The US Housing Crisis Home and Trust in the Real Estate Economy

This book aims to draw careful distinctions between the various forms of housing insecurity and personal circumstances research participants experience. While the urgency of the housing crisis in the US has produced a lot of scholarly work on housing, it often fails to recount the real life struggles that the housing crisis is causing. This is where the book provides a distinct contribution to housing studies and urban geography. The author use of trust as an analytical lens, her qualitative approach, and her work with people on the ground aim to move away from a quantitative understanding of the crisis by giving it a human face. The author seeks to bring to light the human costs of the destruction of home as well as the political reactions and day-to-day strategies that residents apply to make ends meet in times of the US housing crisis.

Introduction.- Trust as a spatial concept for urban studies.- Home and housing as spatialized trust.- Researching home and trust relations – Methodological suggestions and practical implications.- A brief history of housing in The USA.- The disruption of trust and trust Networks: Tracing residents’ struggles on the housing markets in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Washington, DC.- The pervasiveness of distrust on the housing market: Analyzing interactions between residents and housing institutions.- People power, tenant power! – Rebuilding trust through right to housing movements and activism.- Home, trust, and the right to the city – Concluding remarks.

Judith Keller is a postdoctoral researcher in the Geographies of North America working group and at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. As an urbanist, she applies a socio- and cultural-geographic perspective to urban space, focusing on questions of social justice such as access to housing, education, health services, and urban infrastructures. She is most interested in right to the city and housing rights movements and their effect on urban politics. Further, Judith enjoys thinking about the representation of (urban) space in literature and film and about how to integrate creative writing into her scholarly work. In 2021/22, Judith was a visiting research scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in 2022, she joined the editorial collective of the Radical Housing Journal.