Thèses sur le sujet « Politics of housing »

In the early 2000s, Chicago emerged as an archetypal city in the broader movement to remake public housing. Chicago’s Plan for Transformation committed upwards of $1.5 billion to demolish high-rise buildings, rehabilitate a portion of existing stock, and create 12 new mixed-income developments on the footprint of public housing sites. Policy incentives—such as financing for capital development, long-term rental subsidies, and public land transfers—aimed to encourage public-private partnerships. During the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath, however, the promised transformation proved financially difficult—if not impossible in certain geographic areas—to complete at the scale intended. That shift in the economic context, along with subsequent political responses, thoroughly altered the policy strategy. To date few empirical investigations have analyzed how these changes restructured the very nature of public housing reforms, and what this restructuring means for policies that require market intervention for the provision of public goods. This dissertation performs just that empirical analysis.

Privatizing Chicago examines the city’s public housing reforms as an example of “actually existing” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) neoliberal urbanism and explains how specific political actors, processes, and institutions altered market-based policies intended to reshape urban poor neighborhoods. Viewing Chicago as a neoliberal city requires both recognizing its political landscape as one where the primary aim of municipal government is to promote an entrepreneurial agenda that positions the economic success of the city above all other interests, as well as viewing the potential for progressive movements to contest this agenda. Prior to this study, Chicago’s reforms had not been examined across time or geographic areas using critiques of neoliberal urbanism, nor through qualitative methods. This study fills that gap and uses the case of Chicago to improve the empirical understanding of neoliberal urbanism more generally.

The study accomplishes this through a case study of Chicago’s public housing reforms between 2000 to 2016. It shows how government officials, real estate developers, bankers, lawyers, planners, grassroots activists, and others pursued policy strategies favorable to their interests over a 16-year period—a time marked by the economic recession. My methodological approach is a theory-driven form of ethnography, and my analysis draws from 61 in-depth interviews, field observations over 22 months, archival research of over 500 documents, and the analysis of financial data. This approach brought to light the multiple and contradictory visions at work within the neoliberal framework: competing ideas of the proper partnerships between the public and private sectors, shifting authority among local and national government agencies, and struggles for community redevelopment on the land where high-rises once stood.

In probing these conflicts and contradictions, I argue that the overall effect of the reforms was to burnish Chicago’s status as a “global city,” but it also contributed to land appropriation, capital accumulation, and the displacement of thousands of low-income African-American residents. The cycle of government intervention into market failure will continue as long as the role of the state remains dominated by an agenda of capital expansion, rather than of equitable urban development that ensures a place for low-income, predominately racial minority communities to live. Theoretical contributions related to neoliberal urbanism align around four themes: (a) political agency and resistance; (b) privatization and financialization; (c) local state control, federal devolution, and global processes; and (d) the relevance of race. A set of policy implications drives towards recommendations regarding affordable housing policy, democratic governance arrangements, collective action focused on social justice, and market-based policy strategies.

This study is conducted on Duripara slum of Dhaka city which is one of the fastest growing megalopolis and primate cities not only among the developing but also among the developed countries. The high rate of urbanization has posed a challenging dimension to the central, local govt. and concerned development authority. In Dhaka about 50% of the total urban population is poor and in the urbanization process the poor are the major contributors which can be characterized as urbanization of poverty. In response to the emerging urban problems, the development authority makes plan to solve those problems as well as to manage the urban growth. By focusing on the housing issue for the urban poor in Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP), this study is aimed to find out the distortion between plan and reality through making a connection between such planning practice, political connections and business dealings.

Knowledge gained from the reviewed literature, structuration theory, actors oriented approach, controversies of urban growth and theoretical framework were used as interpretative guide for the study. The data set for this study were collected both from primary and secondary sources. The primary sources include data collected through semi-structure questionnaire survey administered to 60 households using non-random judgmental sampling method. Moreover, interview guides, group discussion and personal observation were also used to synergize the study objectives. In addition to primary sources, secondary sources were used when relevant. The study used both qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative methods like descriptive statistics to summarize the results of the study. In DMDP, it was recommended that the urban poor will be relocated to the urban fringe areas with tenure security. This study found that these recommendations are not practical and implementable, at all, in relation to current socio-economic characteristics of the slum dwellers, land management system, transport facilities and political practice. The slum dwellers are highly mobile in choosing their place of residence and their choice is determined, to a greater content, by close proximity to work place and travel cost. This study discovered that a patron-client relationship has been existing in the study area where the political leaders play the major role to control over the slum and thereby their lives. Under the feudalistic social structure the poor are only able to use their limited form of agency for the survival. Whilst, in the urban fringe, almost all the lands are in the grip of private land developers, local elites etc. who have strong relation with the powerful political leaders and where land acquisition cost by the development authority is fairly high.

In general, in and around Dhaka public transport system is very poor and costly which eventually discourages people to live away from their work places. From the findings of this study it is revealed that there is a clear pattern of urban pockets of small scale industries and small scale slum and squatter settlements. There is as such no direction and guideline regarding the development of transport infrastructure facilities commensurate with the recommendations. The politicians are most pervasive actors in all spheres of development activities. They misuse the power to influence any decision of the public agencies in favor of their business interests. They are the well known businessmen and the other businessmen have to keep a good relation with them in order to gain financial benefits. From the findings of this study it was discovered that many of the owners of the private land developers and private consulting firms are politicians. Moreover, these political elites have strong influence on the officials of different public agencies as those officials have been appointed by the recommendations of those national elites. All over, there is a business relationship between these politicians, officials of public agencies and businessmen themselves where plan like DMDP is a mean for business. Under such structure and practice, the poor are the victims who are becoming aliens in the urban social geography.

This dissertation is an exploration of the role of informality in the housing market in southeast Los Angeles County. While informality has long been the subject of scholarship in cases from the Global South, and increasingly in the United States, examinations of housing informality in the US thus far have largely been situated in rural and peri-urban areas. This work seeks to interrogate informality in housing processes unfolding within the very heart of northern North America's leading industrial metropolis.

After a brief preface, the dissertation's second chapter reviews literature on various aspects of informality and on Accessory Dwelling Units, or additions or conversions of living quarters on residential properties. Chapter 3 introduces the work's methodological pillars, and describes the four major, mixed methods relied upon. These are a survey of code enforcement officers; interviews and direct observation; and analyses of rental and property sales markets. Two other, minor, methods employed are an analysis of building footprints and the analysis of secondary data.

Chapter 4 introduces the single case used in the dissertation. This is a group of 14 communities, with a total population of 700,000, that are collectively referred to via the neologism City of Gateway. Next follows a historical overview of the area. Following a discussion of the 1965 Watts riots as a historical watershed, trends in the City of Gateway's economy and population that have driven a dramatic informalization of the housing stock since that time are examined.

Chapter 5 describes the physical expression of the informal housing market in the City of Gateway, in seven extralegal modes that involve either the conversion of existing space or the addition of new space, and the tactics used to effect them. Chapter 5 closes with a quantification and discussion of the consequences of the characteristic urban form produced by the informal housing market, horizontal density, which is the addition of density by more intensively covering lots with buildings rather than building upwards.

Chapter 6 describes the "nuts and bolts" of the informal housing market. It presents evidence that extralegal rentals are, on balance, generally (though not always) cheaper for their occupants than formal market alternatives. It examines presale ordinances that some cities have passed to try to disrupt the informal housing market by intervening in the sale of residential property. It discusses the important role of appraisers in providing or denying mortgage credit to current or would-be homeowners with extralegal space. An analysis of property sales transactions provides evidence that extralegal space does not appear to be capitalized in property values. Finally, the chapter discusses barriers imposed by the current US mortgage system to financing the construction of rentable space on residential properties.

Chapter 7 is an examination of the role played by code enforcement in shaping the informal housing market in the City of Gateway. Specifically, it examines how code enforcement departments allocate their time and effort given that there are far more potential enforcement actions than their capacity allows. The chapter presents arguments that code enforcement reshapes the informal housing market while failing to suppress it; that it is applied unevenly; and that it paradoxically helps maintain the informal order of the informal housing market.

Chapter 8 begins by arguing that issues related to informal housing, when they are discussed at all in the local political sphere, tend to be filtered through the reductive frame of law and order. The chapter presents reasons for this state of affairs, both ones specific to the City of Gateway and others that are more general and potentially applicable to other places in the US. Chapter 8 closes with a summary of high-profile local debates in which informal housing's influence is considerable but rarely acknowledged: fair share housing, water and sewer utility capacity, parking, and school crowding.

The conclusion, Chapter 9, begins by assessing the positive and negative attributes of the informal housing system. A normative judgment is made that the former outweigh the latter, although the drawbacks are considerable and in need of urgent attention. A multiscalar palette of policy interventions intended to usefully and justly intervene in the informal housing system is put forth. Many of these are within the ambit of local government, but action in other spheres—in state and even federal government, and within the housing NGO sector—is needed. Next, lessons for advocates, policymakers, and researchers drawn from the broader implications of this dissertation are presented. After that follows a speculative discussion about the role of culture in comparison with economic necessity in driving the informal housing market in the City of Gateway. Next, informed speculation about the future of the City of Gateway's housing market is presented. The dissertation closes with a discussion of these trends' implications for the City of Gateway's continued existence as that increasingly rare of type of place, a working class enclave in the heart of a vast global metropolis.

Felaktigt isbn: 978-91-85519-61-3