Caring Housing Futures: A Radical Care Framework for Understanding Rent Control Politics

Thompson, S.  (2022). Caring Housing Futures: A Radical Care Framework for Understanding Rent Control Politics in Seattle, USA. Antipode. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12874.
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Hegemonic responses to housing crises overwhelmingly rely on liberal economic logics, which preclude understandings of housing inequalities as produced by intersecting structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. This creates housing futures that replicate housing injustice, through the reproduction of housing crises that uphold racial capitalism, the settler state, and white property ownership. To address this gap, I develop a radical care framework for analysing responses to housing crises as an approach that emphasises relationality, challenges the commodification of housing, and renders different housing futures possible. Radical care is a collective response to immediate crises and precarious futures. I apply this framework to rent control debates in Seattle, USA, which highlight the complex intersections between care and housing politics in responses to housing crises. I argue that analysing housing politics through a radical care framework helps us to account for more expansive sociopolitical imaginaries and actions that point to housing futures beyond the limits of what is deemed possible in a colonial, racial capitalist housing system.

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