Questioning our Questions

Koji Pingry, University of Washington, Department of Geography

In our American society it is incredibly hard for us to break out of the comforts we have come to know and expect. Many problems exist across different scales but because of our desire to maintain a certain lifestyle, the questions we have to ask ourselves about these important issues allows us to seek the safe answers. For example, what can I do about the large-scale destruction of the natural environment? If you are part of the modern American middle class the answers are simple. You can buy organic, drive a hybrid car, use reusable bags, invest in sustainable development, etc. Personal responsibility and individualism are a major part of our American character and the questions we ask about how to solve societal issues like environmental degradation or poverty reflects these ideals. As individuals we have the responsibility and power to make a difference.

The individualistic questions we ask produce solutions that both assign and alleviate guilt. After many documentaries, lectures, or books on the issue of environmental degradation we are posed with the rhetorical question “what can you do to help?” The responsibility for the problem here is placed on you the individual and it now falls on you solve it. The task of ending climate change for any individual is impossible. Unless everybody who is currently living beyond their means drastically changes their way of life, the environment will continue to suffer. Because the responsibility now lies with the individual as opposed to the society, we are given ways that we can potentially help the environment, thus alleviating guilt, without having to give up all that we have come to know.

Slovaj Zizek calls this phenomenon cultural capitalism, referring to how we have now combined the act of saving the environment with consumerism. Buying green is posited as the solution. The concept of developing sustainably, or consuming environmentally friendly products, allows us, referring to the middle class in America, to not move away from what we have understood as the norm while feeling good about our choices. The harsh reality though is that no matter how much we have supposedly changed our buying habits, no matter how green the BP website looks, the environment remains in crisis and continues to worsen each year. The problem here lies more with the original question asked then the solutions that came out of it.

I use the example of the environment because it is an issue that is relevant to all people. The environment is an issue that is frequently talked about and on the political scale there is a general consensus that climate change is a major global concern. Discussions surrounding poverty and homelessness tend to be more contentious, especially here in the United States. These seemingly unrelated issues have at least one thing in common. Mainstream conversations of these topics are dominated by individualistic questions despite the fact that these are collective issues.

Growing up in Seattle my entire life, I have become completely desensitized to homelessness. I have come to know homelessness as an accepted, inevitable part of society. Again, because of our individualistic character, and the media representation of the poor, the responsibility for the poor and homeless to obtain the American dream and become part of the idealized middle class falls on the individual. At the most basic level, the middle class here is portrayed as self-made, hard-working, homeowners, those who support a family, send their kids to college and then retire. In America, where the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ mentality dominates public discourse, those not living in poverty can ignore the system that advantages some people while oppressing others. Those in the middle class can ignore the privileges they have enjoyed in order to succeed in this society. Despite this cultural norm, there is a sense of subconscious guilt that remains part of the middle class identity, the guilt of over-perceived inequality and unequal life chances. This feeling results in the often-asked question; how can I help the homeless? Naturally, the response is the homeless shelter.

This past year I spent time volunteering in a youth shelter and I understand that shelters provide a necessary, important service. The fact of the matter is, there are over 3,000 people a night that sleep outside in the city of Seattle. I have seen the shelter act as a community for young people to support one another. I have experienced the shelter as a positive space of encounter between very different people. Shelters provide a night of warmth and food for many people that may not have access to these on a daily basis. I really came to appreciate the kinds of connections that can be made and the potential for alliance building among volunteers and guests.

But I have also seen the shelter act as a solution for the middle class because it both alleviates the guilt that I described above for the volunteers and donors while providing this necessary service, in much the same way that “going green” does. The concept of cultural capitalism is something I thought about a lot during my time volunteering. There is a general feeling amongst the volunteers that we are doing a good thing but less attention is placed on whether it is enough. As a society if you donate to non-profits you are rewarded with the portrayal that you are a benevolent individual and also tax breaks. As opposed to the shelter being a service that is provided by our local government supported collectively through tax dollars, it is a place that is funded and supported through the kindness of our hearts. We are taught to feel good about ourselves when we donate two dollars to charity as we buy our groceries as opposed to understanding that we all have a communal responsibility to take care of one another.

I found in my experience that even though the shelter could sometimes be a place where alliances across class were built, it was also a place where people’s stereotypes were reaffirmed and their own self-identity reassured. Along with that, I struggled knowing that the shelter was never going to be the solution to end poverty even though it is addressing a desired need. For most people the shelter is not a place to question our privilege. It does not make us question the structural issues that make these shelters a necessity in the first place.

This is not to put down volunteers, donors, or shelters. Again, they are serving a need in the community that is absolutely necessary and many are doing a fantastic job of providing these services. But in the same way that we know using reusable bags really do not do anything for the environment, I think most people know that homeless shelters are not ever going to end homelessness. They are a Band-Aid fix. They are addressing a symptom of our American social, economic system and not the causes. So if we understand that homeless shelters aren’t actually going to end homelessness, that driving hybrid cars wont save the environment, why do we continue to fixate on these solutions? It is because these solutions don’t disrupt our sense of security, our self-identity. It is because the original questions we ask ourselves look to what changes we as individuals can make as opposed to what we can do collectively as a society. It is because both the solutions and questions do not force us to critically reflect on our own lifestyles and how incredibly unsustainable they are environmentally, economically, and socially.

Addressing issues this big takes a long time. The solutions are not something that will arise over night. And because of that at this moment the solutions are not as important as the questions. In conclusion I suggest a few different questions with the goal of moving away from an individualist approach, toward a more relational one: How do the advantages those who are privileged enjoy work to reinforce the cyclical nature of poverty, and continue to marginalize a large segment of our population? How can the privileged deconstruct some of these power structures so that poverty does not need to be a normal part of society? How can those with privilege set aside their own desires, and support movements that may not be directly advantageous to them (i.e. the 15 now campaign, or universal health care)? What would a society look like, what would a shelter look like, if these were the questions being asked?

Fighting with Family and Seeking Transformation through Care

Emma Slager, University of Washington, Department of Geography

Earlier this year, I attended a family wedding that took me into the company of uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings. My family is big and rowdy with diverse life situations and political persuasions, and as is our custom, we did a lot of arguing about politics during the weekend we spent together, drawing a few concerned glances from strangers around us. As our talk ranged from health care to public transit and gentrification, I grew frustrated. I was unable to get my uncle to see my perspective about the Affordable Care Act, unable to convince my aunt that private bus systems set up by tech companies in San Francisco and Seattle might do more harm than good.

And yet, I think most of us left the weekend feeling closer to one another than when we’d entered it. In coming together from all over the country to support a family member getting married, we cared for one another. We made food for each other, gave one another rides, helped set up for the wedding and cleaned up after the reception, talked together about our struggles and joys, offered advice and compassion.

Reflecting on the experience of fighting with family, I wonder if the difficult conversations are worth it. Is it possible to build progressive change by working through our ideas together while we care for and support one another?

Alliance politics suggests that it is, that we can productively seek change through everyday interactions of care and support, rather than through politics of antagonism. In a speech titled “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Judith Butler considers street protest in relation to the everyday bodily dimensions of collective action. Referencing protests in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, she said:

“Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also quite clearly, a way to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy and precarity, overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space and time of the event with such tenacity to bring the regime down.”

Butler here urges us to do away with a distinction between public space of action and private space of bodily support in our analyses of political action, between spaces of production and spaces of reproduction. Political action must always be supported by everyday action, and indeed, it is the carrying out of the daily activities of support—eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, attending to medical needs—in public spaces, as much as the ‘political’ activities of chanting, building barriers, and opposing security forces that make street protests effective struggles for revolution.

Although Butler does not draw on care theory in her speech, her discussion of the support that undergirds political action reminded me of care theory and of Joan Tronto’s article “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments.” Where Butler examines the everyday work that supports public protest, Tronto considers the implication of making political judgments based on everyday care relations. Tronto defines care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (142). Care is ubiquitous, evident in the ways that we care about, take care of, and give and receive care in our daily interactions with people and places. Care theory sees individuals not as rational actors who make decisions based on self-interest but as people “constantly enmeshed in relationships of care” (142). Therefore, unlike political judgments based on abstract and universalized principles of fairness or ‘justice,’ political judgments based on care take account of the needs and capacities of those involved in the specific and concrete situation at hand.

Both Butler’s and Tronto’s arguments hinge on erasing the distinction between public and private, on recognizing the ubiquitous, everyday relationships of care and support that undergird any kind of public politics. All of us are entangled in various communities and institutions in which we enact relationships of care, including our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, faith communities, or schools. How might we therefore go about building alliances within the institutions and communities in which we find ourselves by paying greater attention to care and the work of mutual support in order to transform our communities and our worlds? Below are some ideas of places to start.

Productively critique the power structures operating within a given community and in the broader systems in which the community is situated.

Sometimes, we need to call one another out. Our communities reinforce privilege and disadvantage, they contain and produce hierarchies, and they silence dissent. It is important that we not ignore these dynamics within our communities but that we challenge them from within. This is not easy work, and it can easily be misinterpreted as an attack on the community. However, it is essential work to do. Tronto writes, “in a society that took care seriously, people would perceive greater and wider forms of care as within their self-interest” (146). One way in which we can seek to transform our communities is to help those we are in relationship with to affirm and practice such greater and wider forms of care.

Strengthen the voices of the marginalized within the community.

This involves a process of stepping up and stepping back as we recognize that different members of any community are of course differently situated. When we find ourselves in marginalized positions, we can speak back to those in positions of power and proclaim our equality. And, understanding that marginalization also produces great vulnerability, when we find ourselves in positions of privilege, we can push back against that privilege. In this effort, I have found these suggestions from Mia McKenzie (http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/02/4-ways-push-back-privilege/) to be wise and helpful.

Introduce new voices into the community.

A third way to seek transformation is to introduce new voices into the community. We can demand initiatives to increase enrollment of underrepresented minorities in our universities, and we can welcome marginalized neighbors as full members into our faith communities. We can build long-term partnerships across neighborhood groups to fight for policies that benefit all of our cities’ residents, and we can introduce our disparate family members, friends, and coworkers to one another, asking them to care for each other across lines of difference. At their worst, communities are sites of exclusion, but an alliance politics premised on care requires inclusive communities that are open to being transformed by new members.

These strategies are of course limited and insufficient, and it is vital to remember that we ourselves need to be transformed as well. As Tronto warns, we must not romanticize care. But in caring for others and in being cared for, we not only help sustain ourselves and our communities, but we also lay foundations for political change built through everyday alliances.

Radical Vulnerability: Towards Stronger Alliances

Elyse Gordon, University of Washington, Department of Geography

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. Brene Brown

Alliance work means building trust through radical vulnerability. It is compiling the fragments of our journeys. Paraphrased from Richa Nagar, Keynote Address at the 2014 Critical Geography Conference in Boulder, CO.

—

What does it mean to be in alliance?

A simple question, you might say. Alliances are partnerships, relationships between two or more parties that share a common goal. They work together to achieve that goal.

Let me paint a scene of one such possible alliance:

A local tenant’s union is organizing a campaign to raise awareness of the violence of gentrification. A university professor has worked on gentrification for 15 years, and is eager to ally with the union to provide resources. A local middle-income resident who has felt threatened by creeping rents finds out about the union and decides to start attending meetings and organizing efforts, but doesn’t join the union.

The university professor might think they have some expert knowledge to share on this issue, given that they have researched it and written extensively about gentrification for a third of their life. Yet, have they experienced the processual nature of these practices? The creeping in of bourgeois businesses? The escalating rents? The ubiquity of white folks where once there were few? Have they worried about their ability to pay rent as developers and landlords continue the pursuit of capital? Have they feared their 4-unit apartment building being torn down to make way for a new urbanist condo complex? Likely not. It is possible, but likely not.

The unaffiliated neighborhood resident is familiar with the processes listed above, but they have not felt compelled to join the union. Better to test the waters first before committing to a more radical organizing strategy. But, this resident has been sparking conversation with their neighbors and colleagues, bringing the topic of gentrification to audiences who might otherwise cast it as an inevitable process.

The union is wary of the professor, but eager to have access to the resources that come with a university affiliation. They have been leveraging a large organizing campaign, and being able to reach the university setting more directly is a huge asset. They value the copy-editing and organizational skills of the professor, but dislike the idea of being a staging ground for research. They have work to do on the ground, and are more interested in having local residents buy in and support the work. But, then again, more bodies in the room means more interest and traction around the gentrification concern. They’re not going to turn anyone away.

—

Alliances are fragile, in negotiation. They are not static relationships, but rather ones built on trust and circumstances. Rather than an alliance perhaps we can think of the process of developing and negotiating ally-ship. This suggests that the experiences of risk and the shared goals will inevitably shift over time.

Let’s revisit the example listed above.

Our middle-income neighborhood resident has been enthralled in the work, and eager to spend time organizing and contributing with the tenant’s union. They feel inspired, and they’ve been learning an enormous amount about community organizing principles, and about the lived experiences of gentrification.

But then, our resident recently got a hefty promotion at work. They now make enough money that the concern for paying rent is rendered minimal. And the new expectations at their office meant they had less time to commit to the gentrification awareness campaign.

This is an excellent example of the constant negotiation of ally-ship. The resident’s availability diminished, as did their incentive. Most importantly, so did their risk.

—

Ally-ship is built on the sharing of risk. This risk will always be uneven, because it reflects the same uneven power geometries in which we already exist. Tenants at high risk of losing their apartments due to gentrification have more at stake than a university professor who is intrigued by the organizing campaign. However, the professor is not free from risk. Their work might be devalued in the academy. Perhaps the politics of the organization make them question their own privileged position, thus opening them up to the risk of letting go of privilege. Maybe the time they commit to the organizing work means less time on teaching and administrative requirements, or perhaps less time with family. Either way, there is risk involved, even if it is not the same.

It is in the admittance of this risk that alliances build trust. It is in saying, “I have something to lose, but I choose to be here, anyway.” It is in saying, “I know you have something to lose, and I know my stakes aren’t the same, but I’m here with you.” It is in saying, “I have no idea how to do this work, and I am ok with failure. I am here to learn, not prescribe.” It is in saying, “I just made a mistake. I’m sorry. How can we move forward?” It is in saying, “I have doubts. Don’t you? Can we make that productive, rather than cynical?” It is in saying, “How is your family? Here is a story about mine.” It is in saying, “I recognize that my job makes me complicit with oppressive power relations. But I don’t want that to prevent me from also acting. Will you have me at the table to work alongside you in a common struggle to diminish those power relations as best we know how?” It is in saying, “I’m here. I’m showing up. I’m flawed, but I’m here.”

Richa Nagar, a feminist scholar at the University of Minnesota, calls this radical vulnerability. She argues that this is the only way to do the work of alliance politics. It is to reflect deeply on one’s own flaws and shortcomings, accept that these are part of what makes us human and whole, and then being able to articulate and share these.

Too often, those of us in positions of relative power, say, embedded in universities, might fear sharing our vulnerabilities because we know our stakes in the game, our risk, are often less than those with whom we seek ally-ship and how dare we try to compare our risk to that of a tenant facing possible eviction?

However, if we silence this awareness, we also diminish the potential to empathically connect with our allies. Nagar would urge us that regardless of the stakes, it is important to share the fragments of our own journeys that illustrate our humanity. The connection fueled by this shared humanity, the inherent messiness, is the basis for trust. It is the basis for alliance.

An ethic of care helps illustrate how to engage such a conversation. She recognizes that, “individuals act politically, then, not only on the basis of their self-interests, but as a result of the particular constellation of caring relationships and institutions in which they find themselves” (1995, 142). As a relatively privileged participant in the academy, how might I share my own stories of caring relationships as fragments of the journey that shaped my interest and commitment to my current alliances?

As Brene Brown, a social work scholar and unofficial life coach, has shared, it is in vulnerability that we allow for great creativity and change. If our ally-ships are inspired by visions for more just power relations, for less oppression, for a greater awareness of intersectional identities, for recognizing the ways poverty is produced and sustained, then we must embrace our own vulnerability, and practice the uncomfortable art of sharing that, to lay a strong foundation for trust, ally-ship, and change.

What is a “Sensible” Wage?

Ryne Moses Maloney-Risner – University of Washington 

Seattle has been receiving national attention for its progressive political culture since the election of socialist candidate Kshama Sawant to the city council in November. The defining issue of the Sawant campaign has been a push to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage for all of Seattle’s workers. While the $15 an hour wage has been endorsed by the mayor, it is still a hotly contested issue, with questions circulating about how to best implement it (if at all), whether there will be exceptions for certain businesses and organizations, and whether the overall impact will be positive for workers and businesses.

The debate around the minimum wage is timely and connected to conversations and tension surrounding growing inequality and gentrification in Seattle. In 2013 Seattle saw the highest rate of rent increases in the nation, and according to the Seattle Times, is second only to Boston for rates of city-wide gentrification. Concerns around highly paid tech industry employees displacing long-time Capitol Hill residents manifested in a demonstration in which protestors blocked the path of a privately operated Microsoft shuttle bus, in an action similar to those in San Francisco which have received national media attention. These debates echo broader discussions of inequality and minimum wage in the United States.

The community group 15 Now has been leading the movement to swiftly adopt a $15 minimum wage, without exceptions, limitations or delays, and has even begun to promote an initiative to bring to ballot in the case that the city council takes too long to produce a proposal. 15 Now is coalition of community activists, nonprofit and grassroots organizations and labor unions which has held rallies and marches that emphasize the relational aspects of unfair wages.

Opposition to the $15 minimum wage has come from business owners and associations whose concerns have been given a voice through many Seattle Times articles and editorials, and other media.

In one corner there is an alliance of community activists fighting to bring something new into being, and in the other business elites and the wealthy pushing back. In essence it is a fight over what is possible and what is deemed as sensible, and who makes that determination. In this way the minimum wage debate in Seattle demonstrates some of the political processes outlined by theorist Jacque Rancière in Ten Thesis on Politics.

The idea of politics as opposed to police is particularly relevant. According to Rancière, police attempts to enforce existing orders, attempts to annul any dissenting opinions, to force a consensus by silencing opposition and therefore “partitions” or defines what is sensible. Politics upset existing orders, creates dissensus, and demonstrates new possibilities beyond or opposed to what has been partitioned as sensible.

In the case of the minimum wage debate, activists proposing the increase are engaging in a politics that challenge long-standing notions of what constitutes a “sensible” wage. Currently that number is $7.25 an hour federally, and $9.32 in Seattle. Activists are claiming that $15 an hour is possible.

Reading through the pages of the Seattle Times articles such as:  A do-gooder tells why $15 wage is bad idea and Don’t use brute force to handle a Seattle minimum-wage increase and statements from organizations such as the Broadway Business Association, we see a recurring set of arguments made in opposition to wage increases that seem to flow from “common sense” assertions about the logic of business. Many of the claims repeatedly put forward by business owners seem to imply a sort of economics-based legitimacy, but do not stand up to empirics, or scrutiny:

“Wage increases will hurt small business and cause job loss”

A large body of empirical evidence based in academic and foundational studies suggest that raising minimum wage has little negative impact on businesses or jobs. Cities that have raised minimum wage such as San Francisco continue to experience a healthy if not booming restaurant and small business economy. The dire predictions of shuttered store fronts and unemployment put forward by business associations seem to be more of scare tactic than anything based in facts or deep analysis.

“Prices will go up”

Restaurant owner John Platt, the “do-gooder” described in the Seattle Times article, states that the proposal for $15 an hour is “outlandish” and a “radical step”. As evidence of this the article points out that according to Platt, in order for his restaurant to stay profitable he would have to raise prices by 25 to 30%. This would mean that the $32 pan roasted duck on the menu could end up costing over $40. However, it seems that these predictions of steep price increases related to increasing minimum wage are likely exaggerated, according University of California research. In fact this study concluded that a 33% increase in minimum wage over a three year period would cause a less-than 1% yearly increase in restaurant prices. It seems reasonable, far from outlandish, to assume that the clientele at Platt’s restaurant would be able to afford that cost-hike.

“Minimum wage jobs are entry level positions that should be low paying”

Karsten Betd, a Broadway business owner speaking to Capitol Hill Blog about his opposition to the wage increase states that instead of raising minimum wage “we should focus on better schools and colleges and better education, leading to a more qualified and higher paid workforce. And leave the entry level jobs with the min wage for young people, students, part timers etc.”  15 Now points out that three-quarters of minimum wage workers are older than 20, that 25% are parents, nearly two-thirds are women and that many are college educated. Betd’s statement draws from an unrealistic vision of equal economic opportunity which is deeply embedded in dominate discourses about American capitalism. The statement entirely ignores minimum wage demographics.

If the main points of contention articulated by those against raising the minimum wage are all resting on shaky assumptions and appeals to “common sense”, why is there such fierce debate? What is this fight really about?

In Rancièrian terms this “common sense” deployed again and again by business associations and elites is part of an attempt to build a consensus: one that enforces the idea that it is normal, and indeed beneficial, for workers to be exploited and that those who earn minimum wage “deserve” no more. This consensus privileges a businesses’ right to a profit ahead of the rights of workers to a life free from precarity and poverty. The consensus constructs a world where inequality is sensible.

The fierce campaign to delegitimize and silence claims that a higher minimum wage is possible is an attempt to stop politics. According to Rancière “politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.” Actions that bring workers into the street and gather them with allies make visible the daily struggles of the working poor, erodes the notion that everything is fine within the current order, and produces strong political speech that loudly proclaims dissensus. In other words, business elites are afraid of 15 Now. Afraid not because they cannot afford to pay a higher wage, but because the movement entirely disrupts the current order, one in which business owners are powerful and workers powerless. Where the needs of capital triumph over social welfare.

Realizing that wages are just one of many issues tied to inequality and uneven distributions of power emphasizes the importance of alliance building. 15 Now is part of growing coalition of organizations and activists that span and connect through a broad range of issues, and in some cases transcend class barriers. Labor unions have joined forces with immigrants’ rights organizations, university researchers have produced empirical reports and studies that add institutional power to striking minimum wage worker’s claims and demands. This type of powerful grassroots alliance continues to link issues of education, immigration, healthcare, housing and labor, all of which have become increasingly exclusive or precarious under the current order of sensibility. Business elites and opposition know these issues are connected, and if there is a victory for higher wages in Seattle, who knows what could come next?

Figments of the future: the irony of shelter and security on the Seattle streetscape

Nick Gottschall, University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies 

I

You can see the gentrification of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in the landscape of towering cranes. You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in half-demolished buildings, hastily-assembled chainlink fences, incessant drill rumblings, the endless immaculate conceptions of ostentatious plasticky condominiums.

You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the shuttering of your favorite coffee shop, record store, sports bar (they’ve relocated to Ballard for now, but don’t worry, the sign assures you, they’ll be back in 2016 to reclaim the shiny condo complex’s ground floor retail spaces).

You can see the gentrification of Capitol Hill in the convergence of homeless bodies on the sidewalks, under awnings, staked out in doorways. The proliferation of construction sites lures a segment of Seattle’s transient population. Graffiti, drugs, sleeping bags—all the trappings of the conspicuous poor have appeared in the nooks and crannies, those unearthed shady spaces of condos-in-the-making.

Question: where do the poor people come from? Were they here all along? Have they literally come out of the woodwork, in an exposure facilitated by the destruction and reassembling of urban space? What can explain this intra-urban migration?

This is the irony of shelter, unfolded across space and time: today’s drug addict shooting up in tomorrow’s yuppie apartment; today’s battered wife taking refuge in tomorrow’s hipster coffee joint.

This is the relationality of poverty and privilege, writ large on the streetscape.

II

To levy criticism against the academic study of poverty is not difficult. The image of elitist professors and graduate students discussing the plight of “the poor” from the privileged and comfortable positions of university classrooms and tenured salaries is readily available to the public imagination. (And if it isn’t, maybe it should be.

Criticism runs both ways, and we “enlightened” academics despair of the uncritical claims of the “ignorant”:

Why are people poor?
They’re lazy.
They choose to be that way.
They make bad lifestyle choices.  

The rage provoked by hearing such declarations rivals only the intensity of the academic’s desire to prove them wrong, to concoct a clever response, to convert the ignorant from their misguided beliefs. The pull of elitism is a powerful one, and graduate students face a daily struggle: how do we harness “critical thinking” without invoking bombastic proclamations of dominant, insidious world-systems?

Why are people poor?
Neoliberal market fundamentalism.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Institutionalized prison-industrial complexes.

Here we see a tension between “seeing too little” and “knowing too much.” The scholars writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham propose a tool to help bridge this gap: weak theory. Weak theory refuses to “know too much” about the world and guards against the burden of ceaselessly recalling conspiracy theory-esque dominant systems. My interpretation of weak theory entails a re-examination of the world around us by restoring the significance of our more “primitive senses” (of sight and sound, etc.) in place of the urge to plunge into grand theory and ambitious world-changing aspirations. In fact, according to Gibson-Graham, the humble acts of thought and speech enabled by weak theory resurrect a sort of hopefulness that can enact change in the world.

Importantly, weak theory can reveal the relationality of privilege and poverty—the idea that the former’s success produces and depends on the latter’s plight—in mundane urban life.

Below I sketch two thought exercises that demonstrate the application of weak theory to poverty and privilege in our daily lives.

III

In my last blog post I wrote about the University of Washington’s safety notification emails. Campus security sends these notifications to inform the university community of recent U-District criminal activity, most often muggings, petty theft and burglary. The regularity and predictability of these emails work to concretize boundaries between (insular) academics and the neighborhood’s (violent, conspicuous) poor. This is the routinization of threat.

The U-District is known for its population of innumerable homeless panhandlers, street youth, drug dealers and the like. Undeniably, many of these people own cell phones or have easy access to a computer and the internet. Without denigrating the abilities of campus security, it’s probably safe to say many crimes committed in the neighborhood go unreported—both to the police and to the campus community.

So what if we extend the safety notification apparatus to the neighborhood’s street community?

Imagine:

Sexual assault in a frat house? Homeless teens get a safety notification text. Drug deal in the dormitory? Panhandlers get an email. Rape? Rampant abuse of alcohol and Adderall? The list goes on.

You get the picture. The point of this exercise is merely to provoke a few questions. Whose safety matters? Whose interests are protected? Whose victimhood is validated?

This is the irony of security. The relationality of poverty and privilege is written into our laws, structured in our imaginations, and encountered in our everyday experience on the street and sidewalk.

Now to return to Capitol Hill. The transformation of the neighborhood by gentrification exposes—in a literal, visceral, visual sense—a segment of Seattle’s conspicuous, proximate poor. Surely the eight-story condominiums-in-the-making represent bastions of prosperity, emblems of the city’s resilience in the face of economic recession. Yet today, at this moment, these condos remain merely figments of the future. In their place—in the very same space—abide homeless bodies, poor bodies.

Weak theory demands that we see these juxtapositions. We need not invoke the refrains of uneven development, the criminalization of mental illness, the stigmatization of drug use or invalidation of non-normative family structures. (Although, in fact, we must absolutely keep talking about these.)

In these day-to-day experiences, weak theory asks only that we ascertain the ironies of shelter and security in our physical surroundings. Ascertain, that is, and keep asking questions.

IV

The ironies of urban living sketched here may arise from what Sheppard et al. characterize as the problems of mainstream global urbanism, or the notion that global development is on a trajectory toward city ideals of the advanced capitalist global North. The normative city dweller in mainstream global urbanism is the embodiment of the “personal responsibility” of welfare reform discourse. He (and he is emphatically a “he”) is the natural heir to the American protestant work ethic and “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” evangelism. The normative city dweller is an active participant in the market and seamlessly integrated in the financialized economy. He is above all a consumer.

Global mainstream urbanism epitomizes the ironies of shelter and security. According to Ananya Roy, the formalization of the housing market has meant that the “right to safe and sanitary shelter” enshrined in American citizenship actually prevents people from attaining any shelter at all. Laws intended to provide for the safety of homeless Americans actually work to displace them by criminalizing the informal occupation of space.

Here we return to “strong” theory: neoliberal market fundamentalism, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, hypocrisies of propertied citizenship in global mainstream urbanism. It is absolutely our duty to identify these forces, to name them, to call them out, to propose alternatives. But in so doing we should not underestimate our own primitive senses, our surroundings, our day-to-day confrontation with the relationality of poverty and privilege. Acknowledging irony, contradiction, juxtaposition—this is a key step toward accomplishing change.

The New One-Night House: Losing and Gaining Propertied Citizenship After the Foreclosure Crisis

Maggie Wilson, University of Washington, Department of Geography

“There is a belief around the world that if you can build a house between sunset and sunrise, then the owner of the land cannot expel you. There are many variations on this theme. The condition might be that the roof is in place, or that a pot is boiling on the fire, or that smoke can be seen emerging from the chimney. …The intriguingly widespread folklore of the one-night house seems to be an attempt to find a loophole in the stranglehold of land-ownership to create an opportunity to change a family’s destiny.”

–Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (2002)

There is something alluringly American about the idea of the one-night house that anarchist writer Colin Ward describes in his history of British traditions of squatting. What, after all, could be more American than quickly translating an industrious work ethic into a single-family home, and all the social and financial security that it represents? But acquiring property in this way is also deeply subversive, as it offers an alternative to the transactional relationships that are central to capitalist practices of property ownership. It is not a purchase but a taking, an invasion rather than a negotiation.

For decades, home ownership has been many American families’ primary store of wealth. A house, so the conventional wisdom went, was more than shelter, but an investment that would inevitably increase in value over time. In fact, the online mortgage calculator provided by Freddie Mac itself (himself?) would only accept positive values for home appreciation rates—it assumed that it was only possible for home prices to increase.  This was a tool designed to help potential homebuyers determine whether or not buying a home was a sound financial decision. The prevailing assumption about home prices in America was quite literally encoded into the logic of the institutions, both public and private, at the core of the home financing system and the lending practices that they promoted and enacted.

In retrospect, of course, this thinking was toxically misguided. The very same logic about the American housing market that encouraged individuals to buy rather than rent was a strong incentive to mortgage lenders as well. Since residential property was assumed to be such a fundamentally sound investment, even if a borrower defaulted on a mortgage, the lender could theoretically resell the house to recoup its losses. And so it went, until the system was pushed past its breaking point.

We are all by now familiar with the wide-ranging and destructive effects of the collapse of the American housing market and subsequent financial crisis it unleashed. The epidemic of foreclosures that was one of its most proximate effects has contributed enormously to the further entrenchment of poverty and inequality in the United States all on its own. One of the most disheartening trends that it has contributed to is the widening of the wealth gap in America, and particularly the wealth gap among races. While the difference in average income for different racial groups remained more or less constant throughout the recession, the difference in average family wealth increased dramatically as nonwhite families lost their primary financial assets—their homes—in disproportionate numbers. As of 2010, the average white family was about six times as wealthy as the average nonwhite family. Many anti-poverty initiatives, like campaigns to raise the minimum wage, focus primarily on income, but in some ways, the wealth gap has a greater influence on the perpetuation and reinforcement of inequality.

But most houses are also homes, and a foreclosure is more than a financial loss for most families. Foreclosure features prominently in the narrative of “middle-class slippage” that Elwood and Lawson (2013) argue was foregrounded in the reframing of poverty during the recession. This narrative casts former members of the middle class as the central victims of the recession, and links the emergence of this new category of the poor to suburban places, while the urban and rural poor are largely ignored. The multiple meanings attached to owning a house in the suburbs—as an emblem of prosperity, a signifier of membership in the middle class, and a source of financial stability—were disrupted during the foreclosure crisis, and the images of half-finished suburban construction projects and abandoned, overgrown McMansions suggested an implosion of a key part of the American middle class itself.

Losing a home, becoming propertyless, amounts to a form of social displacement, a revocation of citizenship within the paradigm that Roy (2003) lays out. The paradigm of propertied citizenship interprets the rights relationship between subject and sovereign through property ownership. This was, of course, literally the case during the first few decades of American history; voting rights were contingent upon property ownership, and so the propertyless were by definition disenfranchised. While voting rights laws have evolved considerably since then, propertylessness, within the paradigm of propertied citizenship, is a form of civic exclusion and deviance. Roy uses the urban American homeless as a paradigmatic example of a group that is excluded from the rights of the propertied citizen, but the suburban families who have been displaced from their homes via foreclosure are also non-citizens within this paradigm.

Roy offers an alternative to homelessness for the propertyless, however. If homelessness is the paradigmatic counterexample to propertied citizenship in the First World, she casts informal housing or squatting as its equivalent in the Third World. And she draws attention to the fact that squatting is not solely limited to the developing world by profiling an American anarchist group that practices squatting as a form of resistance to the paradigm of propertied citizenship. Homes Not Jails employs squatting as both a symbolic challenge to policies that persecute the homeless and as a tactic to take advantage of the doctrine of adverse possession, which represents a path to legal ownership through a form of “sweat equity,” a concept more familiar to the Third World than to the First. If an abandoned property is occupied, rehabilitated, and remade into a livable space, adverse possession provides a way for the rejuvenated property’s occupiers to acquire legal ownership. This type of squatting is a kind of reincarnation of the one-night house in a slightly different form and without the extreme temporal constraints, but still a path to property ownership directly through occupation and labor rather than through an exchange of money.

“Taking” houses in this way has seen a resurgence in some of the places that were most severely ravaged by the foreclosure crisis. While it need not take place under literal cover of darkness, it operates on the border between deviance and legitimacy, and opens up an alternative way of accessing the privileges that are tied up with property ownership. The rules that had governed entry and membership to the propertied middle-class for decades were upended in the foreclosure crisis. In its aftermath, these alternative methods of property acquisition seem particularly apt.

References:

Elwood S, Lawson V, 2013, “Whose crisis? Spatial imaginaries of class, poverty and vulnerability”Environment and Planning A 45(1), 103-108.

Roy A, 2003, “Paradigms of propertied citizenship: Transnational techniques of analysis” Urban Affairs Review 38(4), 273-89.

Ward C, 2002, Cotters and Squatter: Housing’s Hidden History. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publishing.