As Desmond points out, housing instability isn’t just a result of poverty; it can be the cause of it. Housing is foundational for success, and having it makes it possible for people to go to school or work, care for children, care for elders and for themselves. Yet as housing becomes harder to secure and to maintain because of escalating prices and stagnant wages, the crisis is becoming a catastrophe.
I have been incredibly lucky despite what some friends and I call my housing curse. I’ve had landlords go into foreclosure, go to jail, die, or simply neglect and mismanage property until it was uninhabitable. I have the knowledge and the resources to solve some of the problems without having to rely on increasingly unstable social safety nets. My husband and I both have college degrees and are hitting the double-income empty-nest stage of life in our forties instead of our fifties or sixties. We have the privilege of financial and social resources.
Despite being a dual-income family, we still faced the possibility of homelessness a few years ago after an apartment we were living in was found to have toxic levels of mold. There’s a lot to be said about how easy homelessness is to slip into and how hard it can be to escape. Family shelters are rare, and the lack of emergency housing can leave someone with limited resources in a terrible situation. We had the resources to be hotel homeless, to keep our kids in their schools, and to get a new place almost immediately. And despite having to get rid of most of our possessions because of the mold, we were mostly inconvenienced instead of undone.
It brought home how much privilege I had accrued since my early twenties, when I might not have been able to pull any semblance of stability together. There’s nothing exceptional about my stories. I am like millions of women in the hood, in the country, anyplace you can think of where women with less money and the same needs might exist. And yet we don’t really talk about the housing crisis as a feminist issue, despite the fact that it primarily impacts women. Oh sure, you can find a handful of articles, perhaps one or two activists bringing it up as a feminist issue. But there are no glitzy campaigns, no programs with catchy slogans backed by famous names. Instead of acting as a collective movement to improve conditions for all, mainstream feminism has largely treated housing as a problem for someone else to solve.
And for those who campaign to bring back affordable housing, to do away with laws that penalize victims of domestic violence, there is a real need for access to power and resources from those who have the privilege of housing stability. Activists who tackle housing insecurity issues are often under-resourced and overworked. And they run right into gentrifiers who pledge to solve the problem by revitalizing neighborhoods with cute little boutiques and coffee shops. The faces of gentrification are often young, white, and female. While the gender pay gap means that white women are unlikely to be able to compete against white men for property in desirable areas, they outearn most other demographics and can afford to take advantage of lower rents and larger spaces in communities of color. Want to start a store that only sells mayo? You can slap a kitschy label on your product, pay far less in rent, and as an added bonus, your presence signals that a neighborhood full of people of color is ripe for economic invasion. We’re all on stolen land in the United States, but some communities are far less likely to be impacted by redlining or subprime lending.
In theory, gentrification can bring services and jobs to a community. In practice it means opportunity for some and criminalization for others. It’s easy to dismiss claims by residents of increased police presence as speculative when you’re new to the area. But for those who have lived through the past few decades in major cities, they have seen the lack of investment in those neighborhoods as children and later as adults. Even as gentrification has become a norm in major American cities, you can drive just past the new street planters full of flowers, the boutiques and coffee shops, right into urban blight. In low-income neighborhoods where longtime residents and businesses are displaced by white-collar workers, you can watch the diversity of options and people drain away block by block the closer you get to the center. Along the way you’ll also see a difference in transit options, trash collection, even in the condition of the road surfaces. The conventional wisdom that gentrification is a boon because of economic restructuring that brings in more jobs and resources unfortunately ignores that long-term residents aren’t necessarily getting hired, and are often targeted by new neighbors who don’t understand neighborhood norms and call the police over mundane things ranging from the sound of ice cream trucks to barbecues. As gentrification rates increase, criminalization becomes more than a side effect and is instead a tool that disproportionately affects communities of color. Gentrification forces those residents most in need away from the new resources and further into blighted areas, where they once again struggle to access the most basic levels of goods and services.
When desirable low-income neighborhoods see an influx of higher-income residents and their businesses, social dynamics and expectations collide. The same congenial chatter from the stoop on the corner that can be comforting to women of color is filtered through the lens of street harassment because a man of color is speaking to a white woman. One of the most telling examples of this phenomenon was a viral campaign against sexual harassment put on by Hollaback! a few years ago that bizarrely juxtaposed a Latinx man saying hello and a groping attempt by a white man. If you don’t remember the campaign, that’s no surprise; internet backlash over the unexplained editing out of most white men tanked the campaign within hours of launch. Differing expectations of safety and public order and the role of the state in providing it clash, especially around housing, because while white women might perceive quiet streets and a high police presence as safety, for women of color, this is often a precursor to a violent interaction with agents of the state. For many communities of color, loitering isn’t a real crime; it’s an excuse for police to harass someone for sitting on a porch or having a cigarette outside the barbershop. For white people from the suburbs, hanging out in the street is apparently a serious issue—as are drummers, people working on cars, and whatever other social behavior can be seen as criminal in racially diverse neighborhoods that are not majority white. And for those who are trying to age in place, the changes can be incredibly disorienting and sometimes dangerous as their community dwindles more rapidly than expected.
Because of the wealth gap, the people most in need of affordable housing in well-resourced areas are least likely to feel welcome there over time. One of my relatives owns a home in the west end of Hyde Park near Washington Square. When she bought it, her home needed renovations, and she got it for a price commensurate with that reality. Fast-forward twenty-three years, and as she settles into retirement and the joys of a nearly paid-off home, she’s fielding an obscene number of attempts to get her to sell her property. It’s not just the casual “Oh is this house for sale?” No. She’s had strangers knock on her door, tell her it is too much house for her, and even write her long-winded letters about how they can picture themselves having brunch on her sun porch! The woman who wrote the letter included a wonderful description of her very white-bread middle-American family, complete with a description of herself. Then one day, while we were outside working in the yard, a couple who either matched the description or were the people who wrote the letter came by and asked my aunt how much she charges to do the yard work. It never occurred to them that she was the homeowner. Needless to say, she enjoys knowing that they won’t so much as break an egg in her kitchen.