Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city

Abstract

This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.

KEYWORDS: :

• Housing justice
• housing inequality
• settler colonialism
• aboriginal sovereignty
• constructive reparations

Introduction

In February 2019, Aboriginal social housing tenants from Toowoomba, Queensland, took to the streets to protest eviction from their homes. Originally owned by an Aboriginal Community Housing Organisation, the 37 homes were meant to provide secure accommodation to low-income Aboriginal residents, but in 2016 they were transferred to a private company which borrowed against the value of the homes and subsequently defaulted on a mortgage debt of approximately AU$4 million. While residents continued to pay their rent, the company did not meet its financial obligations and eventually auctioned the $6.2 million estate in its entirety. Activists launched a public campaign under the slogan ‘hands off our houses’, and called on the Queensland Government to purchase the houses. The events received significant coverage in the media, including The Guardian (Latimore, 16 March, 2019) and NITV, with one article carrying the poignant title: ‘You can’t sell stolen land’ (Dowd, 3 February 2019).

Beyond the original dispossessions of Indigenous land, this story illustrates the very material ways that housing policies and processes unfold atop and in relation to settler-colonial capitalist property regimes. The transfer of the estate to a private company must be set against state disinvestment from social housing; having owned the properties since the 1980s, by 2015 the Aboriginal housing organisation found itself facing financial difficulties stemming from a combination of maintenance costs, limited rental revenues and inadequate state subsidies. A joint venture promised to relieve the organisation of some of these challenges, tapping the value of homes to undertake capital improvements and redevelopment that would increase the organisation’s housing stock (Latimore, 2019). Yet the joint venture entailed title transfer to the private company. The homes became assets on that company’s balance sheet which enabled it to take on debt, and seemingly none of the funds borrowed were spent on the houses themselves. The company borrowed approximately AU$5 million, and then defaulted under the pressure of its financial obligations and was compelled to sell the properties in order to offload the debt. With the homes used as collateral, the Aboriginal residents of the estate—some of whom had been living there for over 30 years—were collateral damage.

This paper attempts to draw out the relationships between Indigenous dispossession and housing inequality, so that we see events such as those that occurred in Toowoomba not as random accidents or legacies of historical injustices but as emblematic of evolving logics of dispossession in which housing is deeply imbricated. In the first section, we unpack and explain what we see as a lack of sufficient communication between housing scholars and scholars of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, imploring housing studies in settler colonial societies to bring to the fore housing’s role in an inherently dispossessive and exclusionary system of property. We carry this argument forward into the second section, where we problematise popular discourses on housing inequality which centre on inequality between tenures. While neoliberalisation and financialisation have made homeownership a powerful vector of wealth inequality, we caution against a ‘colourblind’ analysis of historical and contemporary outcomes and experiences of ownership. Surveying the literature on housing and racial capitalism, we contend housing inequality is racialised across tenure in a way that destabilises arguments that elevate antagonisms of homeowner vs. renter and older vs. younger generations. As Porter and Kelly (2023), Indigenous sovereignty and dispossession trouble the ‘political and conceptual grammar’ (p. 2) of housing studies and a disposition of the state as ‘distributor of access to housing justice’ (p. 4).

How, then, should we understand housing justice in Anglo settler colonies where dispossession is continuous through the trading of land and housing as real estate? What might be considered as a just solution to our opening anecdote? In the third section of the paper we discuss the campaign for Aboriginal community controlled housing in Redfern—what became the Aboriginal Housing Company and the Block—and its relationship to wider land rights and self-determination struggles. This case offers a way of moving beyond concepts of housing inequality and justice that centre on tenure and focuses our attention instead on political opportunity structures (Rodriguez, 2021) that combine housing and land justice. Finally, drawing on recent scholarship on reparations in the context of climate justice, we sketch an approach to thinking about settler colonial housing justice as a world-making project—not one that ‘simply’ redresses historical wrongs but one which restructures social, political and economic relationships (Táíwò, 2022).

The longue durée of settler colonialism: not a housing context

Am I free to roam across my country and to sing and to live with the land of my ancestors outside the body of my Aboriginal being/community? Or will I live the life of the sovereign self only within the mind, body and spirit, and in isolation from country and community—left to the illusionary spaces of recognition within the settled colony, the sovereignty of the Aboriginal being forever a challenge to the settled spaces of the colony (Watson, 2005, p. 40).

The freedom to roam, as articulated by Tanganekald and Meintangk Boandik legal scholar, Irene Watson, is tethered to the freedom to stay put. The two are mirror images, both representing the existence of a home, of safe spaces from which to choose whether and how to move. Colonisation took this freedom away from Aboriginal people, whose lands became the property of settlers in the newly formed nation. In their dispossession, Aboriginal people became homeless. Not (only) in the common sense of lacking shelter or domicile, but in the profound and pervasive sense of lacking a place from which to be as one chooses to be, from which to be sovereign. Whether present on their traditional land or displaced and made to live on the lands of other First Nations groups, the continuous material and symbolic denial of Indigenous sovereignty by settler institutions and communities has been a source of prolonged ‘spiritual homelessness’ among Indigenous communities, whose experiences of being ‘without home’ vary from the individual and urgent lack of shelter to collective cultural detachment (Christensen, 2013). How does Indigenous homelessness, in the way framed here, sit with Indigenous housing policy and research? For example, when an Aboriginal person owns their home, are they no longer homeless? Are they free to roam as sovereign? If Indigenous homelessness is derived from settler-colonial dispossession then can the settler state devise solutions to it? Moreover, what does a just housing system look like in the face of a continued settler colonial structure that is built upon Indigenous spiritual homelessness?

Watson’s work is rarely cited by housing scholars who may not readily see the connection between the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and the ongoing housing crisis that characterises settler colonial states like Australia. For many housing scholars—including those writing about Indigenous housing—colonisation remains a context. For instance, in a recent collection titled, Housing Policy in Australia (2020) Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan and Judith Yates interrogate the ‘wicked policy problem’ of Indigenous housing disadvantage in Australia, clarifying that:

Challenges faced by many Indigenous households in securing healthy, affordable and safe housing have their genesis in a complex web of historical and cultural factors and their ongoing implications. From colonisation in 1788, the lives of Indigenous people were profoundly disrupted as they were forced from their land, deprived of their traditional livelihoods, and as their languages, cultural values and community ties were severely eroded (Pawson et al., 2020, p. 220).

Similar acknowledgements of colonisation as a backdrop for Indigenous housing ‘outcomes’ and, more broadly, for housing inequality in Australia, are commonplace (e.g., Sanders, 1993; Troy, 2012). Indeed, the connection between settler colonialism and Indigenous marginalisation and impoverishment is almost self-explanatory, as is the well demonstrated connection between socioeconomic hardship and poor housing circumstances. But how exactly, and materially, does the settler colonial structure inform and shape housing inequality remains less evident and certainly less discussed. This can be partly explained by the fact that scholars of settler colonialism don’t often write about housing per se. While they unpack the ways that racialised property regimes are produced and reproduced to maintain settler, white supremacy through Indigenous dispossession (e.g., Bhandar, 2018; Blatman-Thomas & Porter, 2019; Bonds & Inwood, 2016), such works rarely draw direct connections between colonial land and property regimes and housing inequalities (although see: Roy, 2019; Fields & Raymond, 2021; Porter & Kelly, 2023).

We know that housing always starts with land—an undisputed fact for various interest holders such as developers, landlords, housing providers and governments. But land, for First Nations peoples, is never (just) a commodity. Land is a cosmology and an ontology of more-than-human relations, it is homeland and kin. Land for Indigenous people is the foundation of freedom, sovereignty, and self-determination (Coulthard, 2014; Estes, 2019; Simpson, 2014, 2017; Watson, 2009). As such, taking land seriously in the discussion of housing inequalities requires reckoning with land beyond its political economy; land holds deep social and cultural meanings while organising structures of belonging in the settler (nation) state (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

As Patrick Wolfe (2006) long asserted, land is the constitutive force of settler colonialism. Following Wolfe, scholars have been examining for years the specific mechanisms through which Indigenous land was taken, transformed, and transferred into white possession. Scholars like Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), Nicholas Blomley (2003, 2004), Brenna Bhandar (2018), Cole Harris (2004), Sarah Keenan (2017) and Robert Nichols (2020), and many others, offer nuanced analyses of ideologies, methods and effects of dispossession in settler colonies. A key contribution to this literature was made by Sarah Keenan (2017) who illustrated how the Torrens system, developed in the colony of South Australia, stripped Indigenous land of its title and reconstituted it as indefeasible settler possession. Over time, this move facilitated the liquidation of Indigenous land in the form of real estate ‘as a social relation and a tool of governance and economic production’ (Yates, 2021, p. 16). Real estate epitomises the move from Indigenous land, with its multilayered meanings, reciprocities, and relations, to a singularly integrated and commodified value system. The latter generates unfixed profit—in the global financial market—that is nonetheless reliant on ‘fixed’ places, namely, (Indigenous) land. This is the move we try to unpack in this paper for it is the fungibility of real estate (partly as housing) that makes it into a source of racialised inequality on the one hand, and masks its racialised nature, on the other. Put otherwise, the fungibility of land feeds into a capitalist economy which increasingly treats housing in financial terms. Consequently, affordability becomes the problem (and so-called solution) of housing inequalities, rather than dispossession.

We understand dispossession, following Robert Nichols (2020), as a recursive structure that brings together two distinct processes, by which ‘nonproprietary relations [are transformed] into proprietary ones, while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property’ (p. 8). Dispossession, then, is the simultaneous signification of Indigenous land as possession (commodification) and the transfer—by legal or other means—of this possession to settlers. Land becomes property through the act of theft itself. In Nichols’ words,

… when Anglo settler colonizers reorganized property relations, they did not simply steal a stable, empirical object called ‘land’ from Indigenous peoples. Rather, as they transferred control over the land, they also recoded its meaning, rendering it a relatively abstract legal entity. So, unlike ordinary cases of theft, dispossession created an object in the very act of appropriating it: making and taking were fused. (p. 145)

Both Keenan and Nichols’s works illustrate that the tradability of land is not an outcome of dispossession but indeed its organising logic. Thus, real estate, as the purest expression of the land’s fungibility in capitalist economies is causally linked to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. As accurately put by Scobie et al. (2021, p. 2): ‘Indigenous lands […] are not just brought to the market but are […] foundational to the establishment of markets themselves.’ Applied to the housing market, settler colonialism is not just a context for the global housing crisis; rather, it is the structure that yields and enables this very crisis. Considering these observations, it seems that just as much as housing scholars should turn to settler colonial theory in their research, settler colonial scholars need to engage more explicitly with questions of housing justice.

In drawing these connections out more clearly, we can begin to engage with housing policy in new ways. Let us consider again Irene Watson’s critique of Australian Indigenous policy. Like other areas subject to continuous government intervention, a range of panaceas have been (somewhat patronisingly) offered to Indigenous people in the housing domain, all embedded in a reconciliatory undertone that cannot and does not challenge the structures that produce Indigenous disadvantage to begin with. As Watson explains:

While many Aboriginal people have embraced and supported the reconciliation movement, there have been just as many Aboriginal people who did not, and many who asked critical questions—like what does reconciliation really mean? Will it provide homes for the homeless, food for the hungry, land for the dispossessed, language and culture for those hungry to revive from stolen dispossessed spaces? (Watson, 2005, p. 42).

Watson stresses that responses to Aboriginal homelessness that are not situated in Aboriginal sovereignty can only further entrench the structures of dispossession described above and deepen the voicelessness of First Nations peoples. In the move to re/formulate the relationship between settler colonialism and housing inequalities, we consider Indigenous homelessness—as elaborated by Watson—not as a ‘separate’ housing problem (as many housing scholars propose), but as the very genesis of housing injustices writ large. Below we demonstrate one outcome of the rather limited conversation held thus far between settler colonial and housing scholars, namely the development of a discourse on housing inequality that centres on a ‘colourblind’ conceptualisation of tenure inequality.

Troubling tenures: race, inequality and ownership

Much has been written about the various and evolving forms of exclusion and inequality caused by housing systems that privilege private tenures and individual ownership. While Keynesian-style state-backed homeownership programmes came under criticism by the likes of Jim Kemeny (1981), greater concern has been expressed against the more recent neoliberalisation and financialisation of housing. The liberalisation of lending, securitisation of mortgages, favourable tax treatment of both investor-ownership and owner-occupation, and erosion of public housing have all contributed to house price appreciation, heightening housing insecurity, and growing inequality between tenants and homeowners (Madden & Marcuse, 2016; Rolnik, 2019; Ronald, 2008). While some argue that these processes are driving profound intergenerational inequality (e.g., Forrest & Hirayama, 2015), intergenerational wealth transfers also play a significant role in mediating access to homeownership, with first time homebuyers utilising the ‘bank of mum and dad’ for direct cash transfers, risk sharing and/or inheritance (Christophers, 2018; Konings et al., 2021). Individuals and families without access to parental wealth are thus ‘locked out’ of homeownership and forced into insecure private rental tenures—a relation of upward wealth distribution as rental payments feed into landlords’ loan repayments and rental yields while they wait to realise capital gains by selling their tenants’ homes (Wiesel et al., 2023; Wyly et al., 2012). Setting this against Thomas Piketty’s influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2017), with its central claim that wealth generated from asset ownership has grown faster than incomes from wages, scholars including Adkins et al. (2021, 2020) and Maclennan and Miao (2017) have argued that homeownership (as the most widespread form of asset ownership) has come to determine class as much as labour. Contemporary academic and public debate sees the inequality between tenures as pivotal to the production and reproduction of wider social inequalities. This framing has prompted proposals ranging from increasing the supply of privately-owned market rate housing, to reducing tax concessions and incentives for residential property investment, to significant reinvestment in public housing, to regulation of private rents and enhanced renters’ rights and protections.

If we understand the tradability of land as real estate to be an organising logic of dispossession in Anglo settler colonies, then it should come as no surprise that their housing systems have been structured in such a way—with housing configured and accessed as real estate, with a range of economic incentives for individual private ownership, and with notions like the ‘Great Australian Dream’ or ‘Kiwi Dream’ valorising ownership culturally and reproducing national myths like an egalitarian society (Blatman-Thomas & Porter, 2019; Rogers, 2017). Yet, as we argued in the previous section, housing scholarship rarely situates itself as such. Fields and Raymond (2021) contend that housing studies has tended to eschew analyses of racial and colonial logics and structures in favour of those which treat race as a variable to identify disproportionate impacts on negatively racialised people (see also Fallon, 2021). Hence, as Porter and Kelly (2023), housing studies has so far lacked the ‘political and conceptual grammar’ for grappling with questions of housing inequality and injustice where non-Indigenous belonging ‘is enabled by already existing violent occupation of a settler state’ (p. 2). Rather than an exclusionary housing system supplanting a more inclusionary one established during New Deal and post-war periods (c.f. Ferreira, 2016; Forrest & Hirayama, 2015), housing in settler colonies has always been deeply imbricated in the reproduction of racial regimes of ownership (Bhandar, 2018). The remainder of this section discusses the place and function of housing policy within racial capitalism, as an instrument reflecting, reinforcing and reconstituting racial inequality and racialised dispossession, to problematise a ‘colourblind’ discourse on housing inequality which centre on inequalities between owners and renters.

The majority of scholarship in this vein has focused on anti-Black exclusion, predatory inclusion, financialisation and gentrification in the United States. A common starting point is the New Deal and post-World War II programmes of state intervention in the housing system, including various homeownership programmes backed by the state and public investment in non-market housing. Black households and others racialised as non-white were excluded from many of the home ownership opportunities created by these programmes, through mechanisms including redlining and racially-restrictive covenants (e.g., Aalbers, 2011; Gotham, 2014; Hernandez, 2009). While these processes are not mirrored precisely in other Anglo settler societies, there are some similarities. In Australia, for instance, these programmes excluded Aboriginal people (including returned servicemen who were otherwise the primary beneficiaries of government housing assistance) due to their lack of citizenship and property rights and systemic racism within labour, housing and credit markets and the bureaucracy (Long, 2000; Troy, 2012). Aboriginal households’ access to public housing, which at the time also offered a pathway to homeownership, was impeded for similar reasons (Morgan, 2006). Racially-restrictive migration regimes throughout the Anglo settler colonies prohibited the entry of many migrants of colour, and, combined with the exclusion of Black and Indigenous people, created programmes which primarily if not exclusively benefitted white settlers. This is, in essence, an example of housing’s implication in what WEB Du Bois (2018) famously called the global colour line (see also Hackworth, 2021; El-Enany, 2020).

As Taylor (2019) outlines, post-New Deal federal housing policy in the United States began a process of ‘predatory inclusion’ of Black households within homeownership programmes. US governments of the 1950s and 60s ostensibly supported Black homeownership but implemented schemes that were readily exploited by predatory lenders and developers for whom Black housing was not an asset for long-term appreciation but a commodity from which to turn a short-term profit. Not only were these schemes unable to remedy unequal rates of ownership, but they also saddled Black households (and women-headed households in particular) with enormous debts on low quality, at times unliveable homes. Many found themselves in negative equity after home values were inflated by the housing industry’s creation and exploitation of scarce availability of and credit for housing for Black families (ibid.). Imbroscio (2021, p. 4) argues that exclusion and predatory inclusion were not only a matter of racial discrimination on the part of the state or real estate industry but a result of the ‘near-ubiquitous racism that constructed the very market values that redlining practices reflected’. Tretter (2016) summarises this as a ‘racist theory of value’ by which ‘those seen as most similar to the dominant group are assigned higher status and seen as more valuable, and those seen as different from the dominant group are assigned lower status and less value’ (Fields & Raymond, 2021, p. 5).

A racist theory of value continues to structure housing, land and financial markets and is reflected in the patterns of house price appreciation and lending. While the contemporary era of neoliberalised and financialised housing is often characterised as ‘colourblind’, the rising significance of intergenerational wealth transfers from homeowners to their offspring reproduces the inequalities produced by the aforementioned forms of racial exclusion and predation (Christophers, 2018). Furthermore, as Fields and Raymond argue, technologies of financialisation reproduce racial inequality by tranching and ranking populations according to ‘statistical associations to risk factors that are themselves the legacy of racial discrimination. These models thus price, allocate and deny access to housing and property in land, producing racial divides’ (2021, p. 8). Housing therefore remains ‘a key site in which racial divides are encoded and legitimized through abstraction’ (2021, p. 7). It is a field in which we can see the operation of what Ruha Benjamin calls ‘The New Jim Code’, which ‘reproduces racist forms of social control into a sociotechnical component that hides not only the nature of domination, but allows it to penetrate every facet of social life’ (2019, p. 3).

Experiences and outcomes of homeownership are therefore starkly racialised. As Wyly et al. (2009, 2012) explain, non-white home purchasers in the US were disproportionately pushed into subprime mortgage markets in the 1990s and 2000s, incurring higher risks and costs than more conventional mortgages and experiencing much higher incidence of foreclosure (see also Ashton, 2012; Hernandez, 2009; Markley et al., 2020). Furthermore, Markley et al. (2020) identify a ‘racial appreciation gap’ whereby places ‘marked as Black’ have seen more limited house price appreciation and even depreciation. As such, they suggest that the division between homeowner and non-homeowner is not so simple:

Homeownership and renting are not essential opposites. Under racial capitalism, they are imbricated forms of tenancy, co-constituted with financial markets that operate to enrich white property owners at the expense of Black people, whether renters or homeowners. (Markley et al., 2020, p. 324)

There is a need for a similar scholarly reckoning with these processes beyond this context vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples, so that we may understand the significance of housing within an evolving logic of dispossession.

One area in which there have been a handful of contributions in this direction is gentrification studies. The higher risk, lower value status of many places inhabited by Black and Indigenous communities, as well as many other communities of colour, is frequently followed by gentrification and displacement. While Black and Indigenous households may be more likely to reside in areas with widening rent gaps due to the aforementioned forms of racial discrimination vis-à-vis housing opportunities and labour markets combined with inner-city deindustrialisation, disinvestment and white flight (Smith, 1996), they are simultaneously subject to powerful racial and colonial logics involving the denial, erasure or delegitimisation of their spatial presence and claims (Addie & Fraser, 2019; Ellis-Young, 2022; Kent-Stoll, 2020). As Coulthard (2014) argues, gentrification in settler colonial cities proceeds on their construction as urbs nullius—spaces with neither Indigenous inhabitants nor Indigenous sovereignty—and thus recreates a colonial ‘frontier’ not as a metaphor but as an ongoing and evolving site of Indigenous dispossession and displacement (see also Ellis-Young, 2022; Mays, 2023). McKittrick (2011) similarly notes how the denial and erasure of a Black sense of place helps facilitate the ‘urbicide’ of Black neighbourhoods and towns. Bledsoe and Wright (2019, p. 13) contend that these processes of accumulation by dispossession ‘are, in part, made possible through the continued societal insistence on Black inhumanity and a Black lack of cartography, which casts Black spaces as empty’. While Hackworth (2021) argues that the persistence of anti-Black racism and imperative to protect non-Black property values via containment mean that gentrification can sometimes be forestalled in places where we might otherwise expect it, this is frequently overcome via state-led projects of large-scale demolition and displacement—of public housing in particular (e.g., Goetz, 2013; Rodriguez, 2021). And where Indigenous and/or Black claims to space are secured through property rights, the settler colonial ‘ideology of improvement’ can work to delegitimise them in relation to supposedly ‘higher use’ and gradually facilitate displacement and dispossession (Kent-Stoll, 2020; Shaw, 2007).

The reduction of housing inequality to tenure inequality risks obscuring these roles of housing within evolving forms of racialised inequality and dispossession in settler colonial societies over the past century. While we hesitate to generalise from the US context to all Anglo settler colonies, there are resonances with the housing circumstances experienced by Indigenous peoples in these societies that warrant further examination. The coloniality of housing systems problematises many of the conventional policy solutions to housing inequality. Simply enhancing market opportunities—whether by increasing the supply of market rate housing or offering vouchers or loans to low-income and historically excluded households—can neither compensate for past subjugation nor prevent the reproduction of logics of dispossession. And it should go without saying that restricting migration for the same purpose is deeply flawed and itself based on a colonial nationalism that naturalises settler’s rights to occupied territory. Yet non-market or decommodified solutions based on public ownership or ‘the commons’ (which we have also advocated for) are similarly insufficient as remedy for the continued dispossession of Indigenous lands, wealth and livelihoods. For one, Black and Indigenous people tend to suffer the most punitive and revanchist tendencies of state social service provision (Wacquant, 2009), most recently exemplified by the revelation that Aboriginal families constituted 50% of all evictions from public housing in Western Australia (Torre, 2023). Furthermore, as Porter and Kelly (2023, p. 11) remind us:

Property, whether public or private, is a dispossessory racial regime of precarity by design… Transfers of public land into private hands are not new modes of enclosure but a continuation of a foundational logic of dispossession. It does not matter if the land is held in public title or private title, its relationship to Indigenous sovereignty is still organised within the biome of a racial property regime.

Where does it leave us? How to continue from here? These are the questions we grapple with in the next section by reflecting on a famous housing struggle and wider social movement in Sydney.

Productive tensions: thinking with struggles

How, given our arguments to this point, should critical and engaged housing scholarship approach the question of housing justice in settler colonial societies? Drawing on Robin D.G. Kelley’s work Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination, Ananya Roy describes housing justice as ‘not a gift handed by governments to communities but rather [something] forged through insurgency, resistance, and conflict’ (2019, p. 16). As such, it is best understood through and at sites of struggle, ‘the frontlines of contestation and mobilization’ (ibid., p. 18). Kelley writes that ‘social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression’ (2007, p. 9). In this spirit, this section presents our thinking through what housing justice might look like in the settler colony of so-called Australia, via close engagement with what is perhaps the most well-known struggle for Aboriginal housing: the struggle to establish community-controlled housing in the inner-Sydney neighbourhood of Redfern and which led to the formation of the Aboriginal Housing Company and ‘the Block’.

The Block and the Aboriginal Housing Company have been the subject of no small amount of scholarship over the past three decades. Yet, for reasons for which we can only offer speculations, this place, organisation and history has received scant attention in the housing studies literature. Such a silence is perhaps indicative of housing studies’ failure to grapple with issues of sovereignty, dispossession, and the imbrication of public and private property within settler colonial states.

Redfern is a neighbourhood located on the southern edge of Sydney’s central business district. Redfern is Gadigal Country, Country which stretches along the south of the Sydney Harbour between the Pacific Ocean, Cooks River or Goolay’yari, and somewhere around the southern tributary of the Paramatta River now known as the Hawthorne Canal or Long Cove Creek. Gadigal people were dispossessed of these lands following the establishment of the Sydney colony in 1788, and in 1817 the Redfern land grant transferred 100 acres from the Crown to surgeon and former convict William Redfern, for subdivision and development (Norman, 2021). Redfern railway station opened in 1855, serving as key node in both the movement of people and goods within, inside and out of the colony until the larger Central Station was built in 1880.

Gomeroi historian Heidi Norman provides an account of the industrialisation of Redfern and surrounds from this time onwards, with the Eveleigh railyards and carriage works adjacent to Redfern Station being pivotal to this process in addition to the manufacturing industries that established operations throughout the ‘Botany Basin’ (suburbs between Redfern and the southern Kamay or Botany Bay that were thought generally unsuitable for residential development). These industries, Norman writes, were key to Aboriginal people’s migration to and settlement around Redfern during the late nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Redfern offered employment opportunities and, as the number of Aboriginal people in the area grew, the promise and affordances of community. Norman writes that the ‘presence of a family member, the possibility of securing private rental, rail transport and adverse circumstances on the mission or reserve saw many families migrate to Redfern’ (2021, p. 25). Redfern thus became a kind of hub for Aboriginal people throughout the state of New South Wales (NSW), an urban place connected to First Nations up and down the coast and to throughout the western regions.

Oral histories suggest that, by the 1960s, the number of Aboriginal people living in and around Redfern was in the tens of thousands (Redfern Oral History Project, n.d.). Among the issues they faced was inadequate housing, with racist private and public landlords severely limiting the availability of homes for Aboriginal people and many of those homes being in poor condition. Redfern did, and continues to, contain a significant amount of public housing. The Redfern estate was completed between 1956 and 1966, as part of inner-city slum clearance initiatives (Zanardo & Boyd, 2019) and includes William McKell Place (184 units) and the Kendall, Mackellar and Lawson towers known collectively as Poets Corner (576 units in total) (ibid.). In neighbouring Waterloo, on Redfern’s southern border, the 2012-dwelling Endeavour Estate was built, mostly between 1966 and 1976 (ibid.). This includes the 32-storey Matavai and Turanga towers and 16-storey Solander, Banks, Marton and Cook slab buildings. However, these were not homes intended for Aboriginal people, despite their high levels of housing need. At the time they were built, public housing was a tenure aimed at white working men and their families. As Morgan (2006) writes, applicants were screened by field officers according to their supposed domesticity and hygiene; unsurprisingly, Aboriginal applicants were largely excluded from public housing by field officers who viewed them unfit or undeserving a public dwelling.

The role of public housing in reproducing racial supremacy during the period of post-war Keynesiasm is further symbolised in the names of the aforementioned projects. The Waterloo estate memorialises Captain James Cook’s voyage on which he ‘discovered’ the Australian continent and declared it terra nullius; the buildings Matavai and Turanga are named after landing places in his journey (in Tahiti and Aotearoa/New Zealand, respectively), and the Solander, Banks, Cook and Marton buildings memorialise the three famed members of the Endeavour voyage and the town of Cook’s birth. Each floor of the Matavai and Turanga towers contains a common area commemorating a distinct place or period in Cook’s life, from his English birth and upbringing to his voyages throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. Several of these common areas were (and some remain) decorated in a fashion intended to resemble ‘native’ environments, as are the communal gardens at the feet of the two towers. Aotearoa Māori scholar Innez Haua explains that ‘Māori kaiwhakairo (carvers) were commissioned to create Māori and Pacific carvings to feature in the grounds of each tower’, and of the fifty-eight common room memorials, ‘39 were on, at, or with lands and places inhabited by Indigenous peoples and cultures’ (forthcoming, p. 12). Yet the Indigenous people of the Australian continent, including the Gweagal men who attempted to ward off Cook as he set foot on the shores of Kamay, are nowhere to be found; the Sydney represented here is urbs nullius (Coulthard, 2014); The toponymy of the Redfern estate is a slightly less repugnant celebration of colonial history: Kendall, Mackellar and Lawson were nineteenth century ‘bush poets’, and McKell the NSW Premier during and immediately post-World War II.

The absence of Aboriginal people in these designs is all the more stark given that, while the estate was being built (and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1977), Aboriginal people were building one of the most significant political movements on its doorstep. In the words of Gumbainggir historian and activist Gary Foley, who moved there in the 1960s from Grafton in northern NSW, Redfern was the crucible of movements for Black Power and self-determination. Redfern-based activists like Foley, Paul and Isobel Coe, John Newfong, Billy and Lyn Craigie, Gary Williams, Chicka Dixon, Tony Coorey and Bob, Kaye and Sol Bellear, were central to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest that elevated land rights and self-determination on the national and international political stage in 1972. Coorey and Billy Craigie joined Michael Anderson and Bert Williams on the drive from Sydney to Canberra to establish the Embassy (Foley, 2014) and John Newfong (2014[1972]) authored a ‘five-point plan for land rights’ on behalf of the Embassy shortly thereafter. This included transfer of freehold title and mining rights for all existing Aboriginal reserve lands and ‘in and around Australian capital cities’; state rights for the Northern Territory through a majority Aboriginal parliament, as well as land title and mining rights for all lands within the Territory; preservation of sacred sites; and six billion dollars and a percentage of gross national income in reparations for lands not returned (p. 139). The Embassy continues to demand land rights to this day, having ‘maintained an intermittent presence in the capital until it was re-established in 1992 by Kevin Gilbert, Billy Craigie, Paul Coe and others who had participated in the 1972 demonstration’, in the grounds of the Old Parliament House (Foley et al., 2014a, p. xxix).

Foley argues that contemporary race relations can’t be understood without reference to this period, its activists and its intellectuals, but that it has been largely ignored in subsequent scholarship. Foley describes how Redfern’s ‘Black caucus’ was inspired by the organising and writing of Black radicals in the United States: ‘the Australian version of Black Power, like its American counterpart, was essentially about the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms, and to seek self-determination without white interference’ (Foley, 2001, p. 2; see also Foley et al., 2014b). Paul Coe described it as Aboriginal people ‘tak[ing] control both of the economical, the political and cultural resources of the people and of the land… so that they themselves have got the power to determine their own future’ (in Attwood & Markus, 1999, p. 261). They also took inspiration from First Nations movements in the United States and Third World decolonisation struggles. They led high-profile protests against apartheid South Africa’s Springboks rugby team, who toured Australia in 1971. They also protested the Vietnam War and the visit of Indonesian President Suharto, and organised a delegation to visit the People’s Republic of China (Foley, 2001, 2014). Coming from diverse First Nations, they saw themselves as part of a national land rights movement and global movement for decolonisation (see also Goodall, 2008; Maynard, 2007).

While the land rights and self-determination struggles led by Redfern-based activists spoke to national and international politics, they were also deeply grounded in place. A series of community-controlled organisations were established in Redfern in line with self-determination principles, adapting ideas that had travelled via the writing of Black radicals and Black GIs on Rest and Recuperation leave from the Vietnam War, as well as Sol Bellear’s time with the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s (Foley, 2001; Chicka Dixon in Foley et al., 2014b, p. 122). These organisations included the Aboriginal Legal Service (1970), Aboriginal Medical Service (1971), National Black Theatre (1972), Murrawina pre-school and childcare centre (1973) and Aboriginal Housing Company (1973). These institutions helped maintain Aboriginal peoples’ foothold in Redfern, ameliorated some of the conditions they faced due to oppression and discrimination, and enabled them to maintain presence and struggle in the face of sustained opposition from governments, police, and property owners. As Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay legal scholar Larissa Behrendt explains,

these very practical steps, in transforming institutions at the most local level, created the most fundamental change in the playing field between black and white Australians in that they opened up services previously denied to Aboriginal people. Not only did they now have access to them, they were in charge of them. And once the barriers came down in these areas, others invariably followed – in education, higher education, the fine arts, the performing arts, law, medicine, small business. Arguably, the Tent Embassy’s association with the program of institutional change in Aboriginal communities makes it one of the most effective (2014, p. xxiii).

Johanna Perheentupa writes that Aboriginal housing in particular ‘challenged the settler-colonial claim to urban land’ in the face of ‘intense resistance from local non-Indigenous people and police’ (2020, p. 158). The struggle for Aboriginal community-controlled housing began when a young Aboriginal man named George Lacey fled from police and inadvertently led them to two squatted homes on Louis St that were occupied by 15 Aboriginal people (Anderson, 1993). The group was arrested, charged with trespassing and sentenced to jail, before two progressive priests familiar with the offenders’ Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer convinced the magistrate to allow them to house the squatters in their church hall. The hall quickly became a refuge spilling into nearby vacant houses, serviced by Aboriginal Medical Service volunteers. Generating the hostility of the police, council, and white neighbours, it was promptly shut down by council inspectors. In searching for new facilities, the Aboriginal Housing Committee—formed by the squatters and other activists behind the refuge, including Bob and Kaye Bellear—returned to the terrace houses from which the squatters had been evicted and which had since been purchased by a property developer who planned to redevelop them. According to Bob Bellear, many of these Louis St homes had been leased to Aboriginal families by slumlords for several decades before their purchase by IBK Constructions, and several of those evicted had been displaced to the western suburbs of Sydney (Bellear, 1976).

The activists occupied the site and sought the support of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, which was at this time under radical leadership and was implementing ‘green bans’ throughout NSW by withdrawing workers and picketing projects that they and local resident action groups saw as socially and environmentally destructive (Burgmann & Burgmann, 1998; Iveson, 2014). Builders Labourers’ Federation president Bob Pringle declared a ‘Black ban’ on the site and members assisted with repairs and renovations. Despite a backlash from white residents and councillors, who objected to both the presence of Aboriginal people and their possession of the site (Perheentupa, 2020), these actions ultimately enabled the newly-established Aboriginal Housing Committee activists to secure a $500 thousand grant from the Commonwealth Labour government of Gough Whitlam. The grant allowed them to establish the Aboriginal Housing Company and purchase and rehabilitate 70 homes from IBK Constructions over the subsequent decade or so, so that they could be leased at affordable rates to low-income Aboriginal families (Bellear, 1976). This site became known as the Block.

Norman (2021) writes that the Block failed to live up to the dreams of its founders in the 1970s, for reasons ranging from the deindustrialisation of the inner-city, to inadequate organisational funding, to the entry of the illicit drug trade, to constant harassment and surveillance by the police. We might say the same of the Embassy activists’ demands for land rights; Foley (2011, 2014) writes that Whitlam, on becoming Prime Minister, reneged on his promises to the Embassy as opposition leader, and the subsequent land rights promises of Prime Minister Bob Hawke were similarly watered down following pressure from mining and pastoral interests. Yet, in the spirit of Kelley (2007) described above, it is worthwhile grappling with these dreams. The Block was housing for and by Aboriginal people—governed by principles of community control and self-determination—in a place that even then was precarious; now, after twenty years of state-led gentrification, it is even more so.¹ As a form of ‘reciprocal repossession’ (Blatman-Thomas, 2019), it foregrounded Aboriginal people’s ‘access to [urban] spaces where their presence remain[ed] disputed or otherwise denied’ (p. 1398). It thus became a site ‘from which to assert a collective ownership and self-determination’ against the colonial denial of Indigenous selfhood (ibid.). It was hoped that it would ensure a continuing Aboriginal presence in Redfern so that its energising social, cultural and political climate might be sustained.

We should be clear that this was not housing designated principally for the traditional owners of the land; the struggle for the Block, as with the efforts to establish the other aforementioned community-controlled organisations, was not led by Gadigal people nor was it for Gadigal people. And Gadigal people did not disappear, as some accounts imply. As such, this housing campaign didn’t ‘solve’ the original act of dispossession. Rather, what it and other likeminded initiatives in Redfern set out to do was create enabling infrastructures for the wider land rights and self-determination movement—not just to improve the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal people but also, as Behrendt suggests, to enable participation in a political project. Drawing on Akira Drake Rodriguez (2021), the Aboriginal housing campaign in Redfern was part of a political opportunity structure that contributed to sustaining Redfern as a crux of collective movements for land rights and self-determination. Rodriguez writes that Atlanta’s public housing system was harnessed by Black women to advance their interests and needs. Public housing and tenants’ associations ‘provided the visibility and legitimacy for marginalized Black residents to advance their own political interests’ (p. 44). We can say something similar of Redfern: that it provided visibility and legitimacy to the collective claims for land rights and self-determination among First Nations people. However, just as in Atlanta, the wider political environment in which the opportunity structure was embedded then militated against these claims. Nevertheless, the Block was, and to an extent remains, a site of place- and home- making that challenged and offers some remedy for the prolonged effects of Indigenous spiritual homelessness in NSW. And it helped shape the debate around the structurally dispossessive work of private property in inner-Sydney for years to come (e.g., Chatterjee et al., 2022; Shaw, 2007).

This case invites us to think about what types of housing and what kinds of housing struggles might form part of a political opportunity structure to best support both urgent housing needs and sovereignty and self-determination in the contemporary era. Moreover, the story of the Block sheds light perhaps on why housing campaigns and housing demands are rarely analysed in terms of Indigenous sovereignty. Revisiting our opening claim that settler colonialism is more than a context for housing inequalities, we must develop a new vernacular for thinking about housing justice outside of dominant frameworks that separate land justice—articulated in terms of Indigenous dispossession—from housing justice—which is too often discussed in tenurial terms. If settler colonialism is both ongoing and shapeshifting, then housing is also a dynamic mode of being. How can we hold in conversation Indigenous sovereignty with struggles for Indigenous housing in a way that advances just outcomes, but does not collapse one into the other? Our conclusion begins to move in that direction by applying the lens of a ‘constructive view of reparations’, developed by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) to housing.

Conclusion: reconstructing housing justice

Considering climate justice through the lens of global reparative politics, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) frames reparations as a worldmaking project, in both scale and practicality, which respond to the historic injustices of colonialism, imperialism and slavery. The climate crisis, Táíwò argues, both emerges from the global order of racial empire and exacerbate its impact in the form of social injustices, by unevenly distributing risk (Táíwò, 2022). Reparations in this context manifest as the redistribution of financial resources and advantages not just in response to past wrongs but also in order to reconstruct futures. ‘The target of the redistributions and structural changes’, Táíwò (2023) writes, ‘would be a world structured by self-determination, one where people are empowered to participate democratically in deciding the course of their lives at home and at work.’ For Táíwò, reparation, ‘is concerned with building the just world to come. But its more specific role concerns how we get there’ (ibid.). This reparative agenda foregrounds the past into a contemporary political economy in new and unpredictable ways, prompting the creation of political formations that address the past in terms of the present. This is a crucial point, for the kinds of outcomes that emerge from this approach are necessarily hybrid and keep in view both the way things were (pre-Empire) and the way things are. Applying this to the story of the Block suggests that sovereignty becomes folded into struggles for housing justice that emanate from and seek to repair the colonial context, if in different terms.

Moreover, building on Táíwò, the struggle for housing justice with and as sovereignty might require a range of existing policy and financial tools—(settler) land rights legislation, public housing, homeownership, community organising—which will need to be used in strategic, contextually-sensitive, non-essentialising, non-reformist ways. Echoing the ‘constructive view’ of reparations which Táíwò proposes as ‘a historically informed view of distributive justice, serving a larger and broader worldmaking project’ (p. 74), the Block campaign should be read as demand for land and housing not merely as financial compensation but as the means of restructuring settler colonial capitalist property and real estate around principles of self-determination and community control. While making only small steps towards these objectives, it nonetheless enables more significant steps to be taken in the future.

To conclude, by outlining the imbrication of contemporary housing policies and processes in Indigenous dispossession, and problematising popular discourses of housing inequality which are too often blind to this imbrication in their focus on tenure, we arrived at the question: what might housing justice look like in settler colonies? As white settler academics in so-called Sydney, we see a crucial role for housing scholarship in addressing this question by furthering our understanding of the reproduction of Indigenous dispossession through dynamics of state policy, capital flows and real estate, and helping to expose how these dynamics are interrupted and reworked from below. Housing justice and social justice struggles more broadly are sites where radical, creative, and clarifying ideas are born (Kelley, 2007), and it’s through deeper and open-minded engagement with these diverse forms of housing struggles that we feel alternative pathways for a more just housing reality can emerge.

Acknowledgement

As uninvited white settlers in so-called Australia, one of us a migrant and the other a descendant of several generations of settlers on this continent, we wish to acknowledge the people of the Eora and Darug Nations on whose unceded lands we live and work. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and the editors of this Special Issue, Libby Porter and David Kelly, for their critical feedback and help in improving and sharpening the arguments of this paper. All mistakes remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Redfern has become increasingly gentrified over the 21st century, fuelled in part by the actions of successive NSW governments. In 2004, an Aboriginal teenager named TJ Hickey died on the Waterloo estate after falling from his bicycle following a police pursuit; some in the community allege that he was knocked off his bicycle by the police vehicle and that the officers then breached police procedure in attending to Hickey before medical professionals had arrived (Anthony, 2018). A protest outside Redfern Station later that day led to confrontations with the Redfern police in what was dubbed the ‘Redfern riots’. In the ensuing outrage and panic, including calls for the Block to be ‘bulldozed’ (see Birch, 2004), the then-Labor government established the Redfern-Waterloo Authority and charged it with renewing and revitalizing the neighbourhood. It did this by selling public lands for private development and further soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in the built environment through changes to planning and development controls (Redfern Waterloo Authority 2006, 2011). The Authority and Minister responsible also exerted significant pressure on the Aboriginal Housing Company to redevelop the Block as a mix of Aboriginal housing and market rate residential and commercial property (Jopson et al., 2004); after a highly controversial and protracted process, demolition and redevelopment began in 2019. The Authority later turned to redeveloping the Redfern and Waterloo public housing estates, and while the specific plans outlined by the Redfern Waterloo Authority did not come to fruition, they were followed by a revised plan for the redevelopment of the Waterloo estate in December 2015. At the time of writing, the estate has not yet been demolished but planning approval has been granted for the redevelopment of one section.