Unsettling the Affordable Housing Crisis in New York City

ABSTRACT In New York City, the lack of affordable housing opportunities is frequently described by politicians and other institutional leaders as an affordable housing crisis, and they claim that simply building more housing units will remedy the crisis. However, using the Morningside Heights neighborhood and Columbia University as a case‐study, I argue that the affordable housing crisis is built upon decades of disinvestment in predominantly lower‐income Black and Latinx communities and ongoing land grabbing practices while denying the public housing services allegedly available to them. Instead of focusing on the lack of housing, this paper argues that there should be a greater focus placed upon the real estate practices of powerful anchor institutions such as universities, as well as state and city governments, that intentionally withhold resources to house people while continuing to promote land grabbing practices under the guise of serving the public interest. I show how urban housing is treated as a tool of control over people's use of space through its commodification and hyper securitization. I find that public‐private partnerships between university and city leaders reduce housing stock to raw material in order to reproduce certain kinds of racialized and classed workers into the urban environment while naturalizing the negative effects of such practices on lower income households as a crisis. I conclude that the result is a revamping of racialized and classed geographies whereby city land is continually repurposed as an exclusive product for the benefit of predominantly wealthy, white young people.