Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 1
·
May 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
5
American Dream — buying your own home — introducing a disconnection between the ideal
value of property and the reality of what it is worth. LECs, however, represent alternative value
conceptions through the stability of price and a different form of sociality, community and
equality.
Furthermore, in a recent article on property and persons under neoliberalism, Hirsch claims
that ‘contests about new and old property forms are simultaneously generative of new forms of
persons…whose outlook and conduct potentially undermine the conventional property claims’
(2010:347). Building upon his model, I explore whether LECs can offer a challenge to the
normative capitalist private ownership regime, while simultaneously (and somewhat ironically)
preserving the hegemony of homeownership. While LEC residents are homeowners, they are
subject to restrictions free-market owners are not, such as limits on resale value. Does this lead to
self-perceptions beyond the renter/owner opposition, a third or hybrid category?
To clarify, I am discussing two domains of identity: the renter/owner/LEC owner and
race/ethnicity/class/gender. In this short paper, I focus primarily on the first definition. My
question is whether, as collective owners who must work together to make a building successful,
LEC residents offer an alternative conception of ownership? In other words, can LECs as a
property form generate Hirsch’s ‘new forms of persons’?
‘We went through hell but now we are in heaven and we ain’t leaving from heaven’
Miss Ruby, a former Black Panther who as a teenager was a bodyguard for Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Jr., describes her experience as the driving force behind the formation of an
affordable housing cooperative. She has lived in the building for thirteen years, making her a
relative newcomer, since some residents have lived in the building for as long as sixty years. She
asked me to refer to her as either Ruby or ‘Mom’. Several residents buy her mother’s day
presents. Whenever I left their building or after a late meeting that we attended together, she
insisted I call her when I got home to let her know I had returned safely.
In order to begin to provide answers to the questions about the process of learning to be a
homeowner, I turn to my two years of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily through a detailed
analysis of a co-op I refer to as ‘Home Together’ in the Harlem/Washington Heights area. This is
a historically African-American neighbourhood that is experiencing gentrification as well as an
influx of Latino immigrants (Jackson 2005; Lao-Mantes and Dávila 2001; Taylor 2002). Home
Together’s residents are almost entirely Black — African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and
Africans. There are only two Asian households, one Latina resident and one white resident.
Ethnic and racial tensions exist among all groups. The neighbourhood’s population, however, is
mostly Latino, the majority of whom are Dominican. Lyrics of the music emanating from nearby
stores, as well as the language on shop signs are primarily in Spanish.
When residents got notice in 2002 that their building was to be sold to a private landlord,
Miss Ruby began to research how it could become a co-op. She consulted with a neighbourhood
housing organization and organized tenants to begin the long process of conversion; some
