Urbanization, Real Estate, and the Anti-renter Regime in American Housing Policy

• In Event: Power and Precarity: The Political Economy of U.S. Housing Policy

Abstract

US housing policy strongly prefers homeownership; this has been the case since the early years of US housing policy. Consequently, material and symbolic benefits have been distributed to homeowners while renters have received very little. How did this come to be? How did the US transform from a nation with essentially no housing policy in the early 1900s to a firmly metropolitan one with a distinct set of housing policy institutions by the 1950s? In this paper, I trace the macro-social foundations of American housing policy. I develop the concept of an “anti-renter regime” to describe the relatively durable set of housing policy arrangements established in the early twentieth century which continue to define American housing. I argue that transformations from industrial urbanization and the development of a professionalized real estate industry explain the emergence of an anti-renter housing policy regime. Rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically changed the social geography of the US and produced an unfilled need for urban housing. The real estate industry, in response to this profit opportunity, centralized and professionalized in order to establish a firm link between real estate, housing, and the welfare of the nation. Together, these two factors produced a robust private market in rental housing. By the time the US began to solidify a housing policy regime, the new social geography and the real estate profession had already normalized tenure-related spatial inequality in housing. These influences actively shaped the following decades’ policymaking such that the US created a housing policy regime that bolsters homeownership while providing extremely few public supports for renters.

Author

• Shai Karp, Northwestern University