by LUCI CAVALLERO AND VERÓNICA GAGO (translated by Liz Mason-Deese)
A reinvigorated battle over property is taking place in the midst of the pandemic. Without making hasty grandiose pronouncements about what comes next, we want to think about what is already happening, how the future is being manufactured. Our hypothesis is that feminism provides us with fundamental elements for intervening in the current debate about property, among which we propose three ideas. First, that we are witnessing a new intensification of property violence, precisely because property becomes visible as the border that each conflict must cross in the pandemic. Second, this debate is focused on the territories of social reproduction and over the command of future labour that household debt seeks to control. Third, that in this crisis the division between property owners and the property-less is widened through the logic of the family, which has been strongly challenged by the construction of feminist spatialities.
Property violence
In Argentina, there have been two recent important conflicts: on one hand, the approval of a rent control law and, on the other, the debate over the state’s expropriation of one of the country’s largest grain exporters.
The rent control law was approved in the midst of a parliamentary debate about whether or not this issue constituted part of the health emergency. The call to ‘Stay at Home’ demonstrated how the housing crisis overlaps with an increase in gender-based violence. In response, the Ni Una Menos collective, along with the tenants’ union Inquilinxs Agrupdxs, began organising around the slogan ‘the home is no place for sexist violence or real estate speculation’. The economic violence manifest in housing access and its close connection with gender-based violence has only accelerated with the pandemic, shining the spotlight on the domestic space understood as ‘the home’. This violence materialises in the abuse exercised by property owners and real estate agents who threaten and harass renters, don’t renew contracts, and directly evict people, despite a decree prohibiting evictions. The question that must be asked today is who are those owners of homes and hotels, those who are primarily evicting women, lesbians, travestis, and trans persons.[1]
In several places around the world, financial valorisation of housing moves to the rhythm of the voracity of investment funds that are taking advantage of the crisis to buy up houses. It is thanks to the work of the PAH (Plataforma de Afectadxs por la Hipoteca—Platform of People Affected by Mortgages) that we know how this functions in Spain. It is also being discussed by organisations that are seeking to prolong the eviction moratorium for a million households in New York, which mostly affects the Latinx and African American population, that same population that has fuelled the historic revolt currently taking place. In countries such as Argentina, it is the extraordinary agribusiness rent that ‘trickles down’, among other things, as a real estate bubble and construction boom in cities (with the consequent increase in housing rents), making apparent the intersecting geographies of real estate and extractivist dynamics (particularly agribusiness). The home, that supposed space of private refuge that feminist movements have denounced as the epicentre of violence, is the terminal for flows that are a central part of the global political and economic scene in the crisis.
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