Housing financialization and Community Wellbeing: tenant resistance in the liveable city

• Authors: Andrew Crosby
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Tenant movements are increasingly impacting urban governance and the development of housing in Canadian cities. Tenants resisting violent and ‘gentler’ forms of gentrification-through outright expulsion or being priced out of their communities-have demonstrated their unwillingness to allow financialized real estate to determine their housing futures. At the same time, tenants also have to contend with discourses of urban improvement that increasingly dominate the terrain of financialized rental housing (re)development. Community benefits agreements and other similar arrangements emphasizing neighbourhood liveability and wellbeing are increasingly deployed as devices to justify housing (re)development, but also work to facilitate gentrification. Through an examination of a struggle between tenants and a financialized real estate investment firm in Canada’s capital city Ottawa-which aspires to be North America’s most liveable mid-sized city-this article explores the implications of a Community Wellbeing Framework for a neighbourhood redevelopment project forged through tenant resistance efforts.

Keywords

EN

Community Wellbeing; demoviction; gentrification; liveability; tenant organizing

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Critical Housing Analysis
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 68-80
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Andrew Crosby

• Critical Housing Analysis, redakce,Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i. Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic