The political aspects of “full housing”: What if paying landlords to house people doesn’t work?

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the U.S. Congress appropriated nearly $50 billion for Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) to stabilize tenant housing, while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued temporary protections against eviction. Real estate industry groups responded by mounting an aggressive legal campaign to overturn the CDC’s eviction protections—a campaign that succeeded when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the order less than a year after its issuance. By that point, however, less than $8 billion—approximately 17%—of the ERA funds had been disbursed. This paper develops a structural explanation for this pattern of collective property-owner behavior: the rapid mobilization to restore eviction authority alongside comparatively limited effort to access unprecedented public compensation. Drawing on Michal Kalecki’s analysis of capitalist opposition to full employment policy, the paper argues that landlords, like employers, operate within a hierarchy of class priorities in which profit-making is contingent on, and when the two come into tension, subordinate to, the preservation of mechanisms of control. Engaging the Black radical tradition and Black geographies, the analysis situates this prioritization of control within racialized systems of political domination and their spatial organization through land, housing, displacement, and mobility. Through illustrative analyses of U.S. public housing policy and the COVID-era ERA response, the paper shows how eviction-based rental systems operate as economic traps that foreclose durable exits from market dependence. The paper thus offers an explanation for persistent landlord resistance to what it terms “full housing” policy—the housing analogue to full employment—and argues that housing justice requires confronting, rather than accommodating, the mechanisms of control that underwrite profit-making in rental housing markets.