Crucial roles of ‘life's work’ amidst public housing renewal in Ottawa and New York City

Abstract

This paper examines the evolving geographies of capitalist accumulation through the urban renewal and commodification of public housing, and the life's work of tenants’ whose exploitation and dispossession it functions through. I trace relational contours between Ottawa (Canada) and New York City (USA), where state-managed redevelopment and revitalisation plans restructure decommodified public housing into housing available to the market. I argue that tenants’ homes and everyday lives are the material core of these processes, which function by expropriating the means of social reproduction – home, and its lifeways – that knit together public housing communities. I situate these state-led urban renewal plans within an interpretive analytic of racial capitalism to examine how their racial-spatial logics rest on differentially valuing the everyday spaces of public housing tenants as disposable, in order to exploit tenants’ housing insecurity and dispossess communities. Tenants’ fights against dispossession and struggles for home highlight details how racialised expropriation continues to structure the expanding reaches of capitalist accumulation. In this analysis, struggles to secure the means of social reproduction are seen as both a stake and a necessary condition for accumulation processes under racial capitalism.

Introduction

In 2018, Ottawa Community Housing (OCH) initiated the urban renewal of Rochester Heights, two public housing developments in West Centretown, Ottawa. Prior to demolishing the ninety-eight townhomes on both sites, tenants were rehoused in other OCH units and told they could exercise their right to return to the new development (Imeri et al., 2022). In 2022, OCH opened the first phase – a mixed-income housing project named Mosaïq811, under a new operational arm called ARRIV Properties. Mosaïq811's rents are below-market-rate (BMR), significantly higher and market dependent compared to the affordability previously provided by rents-geared-to-income (RGI) and displaced the tenants to surrounding neighbourhoods and outer-city areas (Imeri and Sumanth, 2023).

Across the border in 2023, New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) announced the urban renewal of seventeen public housing towers that make-up Fulton Houses and Elliot-Chelsea Houses (FEC) in Chelsea, Manhattan (Related Companies, 2023). In its place, NYCHA will develop a mixed-income housing project in partnership with joint venture team Related Companies and Essence Development, famously known as billionaire developers of adjacent Hudson Yards, the largest and most expensive private development in North American history (Scoditti, 2022). Tenants are being given a right to return at their existing RGI structure but anticipate displacement during the redevelopment and privatisation process (Bach et al., 2020).

In this paper, I examine how public housing is taken to the market through spatial transformations of urban improvement and renewal that rest on differentially valuing the spaces and everyday lives of low-income, racialised and gendered tenants as disposable, and their communities as dispossessable. I argue that tenants’ means of social reproduction – home and its lifeways – are the material grounds of racialised expropriation, and thus analytically central to unhide the specific forms of extraction and dispossession that embroil their everyday life into cycles of capitalist accumulation. As ‘life workers’, tenants meet these processes with various individual and collective forms of resistance, refusal and dissent, most important of which is their intimate and embodied knowledge of what is taking place (Mitchell et al., 2004).

Continued abandonment and impending displacement bring jarring changes to daily life and future life capacities that threaten tenants’ labours and abilities to make home (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006). Crucial roles of life's work – which is fundamentally about life-making through space – are intimately woven with their material grounds of subsistence and exploited first through their positioning as dispossessable and subsequently as terrains for expanded accumulation (Mitchell et al., 2004; Tadiar, 2012). Alongside an examination of the restructuring of public housing to rhythms of real estate accumulation and rental commodification, I excavate the associated restructuring of home and activities of social reproduction as the material goods and social practices that compose the latter are imbricated into, and central to, the accumulation capacities of the former (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Katz, 2001b).

This investigation is grounded in an interpretive framework of racial capitalism to examine how this conjuncture of capitalist expansion through urban space continues to deploy certain operational logics through spatialising race and class that can be placed into connection with previous cycles of accumulation through dispossession (Bonds, 2019; McKittrick, 2011; Robinson, 2000). The transformation of public housing into commodified housing reveals ‘the ways in which regimes of capitalism employ racialised concepts to reproduce’, as these projects pursue colour-blind discourses of urban improvement to delegitimise existing labours and social capitals of low-income communities and normalise their erasure and replacement (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019: 11).

In the following sections, I start by outlining my methodological approach of a multi-sited topographical analysis that examines the conditions of public housing commodification and renewal in both cities through a close look at their impacts on tenants’ homes and everyday lives. I then outline key aspects of the state-initiated plans for public housing renewal and commodification in both cities, and the alignments in the shifting characteristics of OCH and NYCHA in response to these. Following this are three sections of evidence and analysis that examine key areas through which already existing forms of extraction and neglect are extended into and evolved via modes of commodification.

First, I look at how these plans in both cities extract more capital from existing housing insecurity by continuing practices of abandonment (reducing expenses) and pursuing old and new forms of rent extraction (raising revenues). Second, I articulate how myths of disposability are deployed to justify moves of urban improvement, the latter attempting to neutralise racist practices of expropriation. Third, I examine how racialised dispossession continues through increased evictions and permanent rehousing, as a complex process of breaking apart the intricate relations that bind together public housing, extending before and beyond the moment of displacement. Finally, I return to the crucial roles of ‘life's work’ to outline some of the many ways tenants navigate, resist and contest these shifts.

Tracing topographies of state, home and social reproduction

The sudden demolition announcement of FEC ¹ and its replacement with revitalised mixed-income rental housing that threatens displacement crystalised key connecting tethers between both cities. The trans-local alignments of material process – institutional and economic restructuring of a public housing entity, transformation of urban environments and dispossession of tenants – elucidate important layers in the state-managed commodification of public housing in the interests of real estate and rental market capitalism.

In this paper, I draw from Katz's (2001a, 2001b) practice of topography as a method, which entails ‘a detailed examination of some part of the material world’ in a manner that takes into account the many layers of process that produce and reproduce a place and connect it to other scales and geographies of analysis (Katz, 2001a: 1228). I use a multi-sited topographical analysis to excavate the unique yet interconnected conditions of public housing commodification in OCH and NYCHA. Katz's (2001a) describes this as ‘countertopographies’, a methodological and political call to connect distant and distinct places in order to form connected analyses between different ‘topographies affected by global processes in analogous ways’ (Katz, 2001a: 1229).

The destruction and marketisation of public housing is not new, but evolving. This work builds on studies of planned failure and abandonment under neoliberal governance (Bloom, 2008; Gandour, 2022b), contemporary efforts of social mix and revitalisation (August, 2014), and the pivotal role of tenant struggles in shaping these (Hackett, 2024; Rodriguez, 2024). Similar transformations are unfolding in other parts of the world, like the privatisation and redevelopment of council houses in London (Lees and White 2020) and the financialisation of social housing providers in Europe (Aalbers et al., 2017).

The multi-sited research in this paper took place over three years, during which I lived between Ottawa and NYC. I first encountered the development efforts of OCH through a research project that included the study of Mosaïq811 as an example of development-led displacement (Imeri et al., 2022). Following this, I spent a year in NYC during which I began studying parallel changes of privatising public housing and connected with tenant and community-led efforts to resist this, especially in the case of FEC. ² Upon returning to Ottawa, my involvement in community-engaged research projects and tenant organising in neighbourhoods where OCH is planning for renewal continues to inform my research.

I draw material evidence for a topographical analysis from two avenues. I use a textual analysis of documents composing the multi-sector, multi-governmental plans at work in both landlords’ renewal and development efforts (Dittmer, 2010). These broadly outline the political-economic and spatial aspects of transforming public housing into commodified housing and are littered with discourses that devalue and decapitalise existing public housing while justifying urban improvement efforts. These documents include each landlord's long-range financial and operational plans (NYCHA, 2018; NYCHA, 2020; NYCHA, 2023a; OCH, 2016; OCH, 2022b); selected annual plans from 2020-2024 (NYCHA, 2022; OCH, 2022a); and media releases, and official audits and public communications on the plans or projects (CSS, 2018; GAO, 2018; NYCHA, 2017; OAG, 2022; OCH, 2021).

This documentary research was buttressed by my experiences of living in both cities as these events were playing out. This enabled me to participate in organised tenant movements and community-driven research projects that both directed me towards the data I collected and significantly formulated my research questions and analysis.^{3, 4} To flesh out the material conditions, social relations, and communal tethers that compose ‘life's work’, I draw on my observations from tenant and community meetings, my participation in organising efforts, tenant and community-oriented research (Gandour, 2022a; 2022b; Imeri and Sumanth, 2023; NHN, 2022), public testimonies and hearings (NYCHA, 2023b; TPH, 2023; UFAD, 2021) and media coverage on tenants’ experiences (Miller, 2017; Roche, 2024; Turner, 2023; Williams, 2022).

My research and organising have connected me with tenants, advocates and researchers, and my analysis is a cumulative process of learning from others with decades, if not generations, of situated knowledge. These experiences have greatly shaped my methodological framing of tenants’ homes and everyday lives as the primary consideration of this research, echoing a resounding demand from public housing tenants in both cities to be considered as present subjects in these plans that otherwise exclude, erase or disavow them.

At all avenues in this analysis, I consider as most significant the site of these shifts themselves – home and home networks – and the implication on tenants’ struggles for social reproduction. Home is an important avenue for social reproduction not just because activities of life hinge on its presence, but also because the responsibilities for securing the means for social reproduction have been systematically downloaded to the household and community spheres (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Mitchell et al., 2004; Winders and Smith, 2019). This relation is often obscured, as the work of sustaining everyday life is relegated to the ‘private’ sphere of home (Bhattacharya, 2017; Winders and Smith, 2019).

I pursue the re-centred analytic forwarded in feminist social reproduction theory, of ‘shifting our perspective from the point of production to that of social reproduction’ to unhide capitalism's continued dependency on manipulating the spaces and activities that sustain life in ways that cater accumulation (Bhattacharya, 2017; Mezzadri, 2021). A social reproduction lens sharpens focus on the specific material and spatial means through which processes of racialisation and gendering structure capitalist accumulation and opens avenues for this dialectic to produce an oppositional politics of resistance (Mohandesi and Teitelman, 2017).

Public housing as state-managed real estate

It is important to acknowledge public housing in Ottawa and NYC as an already propertied form of housing owned and possessed by the state, with existing modes of extraction and surplus exploitation (Christophers, 2017). However, in its restructuring into commodified housing and repositioning into revenue-generating real estate assets, the accompanying alterations to its specific forms of possession and extraction require scrutiny.

Since 2015, NYCHA has been steadily partnering with private actors under the federal US Rental Assistance Demonstration programme, adapted municipally in NYC as the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (RAD-PACT) (Bach et al., 2020; Gandour, 2022b). After consistent opposition to privatisation, in 2022, New York State established the Public Housing Preservation Trust (Trust), a public benefit corporation (Hackett, 2020a; NY State Senate, 2021). Despite its claim of keeping public housing public, the Trust and RAD-PACT function in similar ways, converting units out of Section 9 Public Housing into Section 8 (a voucher subsidy for private rentals), Section 18 (a voucher subsidy for the demolition and/or disposition of public housing), ⁵ or a blend of Section 8 and 18 (Lavy and Hornstein, 2021; NYCHA, 2020). Once units are transferred out of Section 9, NYCHA shifts responsibilities for revitalisation, development, and future management to a private developer-landlord (under RAD-PACT) or the Trust for ninety-nine years (CSS, 2018; NYCHA, 2018).

Since the early 2010's, and more recently through Canada's 2017 National Housing Strategy, OCH has been securing funding to revitalise public housing into market-based affordable housing, along with other real estate efforts like acquisition, disposition and new development that present new revenue generation opportunities (OAG, 2022; OHS, 2016; OCH, 2022a). OCH is undertaking an unprecedented amount of development efforts under the operational arm of ARRIV Properties, described as ‘representing a new concept in the Ottawa rental market … quality homes at affordable prices for moderate-income households’. ⁶

After decades of systemic disinvestment, OCH and NYCHA describe these plans as necessary measures to address the growing backlog of repairs rendering poor living conditions in public housing (Bach et al., 2020; CSS, 2018; OAG, 2022). NYCHA describes the vouchers under Section 8 and 18 as more stable and higher revenue sources than the evaporating Section 9 fund (NYCHA, 2017). In contrast, NYCHA presents the option of staying public housing as synonymous with poor living conditions, forcing tenants to choose between ‘upgraded’ homes and long-term tenure security (Turner, 2023).

Similarly, OCH has pivoted to leveraging their assets for more stable long-term operation than is provided through retreating federal and provincial funding (OCH, 2022a). A majority of secured public funds are being channelled into the new developments and real estate ventures under ARRIV, with the remainder of OCH housing continuing to face disinvestment and neglect. OCH established ARRIV alongside a comprehensive rebranding effort to alter their perception from a debt-heavy public housing provider to one that can draw in ‘clients’ for their new affordable housing portfolio (Accurate Creative, 2022). Here again, tenants’ homes are improved under conditions that alter their tenure security and place them at risk of displacement.

In both providers’ long-term plans, their large landholdings and associated rental revenue capacities are identified as a central focus for long-term financial stability. NYCHA's 2023-2027 Operating Plan ‘includes initiatives to increase revenue, contain costs and operate as a more efficient landlord’ (NYCHA, 2022: 6). In their 2021-2030 Long Range Financial Plan, OCH outline the need for asset management and development efforts that generate substantial income through the supply of market and below-market rents (OCH, 2022a).

In the last decade, internal restructuring of both providers has resulted in an expansion of asset management services that go from viewing each development as a unique community to positioning public housing developments as clusters of assets in a city-wide portfolio (NYCHA, 2018; OAG, 2022; OCH, 2016). Stating the need for ‘more proactive portfolio management’ (OCH, 2022a: 4), OCH is focusing efforts on renewal, new development, dispositions and acquisitions of public land (OAG, 2022). Similarly, NYCHA has transitioned into its ‘first ever portfolio-wide capital investment plan’ to generate revenue and investment opportunities for revitalisation efforts (NYCHA, 2021).

Portfolio and asset management strategies are regularly used by financialised landlords and is pathway to ‘hyper-commodification’, an unprecedented expansion of commodification in the material and legal structures of housing that make it ‘an instrument for financial accumulation’ while jeapordising it as ‘an infrastructure for living’ (August, 2020; Christophers, 2023; Madden and Marcuse, 2016: 12). Under this framework, landlords decide on the see-saw of disinvestment and investment, sale and purchase, demolition and new construction primarily as capital growth and accumulation strategies, instead of in response to tenants’ housing security (Christophers, 2023; Tranjan, 2023). As a result, rehousing and insecure tenure become more common place, and racial violence through rehousing and rent extraction is normalised as routine asset management practices (Fields and Raymond, 2021; Rolnik, 2019; Roy, 2017). ⁷

The advancement of portfolio management, where homes are primarily units of investment in a portfolio of assets, illustrates broader shifts in the way sedimented state entities are welcoming an ethos of development entrepreneurialism (Aalbers et al., 2017; Harvey, 1989). These actions point to heightened interests in real estate and marketised development by public housing landlords (Christophers, 2017). But they also point to the broader interests and ethos of the racial capitalist state in repositioning public housing as a viable economic asset and securing urban space to buttress the settled nature of whiteness as property (Lipsitz, 2018; Taylor, 2019).

With their respective municipal governments as sole shareholders, OCH and NYCHA provide unique insights into the operation of multiple levels of state power as a central driver of uneven racialised capitalist development. Significantly, OCH and NYCHA are each one of the largest landlords in their respective cities, and the scale of efforts being pursued indicates a massive transformation of deeply affordable housing infrastructure in both cities. ⁸ The scale of housing development efforts in OCH's 2021-2030 Long Range Financial Plan is astounding, with an aspirational goal to add 10,000 new homes to their existing 15,000-household portfolio. The scale of transformation for NYCHA is a total overhaul of all public housing. Approximately one-third of all NYCHA developments are scheduled to be privatised under RAD-PACT and the remaining two-thirds converted under the Trust.

There is growing evidence of the detrimental impacts of finance and real estate capitalism on tenant's everyday lives, however, much of this examines market housing landscapes (August and Walks, 2018; Fields and Raymond, 2021; Stein, 2019; Taylor, 2019). This research contends with what it means when the housing under question is ‘public’, and examines how financial extraction has distinct impacts on previously under or de-commodified spaces and social relations (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Scobie et al., 2021). In these plans, the interface between public and private finance, and state and market actors is full of intricate entanglements that are entering ever-more precarious spheres of housing (August et al., 2022; Christophers, 2023; Tadiar, 2012).

In each case of ARRIV, RAD-PACT and the Trust, the presence and qualities of market actors and activities are distinct. ⁹ The alignment that cuts through these distinctions is the continued and long-term presence of both OCH and NYCHA as land-owner, ultimate landlord and overseer of development efforts. There is an omnipresence of state-managed technologies of dispossession despite the appearance of a retreating state under heightened neoliberalism and austerity (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Mitchell et al., 2004). NYCHA asserts its continuous and long-term presence through ‘joint public-private partnerships’ under RAD conversions (NYCHA, 2018) and as ‘permanent owner of the land and buildings’ under Trust conversions (NY State Senate, 2021). OCH positions themselves as practiced, land-owning housing providers with strategic presence in inner city areas, that can fill the growing future need for supply at the ‘mid-market rental tier’ (OCH, 2020).

Feminist political economists have traced the privatisation of education, care and health as the commodification of social reproduction (Winders and Smith, 2019). The commodification of public housing can be placed both in the heights of neoliberal devolution and the expanding grips of financial economies (Meehan and Strauss, 2015; Tadiar, 2012). Current state actions in public housing reveal heightened interests in real estate as an entwined economic and racial regime to the detriment of the ‘social wage’ – public resources towards good living conditions, neighbourhood infrastructure, and community well-being (Bonds, 2019; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006).

Extracting value from housing insecurity

In Ottawa and NYC, public housing is a critical infrastructure ensuring daily and generational social reproduction amidst rapid housing commodification. Home – as a connected network of spaces that extend beyond the walls of one's dwelling unit – is a sphere where struggles for social reproduction are waged and secured on a daily basis (Mohandesi and Teitelman, 2017; Nethercote, 2022; Roy, 2017). Public housing represents some of the last remaining options for deep affordability, and in both cities is home to largely racialised, low-income and migrant families (Gandour, 2022a). The cases of Chelsea, Elliot and Fulton Houses in NYC and Rochester Heights in Ottawa depict what Fields and Raymond (2021) describe as ‘racialised expropriation’, in this case, a confiscation of urban space and livelihood from low-income, racialised tenants, and their conscription into advancing forms of commodification and propertied accumulation.

Disinvestment is intrinsic to the functions of racialised expropriation, working to decapitalise and devalue the everyday infrastructures of public housing communities (Bonds, 2019; Lipsitz, 2011; Nethercote, 2022). Systemic under-maintenance and neglect are the layered effects of a neoliberal restructuring that has ideologically and materially positioned public housing as a disinvested terrain in need of improvement (Gandour, 2022b; Madden and Marcuse, 2016; Marcuse, 1995). Existing conditions of austerity, surveillance and policing, and aggressive rent collection strategies are already existing avenues of extraction that are revised and innovated as tenants’ homes and everyday lives are confiscated and conscripted into new modes of commodification (Mohandesi and Teitelman, 2017).

As public housing is commodified, the downloaded and depleted material terrains of social reproduction – home and its lifeways – are expropriated into circuits of accumulation that determine them as either valuable or valueless to the processes ahead (Mezzadri, 2021; Scobie et al., 2021). In this sense, public housing is not a new frontier, but a ‘next frontier’ of accumulation by dispossession (Scobie et al., 2021). The particular means of commodification at play – through rent extraction and real estate management – ‘extend to the sphere of circulation and reproduction (where) forms of life are enjoyed and regenerated’ (Mitchell et al., 2004; Tadiar, 2012: 784).

Compromising the capacities and means for social reproduction goes hand-in-hand with readying a depleted geography for investment and accumulation. This becomes clear when connections are made between the tactics of systemic disinvestment (such as routine under-maintenance, broken infrastructure, or rent extraction), and their material impacts on access to safe shelter and sustenance (such as mould or pests, unsafe living conditions, or increases to rent and utilities) (August and Walks, 2018; Fields, 2017). Tenants frequently live with chronic repair needs in the most intimate daily spaces like washrooms, kitchens and bedrooms (Conestoga-Rovers and Associates, 2009; UFAD, 2021). The material depletion of the infrastructures that sustain life also sustain unequal relative capacities for ‘life's work’, which in public housing differentiate groups along lines race, class, gender and age (Rodriguez, 2024; Shabazz, 2015).

On the flip side of reducing expenses is raising revenues. Raising rents as a source of continuous revenue is a crucial aspect of hyper-commodification in housing (August and Walks, 2018; August, 2020; Fields, 2017; Madden and Marcuse, 2016). Rent is a major point of analysis at the collision of exploitative housing practices and tenants’ security in home and everyday life (Rolnik, 2019). On one hand rent is an aggregate source of profit, and on the other it determines a household's ability to afford the daily necessities and secure their futures (Rolnik, 2019; Tranjan, 2023).

For both landlords, rent is already a significant source of revenue, composing 52% for OCH and 19% for NYCHA (NYCHA, 2023a; OCH, 2022a). OCH and NYCHA routinely practice aggressive rent collection strategies, including penalties for late rent like loss of subsidies, immediate recalculations of rent if a household's income increased or a family member was added or lost. Both landlords describe the uncertainty of RGI rental income as unfavourable economic conditions, and often blame uncollected rent as a source of financial issues (CBS New York, 2023). In the absence of steady and direct investment from the state, rental revenue (including utility bills, additional charges and arrears) is described as a reliable capital source to sustain both landlords (Whitford, 2019). ¹⁰

Rent is always an intentional strategy, and OCH/ARRIV Properties describes theirs as ‘renting-up’ (OCH, 2024). In relation to Mosaiq811, OCH has used ‘rent-up’ to describe the change from Rochester Heights being an RGI public housing community to Mosaiq being a mixture of market and below-market rates. Mosaiq811's current rents (subject to the legally allowed 2.5% rent increase in Ontario) is approximately two to three times what tenants were paying previously. ¹¹ OCH's identified household incomes for the second stage of Mosaiq is from $40,000 to $110,000 (RH2 Presentation). In contrast, the average household income of OCH tenants in 2022 was just under $20,000 (OCH, 2020; OCH, 2022a).

There is at least an effort – although slippery – by NYCHA to retain a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) structure under RAD-PACT and the Trust (Bach et al., 2020). New management under both plans is required to keep rents at 30% of household income (CSS, 2018; NY State Senate, 2021). However, multiple tenant testimonies and tenant-led research have revealed rent increases are common practice in RAD-PACT conversions. ¹² There have been multiple accounts of rent increases under RAD-PACT conversions through heightened surveillance in managing incomes, late payments and changes to household structures, and in many occasions without any explanation to tenants (Gandour, 2022a; NHN, 2022).

Rent increases and the addition of new fees and charges provide incremental opportunities of accumulation that multiplied over thousands of tenants result in significant revenue generation. Rent increases exacerbate a range of struggles for tenants as they squeeze other daily necessities to make ends meet, and in the worst cases, result in permanent displacement and de-tethering from the lands and communities that composed home.

Tenants in RAD-PACT converted developments are noticing a range of issues that exacerbate displacement, including poor management, continued under-maintenance, and threats of eviction (NHN, 2022). Many tenants fear for their health as construction work takes place within their units and buildings with improper protections (NYC Public Housing Committee, 2024). Tenants are given the option to convert out of Section 9 even before construction begins, and many tenants do take this option, so their lives are not disrupted by renewal (NYCHA, 2023b). In a Human Rights Watch investigation into RAD, a tenant describes these combined practices as ‘monopoly is being played with our lives’ (Gandour, 2022a: 6).

Myths of disposability and material realities of ‘improvement’

The portrayal of public housing as being in deep states of disrepair figures prominently in the communication material of both landlords. In a presentation to the public, Rochester Heights buildings are described as ‘buildings at the end of their service-life’, and homes that ‘cannot be maintained and must be replaced’ (ARRIV Properties, 2021). In media coverage, Rochester Heights was described as ‘Aging OCH Rowhouses’, accompanied by a picture of it during demolition (Porter, 2018). These depictions layers onto the existing public perception of life in OCH as falling apart, and in a state of deep disrepair (Williams, 2022). The real factors of neglect and disinvestment that result in OCH tenants’ challenging living conditions are abstracted by the vivid depictions of disrepair, death and demise as a natural urban process.

The parallel story of disrepair in NYCHA public housing is almost infamous in public and political discourse (Gandour, 2022b). In July 2023, NYCHA announced its capital needs as $78 billion, ballooned from $32 billion in 2017, and stressed the urgency of RAD-PACT and the Trust to resolve urgent repairs (STV and AECOM, 2023). While this jump is alarming, the difference between the 2017 and 2023 capital amounts are barely attributable to an actual change in the buildings’ physical needs over the 6 years. Close to $20 billion of the increase is due to the change from a 5-year to 20-year capital projection, and another approximately $20 billion of the increase is attributable to market inflation (Thompson, 2023).

In the case of FEC, the display of exponentially increasing disrepair was used as a strategy of obfuscation, as the 2023 capital needs was released alongside a building condition assessment of FEC by developers Related and Essence that announced repair needs had tripled from 2016 to 2023 (Related, 2023). A price tag of $1 billion in capital repairs became the primary reason for demolition being proposed and rapidly adopted as the plan ahead for FEC. Related and Essence claim this as a resident-led decision based on a survey that was not filled by a majority of tenants, and many tenants did not understand its significance to the decision (Turner, 2023).

In both cases, the assertion of an illogical ‘end-of-life’, and the twinning of debt and demise is grossly paired with a rationale for generating capital for redevelopment. OCH and NYCHA have taken on an active role in portraying themselves as housing providers struggling to ensure good – even minimal – living conditions due to the magnanimous issue of disrepair and debt (Conestoga-Rovers and Associates, 2009; Gandour, 2022b). In the documentation of their new operational strategies geared towards development, it is these very conditions of un-liveability that are used to justify the influx of investment into repositioning public housing into mixed-market affordable housing (NYCHA, 2020; OCH, 2022b).

The material and ideological deployment of disposability is coupled with colour-blind discourses of urban improvement through mixture that attempt positive twists on gentrification and dispossession using terms like ‘inclusive communities’ and ‘community renewal’ that scramble the harsh realities of dispossessing tenants into a saleable mixture of improvements and benefits (Slater, 2011). The discourse on improvement is seen strongly in OCH's marketing material and website for Mosaiq811. OCH/ARRIV Properties developments are portrayed as ‘new, modern, innovative’ affordable housing that fills a ‘gap’ in Ottawa's rental market for moderate and middle-income earners (Arriv Properties, n.d).

Communications from NYCHA on the benefits of RAD and the Trust also centre on the programmes’ ability to provide upgraded living conditions for tenants, including ‘improvements like new kitchens, bathrooms, and flooring … new lighting, fencing, doors and windows (and) renovated hallways and stairwells’ (NYCHA, 2017). These are much needed repairs and at Ocean Bay Houses in Queens, the first RAD conversion, a third of tenants noted overall positive changes ‘including ‘cleaner’, ‘safer’, ‘improvements like painting, new cabinets, new floors and repairs’ (NHN, 2022: 7). Yet, tenants also pointed out the inconsistencies in repairs which often targeted superficial fixes while neglecting deeper issues of habitability (Gandour, 2022a; NHN, 2022). These are some of the ways in which an ‘improved home’ is strategically used to draw tenants into being rehoused or being privatised. These distract from the weight of dispossession and the reality that these improvements are rarely intended to benefit existing public housing tenants.

Meanwhile, the conditions of life faced by tenants often do not improve, and neglect continues in their new homes. A community worker who attended the rehousing meetings shared that some Rochester Heights tenants were not happy with their new homes after moving – and accounted this to a difference between the expectations they were given and the reality of their homes. Neglect and disinvestment continues in OCH housing that is not on the receiving end of NHS funds for urban renewal as public funds for capital repairs and operations continue to dwindle (OCH, 2022a). In RAD-PACT conversions, numerous tenant testimonies have pointed to the continued neglect of issues like mould, broken kitchen appliances, broken heating and instances of oven fires (GAO, 2018; NYC Public Housing Committee, 2024).

The contradictions between practices of neglect and accumulation can be seen in the Trust's proposed financial structure. ¹³ The Trust receives access to Tenant Protection Vouchers (TPV) distributed under HUD's Section 18 program, providing 50% higher revenue than Section 9 (NYCHA, 2021). The Trust's proposed financial structure will be to collect the surplus capital provided by TPVs, pooled across developments and speculated into the future as collateral for issuing municipal revenue bonds. The project-generated income from revenue bond investments would fund capital repairs and long-term revenue (NYCHA, 2020).

To access TPVs, public housing units need to be considered in a state of physical obsolescence due to deep disrepair (Lavy and Hornstein, 2021). NYCHA identifies the 110,000 units planned to enter the Trust as in a state of physical obsolescence, and will need them to remain as such for the years ahead it takes to implement the Trust (Hackett, 2020b; NYCHA, 2020). In the current arrangement of the Trust, efforts to secure funds for renovations will work against bettering living conditions. The condition of pursuing a state of obsolescence is at odds with tenants’ rights to safe and adequate living conditions and severely inhibits their capacities for social reproduction (Hackett, 2020b).

There is an urgent need to unhide how the value and worth of tenants’ homes and everyday lives are manipulated in these contexts – how tenants’ labours and spaces of subsistence are caught in the reconfiguration from ‘disposable’ to ‘profitable’ that characterises housing commodification today. Drawing from Wright (2013), this highlights an internal contradiction to the functions of capital accumulation: how lives and spaces can be framed as disposable while their labours produce and reproduce many valuable things.

The regularity and frequency with which metaphors of disposability and obsolescence are used in these contemporary efforts of renewal resonate with discourses of blight in 20th century urban renewal efforts (McKittrick, 2011; Sugrue, 1996; Weber, 2002). These rhetorics of imminent death evokes urbicidal acts like slum clearings and planned destruction, and problematically ‘calcify the seemingly natural links between blackness, underdevelopment and poverty’ (McKittrick, 2011: 952). In times of racial inclusivity and seemingly progressive visions of diverse cities, the violence of racialised expropriation is refracted through notions of improvement and mixture to present a race-neutral and cleansed version of destruction.

A significant aspect of this urban transformation is facilitated by removing from public discourse any mention of tenants and the things they celebrate or love about their homes, allowing the image of deteriorating buildings to replace communities that have built home and home networks over decades and generations. For example, formal assessments of RAD-PACT by HUD or NYCHA have focused on the successful financing of projects and largely ignored the tenant experience, allowing them to claim most privatisation initiatives as successes (Gandour, 2022a).

Without reducing the very real conditions of insecure and unsafe housing being experienced by tenants, I highlight that these narratives obscure the decades-long neglect and poor maintenance from both landlords and the systematic disinvestment by the state in public housing and its tenants. Instead, it perpetuates an unquestioned notion of a natural and timely death for architecture that reinforces harmful projections of decay and disposability (McKittrick, 2011; Weber, 2002). In this way, the decades of disinvestment and neglect are made opportune. Tenant demands and collective efforts for better living conditions are twisted into rationales that justify long-term accumulation despite the detriments these cause to their lives.

The racialisation of space and its subsequent neutralisation through improvement rhetorics ‘enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’ as part and parcel of routine, even benevolent state efforts to develop urban space in the teleological motion of progress (Melamed, 2015, 77; Nethercote, 2022). Questions of home and social reproduction figure prominently here, not just as a material consequence, but as the sphere of life manipulated to facilitate these processes.

Demolition means dispossession

The urban renewal of Chelsea, Elliot and Fulton Houses into a mixed-income affordable housing complex will take over a decade. Even though tenants are assured of a right to return at the same rents, the multitude of tenant testimonies and organised responses indicate that tenants know demolition means dispossession (NYCHA, 2023b). Renee Keitt, a tenant from Elliot-Chelsea reminded readers in a media interview that tenants will have to live with construction and disruption for a long period, facing pressures to leave. Keitt describes the urban renewal of FEC as the ‘commodification of racialisation’, also saying ‘Let's be real – you are destroying someone's community’ (Roche, 2024).

In the case of Mosaiq811, demolition did mean dispossession, and the new development replaced tenants with renters who have higher incomes and are more able to participate in an increasingly unaffordable neighbourhood. Since the tenants were promised a right to return leading up to their rehousing, a community support worker in West Centretown described the understanding of displacement as a slow realisation of loss – of putting together information ‘piece by piece’, ultimately realising that the new development was not intended for existing tenants.

While more research is needed on the changes in racial, ethnic, family and income demographics due to these developments, an analysis of the built environment and tenure structures indicate they are oriented to more affluent, professionalised tenants and are designed for smaller and younger families. Senior's housing is more individualised and less inter-generational, and spaces of public and community space are replaced with amenities and commercial spaces. ¹⁴

Both these case studies are projects of slow and sudden racialised dispossession, where tenants face pressures of displacement at multiple avenues, or a future where urban improvement efforts commodify their access to daily necessities, placing them on unequal grounds with more upwardly mobile tenants. Tenants’ experiences of dispossession extend before and beyond the moment of physical displacement (Slater, 2011). They are both slow and sudden, such as incremental or significant increases in rent, continued neglect and abandonment, and a range of tactics through which tenants are trapped into or threatened with eviction (Gandour, 2022a).

Rehousing and eviction are the two dominant forms of displacement through urban renewal and marketisation. Mosaiq811 should be considered a project of mass displacement, and in the RAD-PACT conversion of Ocean Bay, evictions were seen to increase despite rent collection remaining the same (Gandour, 2022a, NHN, 2022). Low-income tenants in both cases continue to face threats of displacement despite these measures intended for housing security, and eviction notices negatively affect a tenants’ ability to secure housing in the future (Gandour, 2022a).

The multi-year and stretched-out nature of large urban redevelopment initiatives in urban cores pose devastating, long-term impact on tenants, who – if not displaced in initial rehousing sweeps – face multiple potential displacements during demolition, construction or after the opening of the new development. The dispossession of public housing tenants and introduction of more affluent tenants contributes to the transformation of neighbourhoods from ones that were always accessible to working-class, racialised and immigrant populations to a landscape of unattainable housing and commercial spaces (Imeri and Sumanth, 2023).

Many tenants know dispossession intimately in a generational sense, having entered public housing following a history of displacement in their or their ancestors’ lifetimes. A tenant once said, ‘we have always been migrants’, and this haunting statement illustrates both the present struggle for home and the embodied knowledge of centuries of racialised dispossession. Despite this knowledge confirming the cyclical nature of how capital functions through space in the context of urban renewal, the way tenants make connections between their everyday experiences and ideas of racial capitalism and generational dispossession is a form of political resistance. For example, a tenant shared how its important for the majority Black and Brown NYCHA tenants to connect their dispossession with that of the Lenape, Matinecock, the Canarsie, and many other Indigenous groups that continue to inhabit this land (TPF, 2023).

The alienation of life from its means of subsistence has been central to housing commodification (Madden and Marcuse, 2016). Melamed (2015) argues that the ‘racial capitalist processes of spatial and social differentiation (truncate) relationality for capital accumulation’ (79). The relationality that is broken apart is both between tenants and their interconnected generational ties to land and home (Melamed, 2015; Nethercote, 2022; Rodriguez, 2024). This is amplified in public housing as many tenants rely on the networks of relational care and mutual aid present in their communities to support themselves and their families (TPF, 2023).

Activities of social reproduction are fundamentally connected to the land and material terrains they take place on (Katz, 2001b: 711). Not only are tenants’ capacities for possession and social reproduction compromised under uneven property relations, but modes of accumulation also increasingly profit from manipulating the material conditions that sustain life with unhoming as the ultimate outcome (Nethercote, 2022). This profiting does not just take place at the moment of dispossession, but in multitude minute and significant manners throughout the entire process, varying across geographies and regional political economies as evidenced by the two cases explored in this paper.

It is critical to understand rent, neglect, and displacement practices as interlinked mechanisms of accumulation that function through the manipulation of home as the material grounds of life. Layered into a myriad of socio-economic inequalities that public housing tenants already disproportionately experience, these practices exacerbate racialised and gendered dispossession and deepen housing insecurity. Most importantly, they attempt to delegitimise and erase the generations of joy, vibrancy, and pride that tenants associate concretely with public housing as home. As a NYCHA tenant describes, ‘I was born and raised here. So public housing is a part of my identity, is part of who I am. When I’m asked where I’m from, I proudly say I’m from the projects’ (Florentino, 2023).

Crucial roles of ‘life's work’: everyday and collective struggle

Struggles against housing insecurity are struggles for the means of social reproduction. The multitude of detrimental ways in which tenants’ homes and everyday lives are altered by commodification place at stake the means for social reproduction. Activities of social reproduction are always tethered to land, are ‘almost always less mobile than production’ (Katz, 2001b: 709). These state-managed restructurings ripple through the ‘fault lines’ of already differentiated urban space and carve out new patterns of unequally differentiating human value that push everyday life to their brink (Katz, 2001a: 1219). Yet, tenants’ struggles show how social reproduction often takes place despite all odds, and how these grounds of struggle become critical sites of opposition.

The multitude impacts examined so far have particularly intense effects on women, who are stretched thin ensuring their households daily and generational well-being while fighting against intersecting effects of racist and colonial hierarchies (Mohandesi and Teitelman, 2017). Public housing communities are deeply gendered in historically and geographically contingent ways, and continue to be so. The prominence of women-led households is an outcome of gendered divisions structurally instituted into access to public housing as a welfare system, and exhibits the disproportionate impact of housing insecurity on women and families (Rodriguez, 2024; Shabazz, 2015). A majority are racialised and immigrant households, and many are women-led, single-parent households (NYCHA, 2022; OCH, 2022a). A significant number of tenants are also seniors and youth, and intergenerational ties are strong within and between households, as networks of mutual aid undergird tenants’ daily lives (TPF, 2023).

In both cases, tenureships span decades and many tenants have formed tight-knit communities with neighbours. Tenants often speak about neighbours as family, and this sense of community is heightened by the long-term tenure in low-income rental housing in private and public sectors. For example, a senior tenant in a mobility device described how her neighbours are her support system in moments of need when she cannot reach her family (TPF, 2023). The relational ties and necessities for survival are strong in public housing communities, and these compose the unique experience of home that public housing tenants hold dear – family, memories, and security (Florentino, 2023; Imeri and Sumanth, 2023).

The gendered nature of public housing is an immense strength. Informal and organised resistance is often care-oriented and led by racialised women who themselves are marginalised due to the unequal access they are fighting against (Rodriguez, 2024). As such, when tenants fight for public housing, they fight as a collective, for home as a network of spaces and social relations beyond the four walls of their house, and for community extending generations before and beyond the current moment. In Ottawa, tenants fought against school closures for their community's children and consistently fight for the right to public and community space (Miller, 2017). In NYC, an organiser described how the nature of her organising changed once she became a mother – what was once her fight became a fight for all children's futures (TPF, 2023).

The active depoliticisation of displacement through rhetorics of improvement, is an ongoing and always contested process. Home and everyday life become critical sites for organising against the tentacles of accumulation, breaking them down from abstract, sweeping forces to a set of flexible tactics that exploit human life, labour and the spaces needed to sustain these (Fields, 2017; Mohandesi and Teitelman, 2017). Since the material conditions for subsistence are embroiled in the commodification of tenureship; life's work at home and in home networks is a crucial avenue for individual and collective struggle. Informal and organised tenant and community response maintains an oppositional politics that is often grounded in struggles for home and social reproduction (Rodriguez, 2024).

In NYC, tenants have been organised in the fight for public housing for decades, and as a result the modes of resistance against privatisation connect tenants across the city and enable them to voice public dissent to elected officials and via official avenues like council hearings (Bach et al., 2020; Marcuse, 1995). In Ottawa, public housing tenants are active in broader tenant organising networks, but there is yet to be a carved-out space for grassroots organising specific to public housing. Yet, the informal and cross-sector networks of tenant resistance are distributing the knowledge of displacement from Rochester Heights to other OCH developments. ¹⁵

These avenues of collective struggle become arenas for tenants to make sense of the significant changes coming their way. In these spaces, tenants frequently make connections between rising rents and extractive landlord practices, seek solidarity in the challenges of poor living conditions, and grapple with the implications of urban renewal and displacement. These connections are made across time and space. For example, after hearing the announcement to demolish Fulton, Elliot and Chelsea Houses, tenant members of Save Section 9 forged connections to previous and simultaneous events of urban renewal, including the demolition of Cabrini Green, Chicago and Liberty Square, Miami. A testimony by a tenant from Elliot Houses articulates this intimate connection between globalised capital extraction and her home and community:

I do not want my home, my community destroyed and ruined. I’m against demolition. I’m also against privatization….The main developer involved, Related, already have seven buildings and six luxury condominiums. That's 13 buildings in the Chelsea area alone. This is all about greed. They want more. They want our NYCHA buildings demolished to grab every inch of space they can get their hands on in Chelsea. (NYCHA, 2023b)

A majority of tenants in both cities are in the dark on the details and implications of renewal. In both cases, the scale and pace of change have made it difficult for tenants – individually or collectively – to keep up with the changes re-shaping their lives. Still, both OCH and NYCHA frequently praise their ‘resident engagement’ efforts, portraying a public image of benevolence and service to housing-insecure tenants (OCH, 2022a; Related Companies, 2024). There is a big gap between their claims and tenants’ actual access to information.

Each element of the outlined political-economic shifts impose a set of material and emotional changes on tenants. Tenants are constantly bombarded with heady housing policy and tenureship changes that significantly alter their daily lives. Collective resistance efforts have been the more important avenue for tenants to find resourceful ways to fight against them despite being squeezed to their limits.

This is seen in how tenants and communities push back against these processes and call them out as a guise for gentrification and commodification. In many cases, tenants state their dissatisfaction, dissent, and refusal in multiple powerful ways: in their intrinsic knowledge of the intentional consequences of macro-level shifts, through organised responses like rallies and rent strikes, and through conceptual responses like situating their struggles within the long-durée of racial capitalism (TPF, 2023). These materialise in practices of everyday and collective struggle – in the intimate as tenants carefully make home, in the communal as tenants exchange information and situated knowledge on the changes ahead, and in public as tenants organise to appropriate public space for community meetings and events, and voice resistance in formal political arenas.

The ways tenant and community networks make sense of and respond to these changes forge analytical connections between property, commodification, accumulation and dispossession, signalling that tenants – through their embodied experiences – grasp the nuances of how their livelihoods are bound with processes of extraction (Bonds, 2019; Rodriguez, 2024). Even further, tenants in both cities understand the ways in which these accumulation strategies are entangled with their homes, bodies, and collective struggle.

Struggles in both cities reveal home and its lifeways as simultaneous material grounds for production and social reproduction, and as ‘both a site of primitive accumulation, and a site of critical, resurgent, land-based relations’ (Scobie et al., 2021: 1). It is in these moments of everyday and collective struggle that the inherent value generating capacity of social reproduction, and its mutually constitutive relation to capitalist production, are clearest (Mezzadri, 2021).

Conclusion

In this paper, I examine – in distinct, yet interconnected ways – the restructuring of two public housing entities and their repositioning of public housing into commodified and market-proximal forms of housing and everyday life. Through a critical analysis of the plans for urban renewal and a centring of their actual outcomes on tenants’ lives, I analyse how these shifts place at stake ongoing struggles for social reproduction and everyday life and situate the material terrains of these labours as the site where commodification and hyper-commodification takes place.

I outline how racialised geographies of public housing present new spaces of accumulation previously peripheral or outside of capitalist functions (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019). Public housing in both cities are seen to ‘serve as the guarantor of capitalism's need to constantly find new spaces of accumulation’ amidst the expanding reaches and geographical flexibility of housing commodification (August, 2020; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019: 12).

These processes of expropriation that commodify home and everyday spaces not only entail the dispossession of racialised and gendered tenants, but also the commodification of their means of social reproduction. These hinge on ideologically and materially framing the relative value of poor, racialised lives as antithetical to upwardly mobile urban environments while commodifying the very aspects of daily life previously deemed invaluable – community, diversity, and inclusive housing (Scobie et al., 2021).

The shift in perspective called for in social reproduction theory – from spaces of production to also those of reproduction – unhides the working relation between capital accumulation and racial banishment through home. I use social reproduction theory methodologically and conceptually to examine how racial capitalism structures and folds into everyday life. This analytical approach aims to convey the necessity of the spaces and labours of social reproduction embroiled into processes of racialised accumulation (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Katz, 2001a).

Scrutinising the ways in which the material terrains of social reproduction – through which life is lived and life's work is secured – are embroiled into systems of expanded accumulation strengthen the assertions in racial capitalism that accumulation relies on unequal differentiations of value based on race, gender, class and ability (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Melamed, 2015; Wright, 2013). A social reproduction theory lens deepens core arguments in racial capitalism about the imperative role of exploited labours, lands, and life-worlds to capitalism's functions (Scobie et al., 2021; Tadiar, 2012). It highlights how the devaluation of some entails the valuation of others, and of capitalist society at large (Mezzadri, 2021).