An Anarchist Approach to Addressing Housing Precarity: Implementing Anarchist Strategies to Program Efforts for Housing Justice

ABSTRACT

The right to housing is fraught with impositions of market housing logic: our solutions to housing generally imply that people must be housed in conventional housing markets, with a goal that they contribute to an economy that sustains this housing model. Using an anarchist conceptual framework, this paper explores the shortcomings of some existing approaches, challenging the assumption that people experiencing housing precarity inherently desire to participate in market housing and an associated economy. Rather, an anarchist conceptual model for housing suggests that the right to housing that preferentiates need and agency over full participation in the housing market and capitalist economy, while arguing that the means used to address housing instability must be in line with intended ends we hope to see. Proposed alternatives highlight the potential for integrating anarchist tools into practices in the housing sector in order to centre agency, anti-colonial work, and justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• anarchism
• harm reduction
• housing justice
• housing precarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While we recognize that not all States are capitalist, nor are all capitalist structures State-organized, here we position the interconnectedness of capitalism and the Canadian nation-State (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2022) as an important point to understand when addressing housing precarity (Aalbers and Christophers 2014). As such, throughout this article when we refer to the State we are discussing responses from the capitalist State, reflecting the inherently capitalist organization of Canadian State structures and the State-supported capitalist housing landscape in so-called Canada.

2. For a one key example of the exploration of anarchist responses to homelessness within the context of broader social services and non-profits, see Jensen (2018).

3. In this article, we limit our analysis to anarchist theory that is grounded in collectivist notions of anarchy. This does not include forms of libertarian-oriented anarchism that are limited to individualized notions of freedom, or “anarcho-capitalism”, as we are in agreement with other theorists (i.e. Bey 2020) that this does not constitute anarchism as much as it represents hyper-capitalism/individualism.

4. One important caveat to these intersectoral approaches, as mentioned, is when housing is conflated with the unique issue; in the case of HF there is an inherent assumption that homeless individuals need mental health counselling.

5. For communities with direct experiences of intersecting forms of systemic and State violence, knowledge of the intersections of how discrimination is organized is not new (Bey 2020)

6. We do not wish to suggest that facets of anarchism (voluntary participation, prefigurative politics, autonomy within the collective) are not present in other social movements that may be mobilized for housing justice, however, for the purposes of this article we ground our work within this definition as a starting place.

7. While behaviour deemed may be stigmatized, and individualized, as “bad” behaviour, we recognize that the risk in much of these activities is due to State responses, criminalization, and a lack of education/support, which often contribute to greater harm for participants than the activity itself.