Tearing down and building up': a history, theory and practice of abolitionist housing justice in the US

This chapter seeks to define and trace an abolitionist tradition of housing justice, and situates this tradition within African-American struggles to cultivate community power and alternative institutions at the grassroots. At the heart of this tradition is the collective commitment to building up humane relationships and institutions, while simultaneously dismantling those rooted in bondage. The first section examines key theories of abolition, situating them within an intellectual genealogy rooted in the dualistic struggle to end chattel slavery and its post-emancipation carceral afterlives and to create what W.E.B. Du Bois called an “abolition democracy”: a democracy founded upon the rights and resources necessary to sustain freedom. The second section traces an underrecognized tradition of abolitionist housing justice that is exemplified through experimentation with housing models such as community land trusts and praxes such as mutual aid. The third section grounds this theory and history in two contemporary case studies of abolitionist housing justice organizing, with unhoused encampment residents and squatters in Philadelphia, PA and with housing insecure tenants in Los Angeles, CA. Through this multi-dimensional analysis, abolition emerges as a counterhegemonic praxis through which marginalized people cultivate their own power, dream beyond the systems that perpetuate their subjugation and beyond the parameters of what already exists to imagine how their material needs may otherwise be met, and experiment in building alternative institutions through practices that challenge the supremacy of state power, normative modes of planning, and market-based housing models.