Contested public housing futures: whiteness as property in visions of socially mixed revitalization

Abstract

For over ten years, New York City’s public housing has been undergoing privatized revitalization efforts that threaten tenants’ securities while presenting a progressive vision: mixed, inclusive and tenant-centered developments. This article examines privatization and redevelopment efforts as projects of racialized dispossession and property enactment. It follows organized tenant movements that highlight the violence of these “land grabs” and articulate an embodied knowledge of precisely how the state’s possessive investment in whiteness, through property and real estate, extends into home and everyday life. These projects present visions of socially mixed “communities” that covertly forward racial capitalism’s intersecting systems of race, class and gender exploitation while overtly presenting a raceless façade. Building on Cheryl Harris’ work, this article examines the enactment of whiteness and property’s shared “right to exclude” by questioning: what conditions of racial-spatial exclusion persist through racialized dispossession, predatory commodification and performative recognition practices?

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