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Housing as we know it today is a highly contradictory space. It is a place of reproduction — in other words, a place where people relax, do housework, eat, sleep and spend their everyday lives — but it is also a commodity affected by economic cycles. It has a key function as an object of investment within the political economy and therefore within the reproduction of capitalism itself.
Sarah Klosterkamp is a research assistant at the Institute for Human Geography, Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.
Tabea Latocha is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Human Geography, Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.
We take these ideas about housing’s contradictory functions, and its role in reproducing social relations, as the point of departure for outlining approaches to a feminist housing policy.
When Housing Depends on the Size of Your Wallet
Housing conditions and access to housing currently depend significantly on income and wealth, which reproduces social and geographic inequalities. This can be explained by examining the control and regulation of how housing is created and managed: Housing is a commodity that is traded on local and international markets and categorized into segments — social housing, luxury housing, private flats, tenement blocks, care units, etc.
Access to housing is also organized on a market basis: the price depends both on the size and location of a flat and on investors’ future profit expectations. What does not play a role here are the needs and wishes of those who are looking for and/or need housing.
Over the past two years, we have observed issues of equitable access and distribution becoming significantly more important as a result of various crises. While food prices have jumped dramatically with inflation, rents also continue to increase. Higher energy prices have meant that many people are barely, or no longer, able to pay their utility bills. This was exacerbated by the housing shortage and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was particularly hard hitting for those who were only able to pay their rent late or at a reduced rate on account of their small pensions or loss of employment opportunities owing to the crisis. As a result, a significant number of people lost their homes — almost 30,000 in Germany were evicted at the height of the pandemic in 2020, which makes for 81 people per day, as documented by Die Linke MP Caren Lay.
We must also realize that people were and continue to be affected differently by these crises depending on their current and future positions in the housing sector. This is also true at the micro-level — in other words, within a house, housing unit, or neighbourhood. It is possible to recognize certain patterns pertaining to distribution and access opportunity, which in particular affect people presenting as female and migrants in the lower income bracket. These people are among the crises’ losers owing to various overlapping mechanisms of disadvantage. The (differing) access to housing is an expression of the (re-)production of privileges within intersectionally connected mechanisms of oppression and marginalization.
Housing is a crucial space that ensures the everyday reproduction of the population (and therefore workers), but it is not equally affordable for everyone and depends on where they are in their lives.
First coined by the American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term “intersectionality” describes the interaction of multiple oppressive mechanisms. She emphasizes that a person who is at the intersection of several types of exclusion (including categories such as age, gender, origin, or income) is likely to end up being affected by all of them at the same time (e.g. poor and old, etc.). This insight is now widely accepted.
Intersectionality is used as a term and analytical tool in academic research as well as in educational, educational policy and activist contexts. In the field of housing, several mechanisms of oppression and exclusion also usually work together, which in turn have different effects on different areas of life and across different phases of life — and which lead to exclusion.
We will now examine more closely these various exclusions in their respective historical, social, and political contexts. Based on this analysis, we will present concrete tools and ideas regarding how feminist housing policy can be taken from theory and transformed into a more inclusive practice of shaping urban space, and look at projects and activist associations that are already succeeding.
(Wage) Labour and Crisis
We would like to offer some theoretical context on feminist approaches to explain why they can contribute to solving the housing crisis and the problem of unequal access to housing. Materialist feminist theories — such as Social Reproduction Theory — combine a critique of patriarchal structures and gender relations with an analysis of the economic relations that they mediate and of the structural logic of capital. In doing so, they emphasize the central role of reproductive and care work for the functioning of capitalism — that is, the question of how and by whom the working class is (re)produced.
The functional separation of wage labour and reproduction in capitalism often makes domestic and care work invisible. In doing so, it reproduces gender inequalities: wage labour is seen as the only true form of productivity, by which every person is measured in terms of their contribution to society as reflected in their performance and therefore wages. Those who “only” work at home are unproductive and invisible. This male norm also characterizes housing policy and access to housing.
What does this look like specifically, and what does it mean for the women affected by these developments? Together with many representatives on the ground, as a part of the 2020 study entitled “Women, Working, Housing”, Gabu Heidl concluded that, in Austria, women’s lives included specific breaking points and new starts that frequently placed them in a precarious situation. The authors of the study call these “life transition points”. They demonstrate that these significant changes in residence and employment histories have a decisive influence on the housing situation and often lead to challenging situations. These include, for example, moving out of one’s parents’ home, deciding to have children, and leaving the place where they previously lived.
Statistically speaking, the home is also the most unsafe place for women who live in heterosexual couples, rather than on their own. Statistics on domestic violence reveal that this is the case in both Austria and Germany. The authors summarize: “While divorce is primarily a financial problem for men, it is often an existential problem for women in Austria.”
Housing as a social practice and the political control of housing provision are inextricably linked to capitalist socialization, as well as unequal power relations and intersectional discrimination.
Why is this the case? On average, women have lower incomes than men and also spend a higher proportion of their income on housing — a result of the gender pay gap, which is reflected in unequal pay, part-time employment, and the associated reduced pension entitlements. In Germany, 22 percent of women work in lower-paying jobs — frequently in the care sector, which is essential for society — and many of them are migrants. They earn less than two thirds of the median wage (9.24 euro per hour, pre-tax).
In addition to a lower income, women also have less access to education and social capital — both of which also play an important role in the search for affordable housing. As “housing poor”, they are particularly affected by high housing costs: Around 20 percent of single women surveyed in Vienna have already faced the risk of becoming homeless at some point. Almost 50 percent of single women with a reduced income stated that they were repeatedly confronted with the problem of barely being able to afford heating. Thus, poverty is feminine. This is a problem — even in Germany.
Housing is a crucial space that ensures the everyday reproduction of the population (and therefore workers), but it is not equally affordable for everyone and depends on where they are in their lives. The care work — mostly unpaid and emotionally demanding — necessary for daily survival is often performed by women. At the same time, women often perform less and lower-paid labour, which puts them at a structural disadvantage on the housing market. This means that housing and (wage) labour relations are directly related.
Patriarchy and Housing
The poor position of women on the housing market is also reflected in property and ownership relations. This was recently shown by the mortgage broker Interhype: out of 66,000 housing purchases that they financed, 70 percent were purchased by couples, 30 percent by individuals. Here, the gender difference is very pronounced: Two out of three of these individual owners are men.
A similar phenomenon has been observed for some time when it comes to inheritance: Women are also clearly underrepresented and statistically more likely to come away empty-handed — especially when it comes to property. In addition, we can observe that economic conditions provided by the government — such as subsidies for home ownership, building and tax — favour a conservative model of division of labour, such as a marriage where the woman is a housewife and the man the sole bread-winner.
As a result, housing — with respect to access, organization, and inheritance — plays a central role in maintaining patriarchal conditions. This has a long tradition: the roots of patriarchal–neoliberal housing policy lie in a historically heavily male-dominated sector. Housing policy during the so-called economic miracle in post-war Germany, led by conservative politicians Ludwig Erhard (German Economics Minister 1949–63) and Paul Lücke (German Federal Building Minister 1957–1965), laid the foundations for German “ordoliberalism” and tied it to a conservative Christian ideal of the nuclear family.
In the social market economy, social housing was not created as public housing stock with permanent occupancy. Instead, private and public property developers acted with the help of state subsidies, for which they only had to guarantee the state temporary social occupancy and fixed rents. This circuitous route of “interim social use” hence led to the formation of private (property) capital. At the same time, the dream of (suburban) home ownership promoted the importance of individual responsibility (the man of the family), in line with the conservative–corporatist welfare model. This institutionally reinforced the prevailing reproduction model and its unequal division of labour between the sexes.
We therefore see that housing as a social practice and the political control of housing provision are inextricably linked to capitalist socialization, as well as unequal power relations and intersectional discrimination.
The spatial structures of housing are also gendered and have a gendering effect: they produce normative gender roles and reproductive relations. In the floor plans of the urban housing estates and suburban detached houses of post-war modernism, the bourgeois ideal of the home as a place of privacy, a haven of security and a place of care — the social ideal of the heteronormative nuclear family — is literally cast in concrete. The floor plan of a post-war modernist housing estate shows how rooms are assigned fixed functions that define family relationships — two children and a (heteronormative) parent couple.
These days, the needs of a diversified, post-migrant society with diverse working, living, and caring models rub up against these rigid, segmented structures in many areas.
Can Feminism Make Our Cities More Equal?
What does a feminist counter-proposal look like for an emancipatory housing policy? First of all, a feminist housing policy is not a market policy, but a policy that shapes housing as such, focusing on its utility value, not its exchange value. A feminist housing policy must be a housing policy created by tenants for tenants, and democratically regulated. Tenants’ diverse needs and the processes of political negotiation and communication about these needs must take centre stage.
To enable this, a feminist housing policy must fundamentally change the way we deal with housing, basing it upon solidarity rather than economic relationships. The starting point of a feminist housing policy is hence the fight against displacement, the collective struggle for fair rents, and the defence of buildings and neighbourhoods against the profit interests of exploitative property owners.
A feminist housing policy must start with knocking on neighbours’ doors — with caring for and connecting with others in our neighbourhood, actively breaking up patterns of isolation. The utopian but concrete horizon of these struggles encompasses socialization as a new way of distributing urban and living space. If we manage to multiply and materialize caring ways of relating — conserving them as a legacy of past struggles — then we can imagine new forms of housing infrastructure. Housing could be transformed from the violent exclusion of others and the exploitation of the dispossessed into a collective process of appropriation and a social practice of possession.
To accomplish this goal, researchers must form new partnerships with activists, as well as those who work in housing and politics, writing alternatives to hegemonic narratives and making unfamiliar utopian ways of relating concrete.
The “Intersectional Townhouse” — designed and realized by the architecture firm Gabu Heindl in Austria (see illustration below) — shows what our vision could look like in practice. It is a three-storey building with a courtyard in Vienna that has been converted into a single-kitchen house. The project included people of different ages from six to 60, with varying gender identities and language skills, as well as different residence statuses.
With the help of translators, the participants were guided through joint workshops to plan and conceptualize the building. This not only involved translation, but also an understanding of living and residential concepts, which were repeatedly scrutinized: What do the different residents actually understand by their own living space? How big should it be? How big should the kitchen or communal areas be? The project is financially supported by an economy of solidarity in which privileges are redistributed. Although there is little money available, the association behind the project ensures that the building is accessible everywhere: all participants, including wheelchair users, and visitors should be able to access all areas of the townhouse without any difficulties.
Feminist counter-proposals are also on the rise in Germany, with the aim of transforming the way in which people lacking multiple forms of privilege live together. This can be accomplished through forms of alternative, institutionally supported housing models that absorb different, intertwined forms of disadvantage within a framework of solidarity and care communities — for instance, the Berolina housing co-operative in Berlin implemented by Lesben und Alter e.V., an association for lesbians and senior citizens.
At the same time, those involved in such projects emphasize the need for strategic alliances and compromises, as neither capital nor land is sufficiently available, resulting in many projects failing. It would hence take decisively anti-discriminatory housing policies and explicitly feminist planning practices to realize intersectional visions of a needs-oriented city or urban society.
Access to housing, and particular kinds of housing, must be decoupled from income and wealth if we are to solve the housing crisis. To this end, we propose four central approaches, visions and instruments:
- Inappropriate change of use and evictions for the sake of speculation must be combated in a targeted manner. This requires improving legal regulations.
- Housing must be effectively socialized. This will make it possible to free housing from the constraints of the market, to decouple rent from the production costs of the residential property and to regain democratic control over our cities.
- We must call for mandatory refurbishment, coupled with rent-neutral modernization — as, for instance, promoted by the “Social Heating Turnaround Now!” campaign. This would contribute to the future viability of our housing stock, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. It is the only way to prevent ecological and social goals from being played off against each other. For example, modernizing the energy sources of housing estates without appropriate regulations generally only leads to further rent increases, gentrification and displacement. This affect low-income households in particular.
- We should adopt a broader-reaching vision, going beyond housing and considering the city as a whole: the idea of the “caring city”, a concept that places care and the circular economy at its centre.
There are many other approaches we are unable to list here in full. However, we wish to stress that there is no uniform solution to the housing crisis. Rather, the decisive factor is the people who shape the future of our cities: Who is allowed to participate in planning and make decisions when it comes to specific conversions, refurbishments and new developments?
It is important to ensure that the needs and interests of all citizens are taken into account and that inclusive and socially equitable urban development is promoted. Feminist approaches offer a variety of tools that can help explore the potential, as well as the weaknesses, of a more inclusive housing policy from an intersectional perspective, and to develop broader visions for the future of housing on that basis.
Translated by Bradley Schmidt and Christopher Fenwick for Gegensatz Translation Collective.