The rental housing question: Exploitation, eviction and erasures

Critical housing studies have been slow to interrogate the role of low-income rental tenure in contemporary capitalism. Retaining insights of previous Marxian analyses, which insisted that housing is inextricably linked to the capitalist political economy, this essay sets off to revise the rental housing question: how might we explain the rising levels of rental housing insecurity - overindebtedness, evictions and homelessness - of impoverished households, who have been integrated into the financial system as renters and debtors? Viewing this question through an analytical-historical approach in which theoretical concepts are embedded in appropriate historical context, the paper reveals how monetized power relations involving landlords (public and private), creditors and multi-scalar state interventions (federal, municipal and district) play an integral, yet paradoxical, role in low-income rental housing insecurity. To develop this argument, I draw on the case of social rental housing in Neukölln - one of Berlin's most impoverished boroughs - to demonstrate how monetized power relations and multi-scalar state interventions have produced and reproduced housing insecurity through a tri-nodal continuum marked by: (1) exploitation through rent and credit, (2) evictions and homelessness, and (3) erasures by invisiblizing the displaced.