Affordable rent, let alone home ownership, has become a distant prospect for millions of Americans. A report from 2023 found that 44% of all single family home purchases were made by private equity firms. This, among other macroeconomic shifts, has undoubtedly led to the recently-reported 18% spike in homelessness between 2023 and 2024. Though housing costs in the US continue to skyrocket to ever-increasing heights, policy professionals, housing NGOs, and elected representatives offer few viable solutions. Fortunately, non-professionalized communities are nimbly responding to this consolidation of private property and subsequent lack of affordability in a variety of ways: among them are efforts at housing and land decommodification. This presentation will highlight some of these on-the-ground efforts and will devote particular attention to ways in which other interested communities might extrapolate them for their own locally-oriented purposes. I will summarize relevant economic data that has led to this housing-insecure historical conjuncture and present my findings as an activist-researcher devoted to communizing land and housing. Rather than merely providing practical economistic solutions, I will discuss the importance of intentional governance, the need to re-work interpersonal relations, and the essential transformation of subjectivity that these projects cultivate.
