‘The rent is too damn high’ meets ‘pay the rent’: practising solidarity with the dispossessed*

Abstract

This paper reflects on the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project that unfolded in so-called brisbane in 2021, in response to concerns over how the framing of demands and solutions to the present housing crisis in so-called australia can reinvest in and further legitimise colonial-carceral-capitalist logics and structures. Using critical co-constructed autoethnography as methodology, the authors reflect on their own involvement in housing struggles as settlers on unceded Aboriginal land, the recent history of these struggles in so-called brisbane, and the lessons and reflections that instigated the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project, and which emerged from our experiences organising together. The project, comprising a series of radio interviews and broadcasts followed by a public forum, was an attempt to foreground what ongoing Aboriginal sovereignty means for struggles for housing justice, and to challenge the colonial logics and common sense that often permeates settler-led housing politics. Drawing on Indigenist research approaches and police and prison abolition discourse, we offer some partial reflections on building communities of struggle that refuse to accept a housing justice that begins and ends with a more equitable distribution of stolen land.

KEYWORDS: :

• Housing justice
• Indigenous
• settler colonialism
• abolition
• right to the city

Introduction

In 2021, we the authors collaborated on the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project in so-called brisbane (so-called australia), drawing on our experiences as organisers working on issues linked to spatial justice. The project comprised a series of radio shows featuring interviews with community members and a public forum, and was inspired by the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities research project (Roy & Malson 2019). We come to this work from different political locations in relation to what Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2004) terms ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’. Anna Carlson (they/she) and Natalie Osborne (she/her) are both white settlers living on unceded Jagera and Turrbal Country. Anna (AC) is a community organiser, radio producer and researcher, and Natalie (NO) is an urban and environmental planner and human geographer, working in higher education. Jonathan Sriranganathan (he/they) is a settler of Eelam Tamil and English ancestry, currently working as a musician, writer and political organiser. Jonno (JS) served as a Brisbane City Councillor for the Gabba Ward for 7 years. Mo Chan (they/them) is a queer, Chinese-Malaysian, white Ashkenazi-Jewish settler, now working in urban beekeeping and freelance artistry, who at the time was working at the Gabba Ward office as well as running the now-hibernating platform FERN Collective, which centred on collectivising and creating spaces for primarily queer and trans First Nations and people of colour to share narratives often neglected, misrepresented or manipulated by western imperialism and ongoing colonial projects.

In recent years, so-called brisbane has seen a proliferation of experiments in radical politics and community-building, often engaging with spatial/environmental justice through concepts like the ‘right to the city’ and ‘commoning’. As participants in struggles that have been shaped around these ideas, we have become increasingly concerned by the ways they foreclose deeper engagement with the colonial logics that define spatial relations in this place. What does it mean to claim a ‘right to the city’ on stolen land? How can we approach the ‘commoning’ of public land in ways that don’t replicate the historical origins of the colonial settler squattocracy?

The Housing Justice for Unjust Cities Project (hereafter HJUCP) was an attempt to grapple with these contradictions, to build strategies that could tackle spatial injustices of the present from its roots. By centring the material reality of Indigenous¹ peoples’ sovereignty and presence in HJUCP, we were not merely seeking a more sophisticated conceptualisation of housing and spatial injustice in the colony. Rather, we were attending to the specific ways that housing and spatial justice movements are complicit in legitimising, laundering, and recalibrating settler colonial occupation.

In this paper, we offer some tentative reflections on what we’ve learnt about the tensions of housing and spatial justice from organising as settlers on stolen land. We came together as co-authors to think strategically and tactically, as well as reflectively, about these tensions: not just naming the contradictions of our own work, but considering what they reveal to us about housing and spatial justice organising. How do we, or should we, as non-Indigenous people operating in predominantly non-Indigenous groups who align ourselves with anti-colonialism, make claims for justice on stolen land? What might explicitly anti-colonial struggles for housing justice be like? How do we support safe and appropriate housing for all people, without reinvesting in the structures that sustain settler colonialism and white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015)? How can we reckon with the complicity of movements for housing and spatial justice that serve to justify the continuing dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the ‘collective good’? And how do we build solidarities that don’t demand that First Nations People ‘wait their turn’, or subsume specific demands for land back, Indigenous self-determination or decolonisation into broader concepts of housing or spatial justice that are more commensurable with settler colonial continuity?

We begin by locating our reflections on these questions in relation to a continuing tradition of activist scholarship that works to understand ‘dwelling justice’ (Porter & Kelly, 2022) in its most expansive sense. After outlining our methodology for this piece, we offer a recent history of housing justice organising in so-called brisbane and reflect on the political-pedagogical work that we have been aiming to do through the HJUCP. Finally, we offer some tentative reflections on the work of resisting colonial complicity and building communities of struggle, that are premised on the recognition that housing and spatial justice will not be possible without the return of land and stolen wealth, and the abolition of the carceral, racial, gendered and class regimes that protect colonial occupation. In other words: if we recognise that spatial injustice is at the very heart of colonisation, then to work towards housing and spatial justice, we will have to ‘change just one thing, that is everything’ (Wilson Gilmore, 2022).

Theorising housing and spatial justice from so-called brisbane

Housing justice is a field of inquiry emerging from material struggles in and over space; a field that values lived experiences of injustice and struggle, and the theorisation that happens within the everyday, within social movements, and in place (Roy, 2019). In this paper, we are concerned with understanding struggles for housing justice in the context of continuing colonisation, and the persistent question of what housing justice means in a nation premised on dispossession, occupation, and extraction. We recognise that the housing system in so-called australia cannot be understood outside of continuing colonial occupation, which relies on settler claims to possession and belonging for legitimacy (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). We know that cities are the unceded land of still here, still sovereign, peoples (Jones, 2023; Watego, 2021, p. 191)—people who never signed a treaty, never agreed to their land being apportioned up, abstracted from relationships, alienated from its people, imbued with title and tenure, and made a tradeable commodity. We know that the racialised borders of the nation state continue to operate to ensure that only some people are able to be ‘at home’ in this place, without fear of exclusion, incarceration, surveillance, or exile (see Bhandar, 2019; Keenan 2015). And we argue that it is the material reality of Indigenous people’s unceded sovereignty over these lands that clarifies, as Porter and Kelly (2022, p. 6) put it, ‘that dispossession is the prevailing context of life under settler-­colonialism’ (see also Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watego 2021; Watson 2015; Whittaker, 2019, p. 295).

We are left, then, with the question of how to understand and organise towards housing justice in a place premised on spatial injustice. As this article is situated in an edited collection on housing and dwelling justice (Porter & Kelly, 2022), we do not purport to offer a thorough review of that academic literature here. Instead, we focus on thinking drawn from abolitionist and critical Indigenous theory because our primary interest is in developing a deliberately expansive understanding of the terrain of the struggle for housing justice on stolen land, to develop ‘political and conceptual grammars’ that do not reinscribe settler claims to stolen land, nor reinvest in colonial, carceral, and racialised regimes of possession, dispossession, and control (Porter & Kelly, 2022, p. 2).

Our engagement with both abolitionist and critical Indigenous theory comes from trying to think about housing injustice in the specific context that we are contesting it: a nation state that began as a penal colony violently imposed on unceded Indigenous land (see Porter, 2018; Whittaker, 2017, 2019). As a result of this history of penal colonialism, movements and demands for police and prison abolition are deeply linked to demands for Indigenous self-determination, land back, and liberation (see Institute of Collaborative Race Research [ICRR] & Sisters Inside Inc, 2022; McQuire 2019; Watego 2021; Whittaker 2020). It is from a deep engagement with these twin traditions of scholarship and organising that we draw out our central concern with the ‘ideological impulse’ (Davis et al., 2022, p. 58) towards reform that dominates (and limits) movements for social justice (see Rodriguez 2020).

Settler colonial states are in a constant state of reform, giving the appearance of transformation while maintaining colonial power relations (Rodriguez 2020; see also Estes, 2019, p. 64; Simpson, 2017, pp. 45–46). This requires us to recognise, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, that ‘colonialism as a structure is not changing’ through this process of reform, but rather ‘shifting to further consolidate its power, to neutralise (Indigenous) resistance, to ultimately fuel (further) extractivism’ (2017, p. 46), or, in the words of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson: ‘colonisation has not ceased to exist; it has only changed in form’ (2009, p. 11). For prison industrial complex abolitionists, the recuperative and sustaining function of reform is central to the very emergence of modern systems of incarceration and policing (see Davis et al., 2022; Kaba 2021; Murakawa, 2014). The prison itself was a product of reform; so too the penal colony (Foucault, 1995, pp. 73–74).

This focus on reform also helps show how seemingly disparate practices of statecraft—dispossession, eviction, incarceration, and ‘piecemeal concessions’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. xi), regulations, and reforms—function together as strategies through which Indigenous sovereignty and presence can be disavowed so that settler colonial power relations can be maintained and protected:

For Indigenous people, white possession is not unmarked, unnamed, or invisible; it is hypervisible. In our quotidian encounters, whether it is on the streets of Otago or Sydney, in the tourist shops in Vancouver or Waipahu, or sitting in a restaurant in New York, we experience ontologically the effects of white possession. These cities signify with every building and every street that this land is now possessed by others; signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape. The omnipresence of Indigenous sovereignties exists here too, but it is disavowed through the materiality of these significations, which are perceived as evidence of ownership by those who have taken possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. xxiii).

If we acknowledge that the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from their land is the founding condition of colonial occupation, and if we recognise colonialism as an ongoing process, then we cannot be surprised to find these logics of dispossession recurring and recalibrating to maintain colonialism across seemingly distinct sites (Carlson, 2023, pp. 53–57).

The recognition that regimes of colonial dispossession are maintained and even expanded through processes of reform is profoundly significant to our engagements with housing justice organising on this continent. Much of our thinking and organising around housing justice is animated by the question of whether the housing reforms we are pushing for may actually serve to entrench regimes of spatial injustice (Indigenous dispossession, colonial occupation, extractivism, and gentrification) while purporting to address others.

This question is important because housing research and advocacy often focuses on lobbying powerful people (Roy, 2019) to demand better regulation and distribution of housing or public space. In the context of continuing colonisation, this often involves demanding state agencies act to limit the excesses and abuses of landlords, or to provide more public and affordable housing. It is common for advocates to make universalist and rights-based claims for housing, like ‘housing is a human right’ and ‘everyone deserves a home’ (see, for example Chandler-Mather, n.d.). The problem is that these approaches do not adequately account for the material context of where we are, on Indigenous lands that have never been ceded (Barker, 2018), nor can they be relied on to challenge or dismantle other oppressive structures producing ‘home’ as we know it (Lancione, 2023).

This is not merely a conceptual or theoretical weakness. By failing to attend to the meaningful differences in material circumstances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the settler-colony, and overlooking the material reality of Indigenous sovereignty (Spitzer, 2022), these dominant rhetorical and policy approaches work to implicate movements for housing justice in the maintenance and consolidation of colonial occupation. In the framing of demands and solutions, universalist and rights-based approaches often serve as reforms that reinvest in and further legitimise state and financial structures that are entangled with violence, dispossession, and colonial-carceral-capitalist logics (Brooks et al., 2022; Lean, 2021; Marie Cacho & Melamed, 2022; Porter, 2014; Porter & Kelly, 2022). The state we turn towards to provide housing is the very same state that, since its formation, wields violence, dispossession, and displacement against First Nations Peoples, and re/produces racial, gendered, ableist, and class hierarchies—a state that uses poverty and incarceration to protect itself, that has created the financialised housing system from stolen land and wealth in order to shore up colonial possession (Dorries, 2022; Fields & Raymond, 2021; House & Okafor, 2020; Porter, 2015; Porter & Kelly, 2022). And yet it is common for (particularly non-Indigenous and white) activists and scholars to be ‘persistently seduced by the prospect of what a benevolent, freeing state might offer’ (Porter, 2014, p. 402).

We write here as organisers in movements that have been shaped by these seductive visions, as people who are complicit in reproducing and recalibrating a common sense ‘leftist’ idea that public ownership, housing, and distribution of land and shelter can provide an answer to the problem of housing and spatial injustice (Porter & Kelly, 2022). These common sense colonial logics have been subject to extensive critique from First Nations people—quietly, between friends and comrades at meetings and social occasions, and more openly in political and academic spaces (Barker, 2018; Sriranganathan, 2021). Over the past few years of organising and strategising together, we have tried to take these critiques on board, and challenge these common sense ideas by re-centring ‘contingency and incommensurability’ (Rowe & Tuck, 2017, p. 8) in our struggles, to account for how Indigenous territory ‘refute[s] the viability of inclusionist methodologies and their promises of social justice and equity’ (Barker, 2018, p. 34).

Importantly, this thinking-while-doing has drawn our attention to a vast archive of ‘conceptual and political grammars’ (Porter & Kelly, 2022) that have been developed through centuries of resistance to settler colonialism. The insistence on Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and presence is one of these political grammars (Watego et al., 2021, pp. 3–4; Watson, 2000). Rather than looking to European scholarship or theory for conceptual and political tools in our struggle for housing and spatial justice, we instead look to a long tradition of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, and take an expansive approach to housing and spatial justice—one grounded in the material conditions of this place.

Methodology & methods

This paper is a critical reflection on our varied and ongoing participation in struggles for housing and spatial justice in so-called Brisbane, animated by our concerns with how to account for and be led by the sovereignty of First Nations Peoples. It is a partial grappling with Lenape scholar Joanne Barker’s (2018, p. 20) question: ‘What does Indigenous territory demand differently of the pedagogy of political movements and the frameworks of critical theory?’ Drawing from abolitionist (Wilson Gilmore, 2022) and Indigenist (Watego et al., 2021) theory and struggle, we are concerned in this paper with how housing and spatial justice organising can serve to legitimise and recalibrate regimes of patriarchal white sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson, 2004), making it harder to challenge continuing colonisation in the present. We take up this complicity as a site of struggle, reflecting on some of our experiments in building communities of struggle that refused to accept a housing justice that began and ended with a more equitable distribution of stolen land.

Our methodology follows ‘critical co-constructed autoethnography’ (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020), an expansion on autoethnography which draws eclectically from lived experience, encounter, theory, and relationality, with an eye on the workings of power (Butz, 2010; Jones & Harris, 2018). Critical co-constructed autoethnography offers an approach to reflecting collaboratively on ways of working, theorising, and learning collectively, where the work is situated within a transformative political framework (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020). While the structure may resemble an interview, with authors’ contributions indicated by initials, it is a reproduction of the conversations we—as friends and comrades—have had together, as organisers, planners, politicians, academics, community media makers, artists, poets, and renters, buyers, and inhabitants of stolen land (see, for other examples Cann, & DeMeulenaere, 2020; Warren-Gordon & Jackson-Brown, 2021).

This methodology enables engagement with housing justice not as designers of academic studies but as people implicated in and affected by housing injustices. While there is value in engaging in and with academic studies, we are wary of structuring the work—both in the conduct of it and the writing of it—in ways that re-centre academia as the dominant site of knowing. We do not wish to retroactively frame organising, activism, and the work we’ve done as ‘data’, to position ourselves as above or outside the messy work of struggle, or to minimise the importance of less-citable interlocutors—as is sometimes the case in the scholarly outputs of activist-academics. Critical co-constructed autoethnography better reflects how we’ve come to learn what we have, which is through thinking together, in relationships within and beyond this writing team, and in ways that are often complicated by those relationships, obligations, intimacies, and the complexities of being in community with one another while inhabiting institutions (and worlds) not built for it (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2012, 2020; Warren-Gordon & Jackson-Brown, 2021).

A note on rebel archives

As people engaged in radical political education projects, attempting to de-centre academia in our geographies of knowing, we are interested in sites and practices of archiving located elsewhere, and non-extractive modes of recording and sharing materials. A common weakness of academic writing about activism and grassroots community projects is the significant power authors wield—usually with minimal accountability (see Dalloul et al., 2020)—in curating and selecting which quotes or ideas are amplified. The HJUCP was the major ‘output’ of this project, and running alongside it was a series on housing justice broadcast on Radio Reversal, a show on community radio station 4ZZZ. We recorded media interviews with community members with different angles on the question of housing justice.² These interviews were played on Radio Reversal in the run up to the forum; we also used these interviews to frame questions to the panellists, including playing excerpts on the night.³ The organic flow of conversation—with questions from audience members and the presenters bouncing off each other—means that every comment carries layered meanings arising from the event’s specific context, which can be lost if they are repackaged for an article. Rather than excerpting these materials here and subjecting them to our own analysis, we have instead made the full set of recordings available⁴, as an offering to a rebel archive on the struggle for housing and spatial justice in this city (Dalloul et al., 2020). This article sits alongside these recordings not as an analysis of what is already analysed therein by the contributors (go listen for yourself!), but as a critical reflexive account of what we learned through organising, reflecting, discussing, and re-thinking, together, over time. We note, however, that while rebel archives can offer a way to attempt to refuse authoritative interpretations of the work of movements, facilitating the compilation of an archive, even collaboratively, still reflects some degree of curatorial control, and by drawing your attention to that archive through this publication, the authors of this paper may then be positioned as authorities on it. There is no one simple way to dismantle the authorial authority afforded (some) academics, and we are conscious that this paper reflects both a refusal and a (hopefully equivocal and undermined) reproduction of it.

Contextualising housing justice in South-East Queensland

NO: Before we come to the HJUCP, we thought it would be helpful to contextualise the work we’ve been doing within a broader account of housing justice organising in so-called brisbane and surrounds, and to, per Bhandar (2019) ‘centre in our political consciousness’ attempts, however temporary or imperfect, to challenge capitalist-colonial regimes of property. One of the reasons we want to do this is that a persistent feature of housing and spatial justice theorising and organising in so-called australia is the tendency for ideas, tactics and critiques that are generated at the margins to be absorbed into larger centres of commentary and academic research, repackaged as though they originated there. This often means that the specificity of housing and spatial justice struggles in different places and times is overlooked.

JS: So-called australia has a long history of housing justice activism and theorising, with varying levels of connection to First Nations’ struggles for land rights and sovereignty. But at least since the early 2000s, housing advocacy in brisbane (and, arguably, most australian cities and towns) has been fragmented, deradicalised and heavily dominated by NGOs and charities. Tenants Queensland (formerly the Tenants’ Union of Queensland), Q Shelter, Anglicare, St Vincent’s etc. have predominantly service provision models, offering charity and crisis support to unhoused people, or legal advice to individual renters. Advocacy for more public housing construction or for legislative change to Queensland’s (QLD) landlord-friendly residential tenancy laws largely revolved around submissions to government and private meetings with ministers. With one or two notable exceptions, concerns about gentrification were usually subsumed into conversations about urban planning. Isolated campaigns would focus on challenging new developments or changes to planning instruments, design, heritage, and transport issues, rather than on the economics and ownership of housing itself.

AC: This is interesting because it reflects the distancing of urban justice from other sites of struggle. At the same time as we were organising around housing and spatial justice and beginning to talk about gentrification, there were also major campaigns led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that were challenging the racial profiling, surveillance, targeting of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in cities; dynamics that are directly connected to gentrification. As Munro and Sherwood Spring (2018) point out in their podcast Survival Guide, ‘gentrification is colonisation’. And yet we often failed to draw these connections explicitly in our organising, or to build coalitions around them.

NO: I think this distancing and fragmentation reflects how planning launders spatial injustice by narrowing the scope of how problems are understood, and privileging technocratic or procedural solutions that limit more expansive or transformative engagement. Planning is an inherently political activity, yet many dominant planning paradigms seek to depoliticise it.

JS: Challenging this depoliticisation was one of the goals of my 2016 local government election campaign, which focussed directly on housing, transport, and spatial justice. Before the 2016 campaign, housing justice had largely disappeared as a site of struggle in activist circles. As part of the campaign, we organised well-attended discussion forums under sharehouses and in public parks with session titles like ‘The Right to the City’ and ‘The Rent is Too Damn High’. We connected with the Brisbane Free University and other community groups to start pushing conversations about housing and spatial justice to the centre.

After the Greens won the Gabba Ward of Brisbane City Council in 2016, as a newly-elected city councillor I partnered with existing local resident groups as well as new activist configurations operating under the ‘Right to the City’ banner (which AC and NO were also active in), to centre demands for more public housing in local struggles against unsustainable development projects. In mid-2016, a series of public protests, construction blockades, and marches down West End’s Boundary Street marked the first time—perhaps in decades—that the rally cry ‘What do we want? Public Housing!’ rang out across brisbane streets. Gradually, a lack of public housing and the displacement of low-income residents became core concerns behind local protests against new private development proposals, even if many of the middle-class participants were arguably still more concerned about traffic impacts or poor design.

NO: These campaigns were also useful interventions in public discourse and education about planning processes. We spent a fair bit of time talking with people about how planning legislation and development assessment processes curtail opportunities for public participation and appeals, which I think helped folks—especially more privileged, property-owning residents, who were perhaps a bit more optimistic about what they could expect from Council and State Government—understand how the system was stacked in favour of property developers and private profit.

JS: Yeah—and the housing justice angle spread to other campaigns—like the opposition to the widening of a short stretch of Lytton Road, in East Brisbane. Members of the Anti-Poverty Network QLD briefly squatted one of the 50 empty homes that was about to be demolished to accommodate the extra car lanes. Their online statement included the words ‘The APN’s demands are: recognition that all houses are constructed on stolen land and reparations paid to First Peoples, vacant properties be resumed and given to the homeless, a massive expansion of public housing construction, substantial increase in emergency shelters, especially domestic violence shelters, communities are given control of local development’. Banners reading ‘Housing is a human right’ and ‘20, 000 homeless − 60, 000 empty homes’ hung from the house for roughly 36 hours until, shortly after news crews had gone home, approximately 30 riot police were deployed at Brisbane City Council’s request to evict the 7 squatters.

Simultaneously, at the state level, the Queensland Greens began talking more consistently about housing affordability. While Right to the City activists were organising local events about gentrification, and the need for rent controls and inclusionary zoning, similar policy demands were being incorporated into the Greens state election platform.

NO: For a while there was a lot of energy in the Right to the City—Brisbane collective. We were organising community fora, creating alternative plans for sites and neighbourhoods, throwing protest-parties in the street, organising blockades of destructive developments, writing street histories, ‘reclaiming’ (scare-quoting to note how problematic it is to ‘reclaim’ or ‘occupy’ already stolen, already occupied land) vacant lots and underused spaces, and using tactical urbanism to intervene in public space and spatial politics. But the project was full of tensions. The collective was composed primarily of settlers; occupiers and beneficiaries of stolen land. Despite proclaiming our support for and solidarity with First Nations Peoples and movements for decolonisation and Land Back, in adopting ‘right to the city’ as a central theoretical framework—theory from elsewhere—we were conceptually and politically reasserting settler claims to this place, this city on stolen Country. We were rightly and generously called in on this by First Nations comrades, and asked to do better.

JS: I don’t think those critiques were widely taken up. Within Greens and activist circles, most conversations about housing policy continued to sidestep any mention of colonialism or handing back Aboriginal land. During this period, calls for stronger renters’ rights, inclusionary zoning, more direct investment in public housing and taxes on vacant investment properties became key elements of the Greens’ growing electoral success in South-East Queensland, even while Greens parties in other states continued to focus more heavily on issues like climate change and tree clearing.

AC: And, in the way that so often happens in activist spaces, organisers moved in different directions—some pursued housing concerns through electoral campaigning and policy avenues, others in more community-based, anti-colonial, spatial justice focused struggles.

NO: It was around then, Jonno, that the Gabba Ward crew started getting involved in coordinating direct action on housing?

JS: Yeah that’s right. In February 2018, my office called our first anti-­eviction snap blockade when an Aboriginal mum and her five children were facing eviction from their home in Highgate Hill. The property was government-owned and managed by one of Australia’s largest non-­profit community housing organisations, Compass Housing (renamed ‘Home in Place’ in 2022). I alerted the media, and organised activists to gather at the home before police and Compass Housing came to enforce the eviction. Facing the prospect of an open confrontation, police advised that they would not proceed. Instead, Compass Housing negotiated a new lease with the family, and the blockade was called off before it started, with a committed core—mostly members of the Anti-Poverty Network QLD—offering ongoing support.

In April 2018, my office supported a new campaign bannered ‘Brisbane Renters Alliance’ (BRA). BRA began organising forums, social events, online resources and a submission-writing campaign oriented towards the State Government’s rental law reform process (which was watered down and eventually postponed due to pressure from the real estate industry).

Then, in late 2018, the State Government erected temporary fencing around the undercroft of the Kurilpa footbridge—a space regularly used by rough sleepers—as a prelude to installing landscaping designed to deter people from sleeping there. Our office organised two protests to draw greater attention to this issue. At the first, a handful of participants completely dismantled the temporary fencing. The fencing was reinstalled, and a heavier police presence at the second rally prevented a repeat of this action.

AC: I think these examples are useful because they help to explain the expansiveness of housing and spatial justice work during this time, and the way that organisers were beginning to focus on the connections between our struggles. By 2020, we were organising at the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter organising globally, and, at the local level, a solidarity blockade of an over-crowded immigration detention centre in Kangaroo Point in Brisbane. Before the pandemic it sometimes felt like there wasn’t enough capacity for people who were interested in social change to focus on so many different issues at once: from disability and queer justice, to housing, anti-racism, abolition, and movements for land rights and decolonisation. But by the end of 2020, it felt like more of us were beginning to understand that these were directly connected struggles; that everything from ecosystem collapse, to intensifying white supremacy, to new waves of eviction and displacement, to carceral expansion and border regimes, were all rooted in the same foundations.

MC: I was living in so-called melbourne during COVID lockdowns, and we saw a massive intensification in the visible policing of poor, ­working-class, racialised neighbourhoods during this period, as well as an increased awareness of the politics of housing and public space. In the earlier months of 2020, several housing commission towers were locked down with almost no notice, leaving residents completely unsupported. Community members (including myself) rushed to the towers to distribute food, medical supplies, nappies and other essential goods to the people in the towers. When I arrived, there was an enormous police presence, and at one moment I observed a meeting of maybe 80–100 police on the oval nearby.

During lockdown, many homeless folks around the continent had been provided housing in various hotels and multi-residential buildings. This, I felt, led to a mainstream awakening that homelessness is better understood as state-sanctioned violence (Watego, 2021) and organised abandonment (Wilson Gilmore, 2022) rather than an outcome of personal shortcomings, a lack of housing options, or a lack of possible solutions. Housing and space have always been carefully protected commodities in the colony, and it seemed COVID-19 revealed to a lot of people how access to safe, accessible and adequate housing was a requirement for disability justice and transformative justice.

JS: Absolutely, COVID-19 did seem to catalyse these understandings, as well as a surge of interest and grassroots activism around housing justice here, independent of active leadership from the Greens or other funded organisations. Facing a sudden loss of income due to the abrupt closure of many hospitality and service sector businesses, a core of young inner-city renters—many of whom had previously been involved in climate activism and other social justice struggles—began distributing flyers and publishing online material calling for rent strikes, mirroring similar approaches in other australian cities. I think it’s worth considering how the widespread, open discussion of rent strikes (both in so-called australia and globally) in 2020 probably contributed to the federal government’s temporary introduction of new and expanded welfare payments. Arguably, this increased income support diminished the sense of urgency for housing activism among many of the university-educated young adults who commonly lead grassroots organising in Brisbane.

In short, COVID-19 showed people the importance of having housing that’s well-designed, well-ventilated and comfortable to occupy continuously for days and weeks. At the same time, it also highlighted how precariously so many of us were living—thousands of renters were just a few lost shifts away from missing rent payments and getting evicted, but perhaps hadn’t quite grappled with that reality until lockdowns and sudden work closures forced them to.

More recently, as rents and house prices have continued rising, new activist groupings have emerged in the housing justice arena, most notably the South-East Queensland Union of Renters (SEQUR), which formed in July 2021. Unlike older advocacy organisations such as Tenants Queensland, SEQUR are entirely volunteer-run, and are much more willing to publicly critique both government power-holders and individual landlords and real estate agencies. The new union’s organising activity has revolved heavily around political education, supporting members with advice on how to defend their rights via tribunal processes, as well as occasional marches and rallies.

AC: There has also been a bit of a shift in some of the approaches and strategies that housing justice organisers have been taking, with an increasing recognition of the limits of reforming a fundamentally unjust housing system.

JS: While antagonistic civil disobedience actions that directly resist or disrupt evictions remain relatively rare in so-called brisbane, there have been a couple of really successful examples in the past few years. It is still uncommon for individual tenants to be willing to risk the long-term legal consequences of refusing to move out once a lease has been terminated, but in 2022, the Gabba Ward office co-organised two successful actions to resist imminent evictions. The first involved a public housing tenant who was being evicted from his home in Taringa by the Queensland Government’s Department of Housing. In partnership with the office of State MP Michael Berkman, SEQUR and other activist groups, we organised a blockade and frontyard occupation on the Friday afternoon (17 June) when police were due to enforce the eviction warrant. Facing dozens of committed activists who were prepared to resist the eviction—including some who locked onto the front door with bike locks—the police backed down and advised they would return the next week. A second follow-up blockade was organised, and in response to sustained resistance, the government decided to allow the tenant to remain in his home.

The second campaign took place in Milton, where a property developer proposed to evict a pensioner from his long-term private rental to demolish it and build highrise apartments. The tenant’s lease had technically expired in February, but almost six months later, the tenant was still refusing to move, and the developer was reluctant to wear public flak for forcibly evicting a pensioner into homelessness. After a series of media stunts, community meetings and protest actions organised under the banner of Brisbane Renters Alliance, the developer eventually agreed to compensate the tenant $60,000 in order to move out, even though the tenant had no legal entitlement to remain.

In both of these successful anti-eviction actions—one regarding public housing, and the other involving a private rental—the active support of elected Greens representatives and paid office staff was arguably a key ingredient. Paid staffing capacity was used in coordinating volunteers and planning protest actions, and the buy-in from elected representatives also gave the tenants at the centre of the struggle confidence to continue resisting eviction.

AC: This is an important and complex dimension of these movements, and one that we do need to pay attention to in understanding the struggle for housing and spatial justice (and the dangers of what Dylan Rodriguez (2020) calls the ‘liberal counter-insurgency’).

JS: While many activists—us included—would like to believe that grassroots-led anti-eviction direct actions can be organised autonomously by volunteers, the only recent anti-eviction civil disobedience actions we are aware of in brisbane to date have been organised with heavy involvement from the Gabba Ward office and paid staff. These offices often have the advantage of being well-networked with local residents and community groups, a big social media reach, and perhaps greater legitimacy and negotiating weight (than the average activist) with government departments, developers and real estate agents. Hopefully other activist groups such as SEQUR will build the scale and organising capacity to be able to directly resist evictions on an autonomous basis. But in the meantime, we need to work to ensure that movements that rely on the support of electoral offices do not end up acquiescing to narrow and reformist ideas of housing justice.

NO: We also want to honour the larger ecology of resistance, and resist professionalising struggle or shifting the gravitational heart of the work into policy or technocratic spaces where the entanglements with the state and electoralism are so tight and tricky.

AC: This commitment to constantly expanding our approach to housing and spatial justice is strategic. Rent strikes and eviction blockades are not the only forms that direct action around housing and spatial justice can take. Over the same period that we have been organising, we have seen a proliferation of campaigns led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people demanding land rights and climate justice. We have seen police and prison abolition campaigns that focussed directly on the role of policing, prisons, and surveillance in displacing people from their homes, families and communities. We have seen refugee justice campaigns focussed on ending the incarceration and surveillance of people seeking asylum. These are all spatial justice struggles, just as they are anti-colonial, anti-­racist, feminist, and abolitionist struggles. Part of the work we are trying to do as organisers is to build coalitions that can attend to these links, without subsuming the specific demands of any one movement into another.

JS: A good example is the struggle to protect Deebing Creek from private development. Deebing Creek, on the southern outskirts of Ipswich (brisbane’s largest satellite city) is a former Aboriginal mission of great cultural and political heritage value, and an intact wildlife corridor of high ecological significance. Aboriginal land protectors and their allies occupied parts of the forested site since early 2019, initially in tents, and later building more permanent structures, calling for the entire area (which is split over three separate blocks under the control of three different private developers) to be returned to its rightful First Nations custodians.

As a high-profile Aboriginal land rights campaign in close proximity to a rapidly growing city, Deebing Creek represents another crucial battlefront against the commodification and privatisation of housing and land. The commercial pressure (and associated political support) to bulldoze intact ecosystems on the outskirts of Ipswich and subdivide parcels of land for private sale is a direct result of escalating property values, and the preoccupation in the state’s capital city with treating housing as a source of profit. The willingness of so many brisbane residents who have also been involved in inner-city housing activism to travel out to Deebing Creek for protests and meetings underscores this interconnection.

The periodic attempts by riot police and developer-funded private security to force Aboriginal land protectors off their campsites replicates many earlier waves of evictions and displacements, whereby so many First Nations peoples have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands and made homeless in their own country. In Deebing Creek, we see that struggles for housing equity and forest protection are ultimately different facets of the deeper underlying struggle against capitalist colonialism.

Summary

The recent context of housing justice advocacy in South-East Queensland had been characterised by somewhat fragmented thinking and organising. Aboriginal calls for land rights, protests about the impacts of road-widening projects and poorly designed development, and growing concerns about gentrification displacing lower-income renters, had effectively been operating in silos, without explicitly and meaningfully articulating their direct connections and seizing opportunities for solidarity and mutual support. But in the past few years, we have observed a growing understanding of the connections between these struggles. There has been increasing appetite for grassroots direct action, and rising critical consciousness about housing justice and the treatment of housing and land as for-profit commodities.

These growing concerns around housing injustice have led to two dominant approaches to housing justice organising over the past few years. The first, and perhaps less surprising approach, has been a surge in electoral organising and campaigning, with people who are concerned about housing affordability and unsustainable profit-driven development deciding to campaign for the Greens in the hopes of putting pressure on and eventually replacing Labor government MPs. The second approach has seen activists and organisers developing much more critical approaches to housing advocacy, rejecting supplicatory and reformist tactics such as petitions, submissions and letter-writing, and focusing instead on civil disobedience actions like protest marches, blockades and occupations. These actions seek not merely to raise awareness and show politicians the strength of community concern, but to materially disrupt or delay evictions and profit-driven development projects.

In so-called brisbane, the 2016 Gabba Ward victory, subsequent Greens electoral organising, and new housing activism groups and anti-poverty networks with explicitly anti-reformist politics emerged within and alongside the crisis acceleration impacts of COVID-19, and growing movements for police and prison abolition, land back and Indigenous self-determination. This proximity has led to connections being drawn between these emergent political movements and longer standing struggles for Indigenous self-­determination, prison and police abolition, and land back. Whether this continues, and whether the connections and contradictions between settler-centred housing affordability campaigns and First Nations land back demands are taken up by larger political projects, remains to be seen.

Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project

JS: The HJUCP came into being because my office was coming into contact with more people experiencing housing precarity, but noticing that beyond the usual pathways of helping people get onto the public housing waitlist and connecting them to other charities, the menu of structural responses available basically ended with ‘vote Greens at election time and pressure your political representatives to improve renters, rights and public housing availability’.

We decided a public forum on housing policy that included at least one or two First Nations people might help broaden the parameters of debate in brissie’s activist spaces, and also prompt the Greens to critically reflect on the limitations of the state socialism policy visions the party was articulating in election campaigns. The Greens had generally been calling for more public housing that’s built and owned by the colonial nation-state, without meaningfully addressing how such models are partly at odds with ongoing First Nations demands for ‘land back’ and self-determination.

MC: Throughout my work at the Gabba Ward, I began to understand the municipal logistics of housing, and the ways that housing injustice proliferated within our local community. From my first introductions to housing justice organising, I mainly saw electoral campaigns or local community groups demanding more for infrastructural and municipal changes: demands which are obviously integral to housing justice. Yet there was little recognition of the intersections of housing justice with disability justice, First Nations’ sovereignty and racial discrimination. This was especially frustrating since it seemed like many organisers would acknowledge that the first housing injustice was that of settler-colonialism, the forced displacement, theft and dispossession of First Nations’ people of their homes and land. And yet despite the fact that we frequently saw ongoing racial discrimination and barriers to housing and land, this was rarely reflected in the demands or articulations of housing justice that came out of electoral and tenant organising spaces.

This highlighted to me the need for a general collectivising of both activists and the general community to truly grapple with the interconnectedness of housing injustice in our organising spaces, and to obtain a better local contextual insight into the intersectionality of organising within housing justice spaces. This not to say that electoral or tenant focussed housing movements simply need to acknowledge these intersectional marginalisations and then go back to their usual tactics; but rather that we need to meaningfully reckon with how our advocacy around housing reproduces colonial and racial logics of possession and property. We must ask: why hadn’t housing justice organising been an imperative structure for organising around prison abolition and transformative justice? Why were many of the organising electoral and housing justice spaces predominantly white? How come information and organising around tenants’ rights felt distant and disconnected to the general leftist community in this general struggle for liberation and safety? Where are these discussions being had, are they accessible to disabled communities, to non-­english speaking communities?

These were some of the questions that, for me, underpinned why we needed to host this event. The only resource I could find at the time that really acknowledged the interconnectedness of these struggles was hosted in Turtle Island. It felt significant that we strain through these questions and issues within the specific context of this place, and all the present and historical organising that had occurred, and to assist with what can occur.

AC: Through our conversations together, we shifted to a more explicit focus on the need to centre Aboriginal sovereignty in housing justice discussions, and a panel comprised entirely of First Nations speakers, including people who would not traditionally be understood as ‘experts’ on housing. It was a very deliberate attempt to widen the conversation on housing justice by bringing in people who could locate housing injustice on this continent in relation to colonisation, dispossession, racial violence, erasure, and enclosure. While several of the panellists were working or researching in fields that were closely connected to housing justice—such as health, social work and supporting incarcerated people—they weren’t necessarily the kinds of speakers who would ordinarily be interviewed or platformed in public conversations about housing policy. In our forum, Sam Bond, a frontline worker at Murri Watch’s Bowman Johnson Hostel, was the only person whose work centred around providing temporary housing and supporting unhoused people.

This approach was partly about centring Indigenous sovereignty and resistance, but it was also intended to make visible the relatively narrow ways in which many of us, even otherwise ‘radical’ housing activists, are disciplined to approach housing as a policy problem within the confines of the colonial nation state. In putting together this forum and the radio series, we were responding to this dynamic and how it had shaped our own thinking and organising, trying to work against the terms of reference set by the colonising settler state that so often saw us recycling a set of technocratic and reformist solutions to housing injustice that failed to engage with the context of colonisation.

But at the same time, as organisers and activists, we were also struggling with the problem of how to engage expansively with housing and spatial justice while still retaining clear demands and targets for organising and education. We knew that clear sites of struggle and simple demands would be useful in building momentum and collective power: it is difficult to know what tools to use when your target is everything. And so we were trying to find ways to come together to build strategies and tactics for collective liberation that really could tackle these intersecting harms from their roots.

NO: I want to phrase this with deliberate uncertainty, because I don’t want to offer excuses for modes of theorising and organising that do not centre Indigenous sovereignty, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that we can’t hold everything in our heads, and everything in view, at once, on our own. I worry that efforts to craft ever-more complex and nuanced understandings tips us back towards modes of thinking that grow abstracted from material struggles in place. I think this underscores the importance of building collectives, coalitions, and solidarities across multiple sites of material experience, complicity, and struggle. We don’t have to be across everything, we have to leave room for it. We don’t have to know everything, we have to leave room for learning, and for accountability. Maybe this is something an abolitionist approach offers us—working towards some combination of harm reduction and non-reformist reforms and critical reflection and public learning and big expansive dreaming and tearing things down and building things we’ve never seen before, in concert across communities of struggle.

JS: This is also, of course, where this work is most challenging. Because while there were definitely positive ripples, perhaps one of the reasons the forum didn’t have a major, obvious, immediate impact on housing justice organising and discourse in wider brisbane activist circles is simply that so much of that world is oriented towards shifting mainstream policy discourses where the treatment of housing as a for-profit commodity is still a widely accepted norm, and the nation-state is presumptively treated as legitimate and permanent. Political campaigners are still struggling simply to normalise the idea that everybody should have guaranteed access to housing even if they can’t afford market rents or house prices. So discussions about how much of that housing ought to be Aboriginal community-controlled, or how we can return more land to First Nations people rather than defaulting to state-centric policy responses, tend to disrupt and complicate the neat public vs private binaries that often characterise such debates.

Resisting colonial complicity in housing justice organising

The erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s sovereignty and presence from the ‘settled space’ of the colony is a founding strategy of colonisation (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). From the brutal violence of the Frontier (Banivanua-Mar, 2005), to the physical removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through the ‘Protection Acts’ (Foley, 2020), to waves of gentrification that further displace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (Whittaker, 2019), to regimes of surveillance and policing that target, criminalise and incarcerate Indigenous people (Porter, 2018; McQuire, 2022; McKinnon, 2020; Carlson, 2023), to the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty, theory, and activism (Watego, 2021): diverse strategies have been deployed to sustain these colonial fantasies of terra nullius.

Here, we are primarily concerned with the ways that our movements for housing and spatial justice can be recruited into the ongoing work of reforming and sustaining colonialism. Common sense approaches to housing and spatial justice on this continent tend to take for granted that the colonial settler state is a legitimate provider of housing, shelter, and space. As a result, contemporary conversations and heated mainstream policy debates around housing tend to focus on the distinctions between private for-profit housing, or public housing built and controlled by governments (or by NGOs that are closely connected to the nation-state). Both mainstream politics and activist spaces—including the ones we are involved in—frequently insist on clearly defined policy demands as a focus and motivator for action, particularly in response to housing.

Increasingly, we see this as a trap. By ceding the terrain of housing and spatial justice to a technocratic debate about housing policy operating on terms set by the colonial state, we overlook the possibilities offered by explicitly anti-colonial, anti-racist, abolitionist feminist theories of change that do not work to reform the colonial nation state, but to abolish it. The erasure of Indigenous sovereignty from these conversations narrows housing justice into a debate over who should be responsible for managing, distributing, and benefiting from stolen land, foreclosing more substantive critiques of the legitimacy of settler-colonial government itself, or the presumed ‘benevolence’ of the intrinsically racist colonial nation-state.

Our reflections on the last few years of organising around housing justice in so-called brisbane suggests that we need to be strategic in how and when we narrow in on specific targets and sites of struggle; and uncompromising in our commitment to always attending to the root causes of injustice in this place. As we engage in politics that seeks to resist ­settler-colonial power relations, conceptions of private property, and colonial logics of benevolence, we are experimenting towards a more deliberately expansive, open-ended approach to housing and spatial justice. This can be very challenging. If everything is connected, and the deep changes we imagine are too complex to be reduced to straightforward demands, the scale of struggle becomes overwhelming. It’s difficult to know what to do.

In writing these reflections, we are taking stock of what we have learned from our engagements with each other and communities of struggle. We hope these stories and reflections of housing justice struggles in so-called brisbane, and experiments in approaching them through anti-colonialism, offer some insights into the operation of power, and the possibilities for collective liberation, on stolen land. The work of anti-colonial coalition building is marked by ‘contingency and incommensurability’ (Rowe & Tuck, 2017, p. 8); it is complex, uneasy, and incomplete. Through critical co-­constructed autoethnography and rebel archives, we have attempted to reflect and make meaning from our experiences as organisers in partial and situated ways. Yet, we also acknowledge that, if this partial account is the only part a reader engages with, it can be easily mistaken for the whole despite all our disclaimers. Working in ways that account for contingency, difference, positionality, incompleteness, and uncertainty, demands more—more reporting, more critical reflection, more archiving, more storying, in more formats, by more of us. This hopefully also serves as a reminder to those academics interested in and engaged in housing justice struggles to move beyond ‘descriptivism and prescriptivism’ (Lancione, 2023, p. 62) in our work, and to understand movements and sites of struggles not as sites from which data can be extracted for contained theorising within the academy, but as sites of theorising and analysis that we learn from by joining and by co-constituting communities of resistance. Incompletely, imperfectly, refusing complicity where we can and carrying the rest of it with us, we practice solidarity, we work towards accountability, we experiment with coalition-building and with strategies and practices that might enable dwelling otherwise (Lancione, 2023; Maynard & Betasamosake Simpson, 2022; Porter & Kelly, 2022). We learn and unlearn; strategise and re-strategise; and we do it over and again, ‘til we free us’ (Kaba, 2021).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who contributed to the Housing Justice in Unjust cities project, including panellists Uncle Dr Shane Coghill, Professor Chelsea Watego, Samantha Bond, Kevin Yow Yeh, interviewees Hakim Mokhlis, Mali Hermans, Boe Spearim, Jade Taylor, A/Professor Fiona Foley, Witt Gorrie, Dr Max Brierty, and Sara, Nina, Crystal and Gabi from the Homes Not Prisons campaign, and Sean from the Renters and Housing Union. We also thank the staff of the Gabba Ward Office, volunteers who contributed to the panel event, and our fellow producers from the Radio Reversal Collective, including Marissa Dooris, Dr. Shreya Singh and Dr. Han Reardon-Smith. AC and NO would also like to thank our regular and beloved interlocutors in the Brisbane Free University Radical Reading Group, where many of these ideas get thought collaboratively in conversations spanning years. NO would also like to thank the Place, Race, and Critical Theory Reading Group, whose generative engagements with recent texts in housing and spatial politics have enriched her thinking and informed this work. AC would also like to recognise the contribution of the ICRR reading group and broader community, particularly Dr. Chelsea Watego, Dr. Amy McQuire, Dr. Jamal Nabulsi, Dr. Liz Strakosch, Dr. Alissa Macoun, Dr. Mujib Abid, Anna Cerreto, and Dr. David Singh, all of whom helped shape my thinking and organising on housing justice. MC & AC also acknowledge our comrades from the Transformative Justice working group, which also served as a place for thinking more deeply about the interconnections of policing, imprisonment, surveillance and gentrification. We are grateful to the editors of this special issue, David Kelly and Libby Porter, and to the anonymous reviewers, for their insightful feedback and generous support of this piece.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use the terms ‘First Nations people’, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’ and ‘Indigenous people’ interchangeably in this paper, recognising that this is all colonial terminology that flattens the experiences of peoples who are, as Mununjahli and South Sea Islander theorist Chelsea Watego explains, ‘both First Nations and first raced’.

2 We recorded interviews with Hakim Mokhlis, Mali Hermans, Boe Spearim, Jade Taylor, Witt Gorrie, A/Professor Fiona Foley, Dr Max Brierty, and Sara, Nina, Gabi, and Crystal from the Homes Not Prisons campaign and Sean from the Renters and Housing Union.

3 The panellists were Uncle Dr Shane Coghill, Professor Chelsea Watego, Samantha Bond, and Kevin Yow Yeh, and the panel was facilitated by Dr. Natalie Osborne, and introduced by Jonathan Sriranganathan and Mo Chan.

4 https://soundcloud.com/radioreversalcollective/sets/housing-justice-in-unjust-cities-2021.