Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850

Conclusion: The Housing Question

Elizabeth Blackmar

[Excerpt from the book published in 1991]


By 1850, New York City's capitalist housing market had transformed the spatial organization of everyday life and with it the social relations of real property. Landownership had lost its association with the conditions of independent proprietorship, and houses no longer sheltered and integrated trade and domestic labor. Though the proprietary house and shop persisted as a residual form, particularly in family-operated taverns, groceries, and handicraft shops, the vast majority of New York households had moved onto the cash nexus of wages and rent. The social distribution of shelter like that of any other commodity produced for profit, measured economic power; and in the years 1785 to 1850, New York City's working people had lost power, their collective claims on the city's resources, including the value that they created as workers and as tenants. No matter how many individual families might move up and down the economic ladder, the housing market organized class divisions as permanent features of the city's social landscape.

In a culture that vigorously denied fundamental class antagonisms and celebrated "society's" progress, the construction and preservation of social distance through distinct residential neighborhoods had become a key strategy for ordering city land use into profitable investment. The displacement of older institutions of proprietary independence was only one part of a larger process that did yield the progress of an increasing social capacity to produce new material wealth. Where for centuries control of land and housing had represented the primary means of controlling labor, the organization of property relations as market relations that measured value through exchange dissolved traditional structures of social hierarchy, monopoly, and appropriation. But in New York City, control over land and housing had assumed new social meanings and represented a new kind of social power.

By the mid-nineteenth century, landed property relations in New York City had changed in part through a change in the social composition and goals of landowners. New investors, particularly speculators and developers who bought up large tracts for construction at the city's periphery, joined and gradually replaced an older generation of merchant rentier families. These real estate entrepreneurs did not expect to attach their names to the landscape, to pass on the stored wealth of prestigious country estates to sons or daughters, or to claim political privileges. Rather they looked to sell or to develop land in a favorable market and quickly reinvest the returns. And when they asserted political power it was through the influence of their money and strategic coalitions rather than through propertied status.[1]

Manhattan real estate continued to be distributed through a tiered system of long-term ground leases, building leases, and subleases. If exposes of Trinity Church's slum housing in the 1840s and i850s and again in the 1870s prompted that venerable institution to divest portions of its eighteenth-century land grants, other rentier families and new entrepreneurs retained and distributed large tracts through ground leases.[2]Still, property taxes and assessments for streets and utilities made the holding of Manhattan land a luxury that could be afforded -- even when the land was inherited -- only through close calculation of opportunity costs: interest and taxes set against rent revenues or alternative investment outlets. Political economic theory reconceptualized "ground rent" itself to analyze not only revenues collected from tenants but even land's "cost" to an owner-occupier who might pursue alternative investments. Whereas historically land investments had been central to the formation of the city's bourgeoisie, by 1860 real estate represented one choice -- and not necessarily the most lucrative -- among many outlets for accumulated capital or savings, including finance, industry, transportation, and western lands.

Even as social calculations of land's value changed, fluctuations in the real estate market continued to register the health of the city's larger economy. Thus the experience of 1837 was replayed in 1857 and again in the mid-i870s. Though real estate remained a relatively open sector and continued to absorb the petty capital of small entrepreneurs, each depression reinforced the trend toward institutional consolidation. By the 1870s, real estate brokerage and Manhattan management firms, incorporated building companies, financial institutions and neighborhood real estate associations sought to coordinate competition and further landed interests in particular locales, and trade journals imparted strategic wisdom alongside recent market information.[3]

Some elements of that wisdom had emerged from the trials and errors of the first half of the century. As in the 1820s and 1830s, new residential construction was liveliest at the edge of the built town. For this very reason, by the 1870s Manhattan real estate investments were closely linked to transportation systems, first to the horse-drawn railways and later to the elevated railroads and subways. Having learned the benefit of public open ground in establishing residential districts, in the 1850s uptown landowners and developers embraced the creation of Central Park, more than 8oo acres of landscaped beauty guaranteed to increase the value of lots and buildings in its vicinity. But the rapid growth of Brooklyn and New Jersey towns also expanded the field of real estate competition.[4]

Then, too, after decades of debate over the problematic respectability of multifamily dwellings, by the late 1870s Manhattan developers were shifting from single- and two-family row houses to apartments. In doing so they followed the same logic of absorbing land costs through intensified occupancy which had prompted the production of "tenements." To overcome middle-class New Yorkers' suspicions of a housing form historically associated with poverty, builders added amenities lacking in tenements -- new utilities and ornamentation -- and promoted the value of prestigious addresses and the "convenience" of yet a new style of "modern housekeeping." No less than the single-family dwelling, the emergence of middle-class apartments restructured domestic labor relations by reducing the need for live-in servants to guarantee the home's smooth operation and respectability. And as with the management of tenant houses, the introduction of new tiers of agents and managers whose work it was to collect middle-class rents added another layer of housing cost, even as it created another sector of managerial employment.[5]

Still, despite these industry-wide strategies, specific conditions of landownership, prior land use, commercial competition, neighborhood succession, and the uncertain rhythm of building cycles continued to shape the history of particular Manhattan blocks. Not until the twentieth century did government support of the residential real estate market discover in zoning a new means of regulating land use to stabilize neighborhoods and enforce spatial and social uniformity as a primary public goal. And hot until the emergence of Harlem in the early decades of the twentieth century did the Manhattan real estate market take race -- as distinguished from poverty -- as a primary category of spatial organization.[6]

Even as new uptown housing absorbed the revenues of the city's middling and elite families in the years 1850 to 1880, the city's laboring people remained concentrated in territories first claimed by the families of artisans and journeymen, especially on the Lower East Side. As each depression ripened downtown lots on the old Rutgers, De Lancey, and Stuyvesant lands by reducing acquisition costs, builders replaced earlier generations of subdivided tenant houses with tenements and launched a new cycle of filtering from within. Some of the city's older artisan neighborhoods gave way to commercial redevelopment -- particularly the West Side Fifth and Eighth wards, which became the warehouse district now known as SoHo, with expanded sweatshops above the stores in cast-iron buildings. In the 1850s, as metal shops, gas-houses, and factories located along Manhattan's shores, new Irish and German working-class neighborhoods extended north into Hell's Kitchen on the West Side and Yorktown on the East Side.[7]

At the heart of the housing market remained the essential strategy of securing demand by restricting supply. The permanent housing crisis moved in waves, exacerbated by swells of immigration following each depression. Doubtless for thousands who settled in the city, as for the Irish in the 1840s and 1850s, tenements, however crowded, represented an improvement over the living conditions they left behind. Each generation of new arrivals adapted their housekeeping to the exigencies of crowding and mobility. And working-class families developed cooperative strategies to maintain their standard of living against repeated encroachments from landlords and employers alike -- from low wages and rent hikes that in reducing housing space intensified the requirements and reduced the value of domestic labor. However frequent their change in domestic quarters, wage-earning New Yorkers created neighborhood institutions -- informal credit networks, saloons, ward clubhouses, benevolent societies, unions, and church congregations -- which transformed the territories of hardship into the staging grounds of ongoing social contest.[8]

If investment maps and the logic of the bifurcated housing market systematically created class territories, New Yorkers drew their own boundaries through the daily patterns of social traffic and interaction. By the 1850s, a new literature of "guides" that "uncovered" and "exposed" the city to its middle-class residents testified to the irrelevance of spatial proximity to social knowledge.[9] But the practical necessities of sharing the city landscape also exposed social and spatial contradictions that could not be ignored. The questions that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century remain with us today: What were the social limits of private property rights? Who bore the social costs of unlimited rights of appropriation? How within a shared environment could any individual justly claim an exclusive interest in and control of resources necessary to all? These questions arose not from the most oppressed but from middle-class New Yorkers who saw in the city's mid-nineteenth century housing conditions a danger to their own health, safety, and domestic tranquility, and a threat to the social equilibrium of a free-market society. Their answers to these questions were constrained by the contradictions of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal republican response to the transformation of property relations into market relations. Regarding private property in land (as well as in labor) as the means to independent living, reformers who took up the housing question had limited ways of addressing the consequences of the circulation of land, housing, and labor as commodities.


The Politics of Property

Challenges to the Anglo-American tradition of landed property rights first emerged not in the United States but in Europe, where the privileges of crown, church, and aristocracy came under assault, and in the West Indies, where Haiti's successful slave revolution broke asunder the landed basis of racial domination. Such New Yorkers as Chancellor James Kent warned of the "Jacobin" threat to republican institutions, but it was not just radicals who had begun to question the historical foundations and justice of exclusive rights in land or enslaved labor. Steeped in a faith in natural rights and natural laws of economic behavior, liberal political thinkers could find no principle that overrode every man's right to the property of his own labor; and they had begun to question the legitimacy of a landed elite's monopoly of the wealth of nations.[10]

American political leaders had built and compromised their nation on contradictory principles of protecting the institution of slavery while at the same time affirming private property rights that found their justification in a person's ownership of self. The compromise collapsed, but only at that moment when the principle of labor's alienability, the free labor market, had transformed the meaning of property in labor. Labor power, not persons, not the self, could be bought and sold like any other commodity. And where, as in the South, emancipated labor had no access to the means of subsistence, landowners reasserted their control over labor through their control of land.[11]

Having embraced the principle of free labor half a century earlier, northern republican leaders sought to secure the benefits of proprietary independence by abolishing the vestigial property relations of a "feudal order." In New York, farmers drew on the language of the Revolution for seventy-five years to attack the state's "landed aristocracy." In the 1840s and 1850, New Yorkers struck new compromises on the meaning and extent of real property rights through constitutional and legal reforms, and the last preemptive powers of a landed social order gave way to the imperatives of the market. The political debates of the mid-nineteenth century framed the possibilities for state intervention in the housing market.

The 1846 movement to write a new constitution in New York drew strength from overlapping political developments. Popular attacks on the powers of corporations chartered by special legislation, anxieties over rising taxes that bailed out state-sponsored canals, and the pressures of creditor-debtor relations following the panic of 1837 laid the ground for a bipartisan coalition that saw in a revised state constitution a new democratic charter. Although motivated by different concerns, anti-canal Bamburners, Anti-Rent farmers, and reform-minded lawyers joined in dismantling an older commonwealth tradition of direct legislative involvement in the economy. Attacking state debts (which taxed individual initiative), special charters, and feudal tenures, constitutional reformers denounced "monopolies" that ran against the democratic republican grain. They simultaneously called for a reduction of government's powers and an increase in electoral participation. Thus the 1846 constitution sharply restricted the Legislature's power to incur debts for internal improvements, endorsed general incorporation laws, and abolished state inspection of commodities. New provisions for biennial Senate elections, single-member Assembly districts, the election of judges, voter referenda on state debts, and the abolition of property requirements for office holding aimed at bringing government action more closely under citizens' control.[12]

Constitutional and legal reforms of the 1840s and 1850s endorsed a laissez-faire economy and purported to shift government's role from that of an active agent in economic development to that of the grounds-keeper of the neutral playing field of contractual private property relations. But while democratic utilitarian thought embraced competition as the greatest public good, laying the legal and constitutional foundations of a free-market economy required the setting of limits on preemptive property rights. Antebellum judges had themselves initiated the process of weighing absolute private rights against public policy by modifying common law doctrines that inhibited new industrial land uses. The tensions of redefining property rights and adapting them to new market conditions without infringing on the principle of the state's responsibility to protect private property was evident in the treatment of tenure relations in the 1846 constitution.[13]

Advocates of the 1846 constitution saw its reforms as fulfilling the "policy of our government which was to favor free alienation of property, and to discourage the accumulation and perpetuation of large estates in particular families." Thus the constitution abolished feudal tenures, as had the Legislature by statute repeatedly since 1779. Furthermore, in an effort to end "feudal" conditions in leases for life or in fee, the constitution voided "all fines, quarter sales or other like restraints upon alienation reserved in any grant of land." Finally, the constitution incorporated the statutory rule against parole (oral) leases of more than a year's duration, By making written leases a matter of fundamental law, the state presumably encouraged tenants to reject unreasonable covenants and thereby protect themselves against feudal customs and even the common law.[14]

But delegates representing the cities expressed concern that these reforms on behalf of rural leaseholders would interfere with the rights and interests of urban landowners. Landlords in the "vicinity of cities" often leased their extensive speculative holdings "for agricultural purposes for long term, and in view of their being wanted hereafter for city purposes, explained one delegate, who was himself a member of a prominent Manhattan merchant landowning family. Restrictions upon the length of leases, the delegate complained, would render such lands utterly "unproductive" until such time as they might be developed for city use. Furthermore, delegates warned that proposals to restrict covenants against tenant alienation of leases "would admit of a more general construction allowing tenants to sub-rent without consent." If extended to cities, such a provision threatened the interests of landlords "who took care to know who were to be their tenants when they made leases and [who] should not be deprived of the right to do so."[15]

City landowners saw to it that reforms that established the principle of land's free alienability did not also discourage strategies that made real estate investments competitive with other sectors of capital. The 1846 constitution placed an "agricultural" qualifier on its prohibition of leases for terms of longer than twelve years, allowing city rentiers to continue speculative trading in ground leases of twenty-one years and longer. The restriction on covenants against tenant alienation of leases remained, however, and was largely ignored by city rentiers, who continued to covenant against subletting without permission.[16]

A similar ambiguity in extending private property rights by limiting traditional prerogatives of landholding emerged with the passage of New York's first married women's property act in 1848. Despite the aggressive campaign of such of feminists as Ernestine Rose and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, most lawmakers who supported the reform saw it less as an attack on the economic foundations of patriarchy than as a measure that extended men's powers to protect dependent women. New York's wealthiest families had long used trusts to create separate estates that sheltered wives' property from husbands' obligations for debts. But reform lawyers who viewed equity jurisdiction as cumbersome and restricted in its benefits joined debtors in the campaign to place all wives' property beyond the reach of creditors. Like the mid-century general incorporation laws that replaced special legislative charters, married women's property acts can be read as part of the larger trend to promote commercial ventures by creating a personal safety net. Married women's property rights abolished the patriarchal structure of landed property and labor relations in a commercial economy that no longer questioned the rights of appropriation that those relations embodied.[17]

Alongside the 1846 constitution and 1848 Married Women's Property Act, the mid-nineteenth century land reform movement broadened popular discussion of the republican conception of private property rights and indeed to many people represented a means of resolving the tensions between the sanctity of those rights and the problematic social powers of monopoly. The intellectual seeds of land reform were laid in England and Ireland, where Chartists, militant tenants, and liberal political economists all attacked the political and economic position of an elite landed class. David Ricardo and, a generation later John Stuart Mill questioned the economic utility and social justice of land monopolies; class monopolies of the limited supply of natural resources, they argued, arose not from individual initiative but from inherited rank. If labor produced all value, what right did landowners have to collect in rising rents the "unearned" value that resulted from the labors of society as a whole?[18]

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Americans gave the principles of land reform a distinctive twist. As in Europe, radical and liberal strains of land reform found different followers. New York mechanics who embraced Owenist (and later Fourierist) associationist ideas envisioned utopian communities that, replacing competition with cooperation, would share the resource of land as common property. Although Jacksonian workingmen remained skeptical that freely distributed land could resolve the conflicts they had only begun to articulate as divided interests of capital and labor; they placed land reform on their political agenda alongside free education, lien legislation, and the abolition of banking monopolies. But when in the late 1820s such radicals as Thomas Skidmore carried Owenist principles to their logical conclusion and called for the abolition of private property, trade unionists hastened to reassure the public that they "only want to be secure in our labor and have no more intention of taking what does not belong to us than we have of taking arsenic."[19]

The stronger strain of American land reform drew on the agrarian republican tradition, which viewed individual proprietorship as the foundation of personal and civic virtue. Unlike Europe, the United States enjoyed an abundance of vacant land. When the frontier was opened to settlers, the nation would tap its natural resources without challenging the principle of private property rights in land (or, indeed, in labor). In the 1840s and 1850s, this faith mobilized popular support for the conquest of western territories and triggered lively debate over policies to distribute public lands to homesteaders. By the late 1850s, the antislavery movement had linked free soil and free labor, and the new Republican party endorsed liberal homesteading policies that reinforced the antislavery alliance of northern farmers, small producers, western merchants, railroads, and land speculators.[20]

Antebellum land reform addressed the question of the exclusive appropriative powers of landownership by promising those rights to increasing numbers of people. Attaching the republican goal of proprietary independence to migration, land reformers implicitly conceded that that goal could not be realized in eastern cities. But as taken up by the labor movement, land reform also represented a strategy to improve the conditions of working people within the free labor market: if workers' families could migrate to affordable homesteads, those who remained behind might stand in a better bargaining position. In New York City, workingmen further called on the city to distribute corporation common lands for the construction of workers' housing. At the very moment when the city took more than 8oo acres of uptown land out of the market to create Central Park, unemployed demonstrators sought to apply the principles of land reform to the city's housing crisis. But with immigration accelerating, neither western migration nor cheap city lands could alleviate the condition of workers caught between employers' and landlords' drive for profit.[21]

Liberal land reformers, like the advocates of the constitutional and legal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, saw in the distribution and unconstrained circulation of abundant land a solution to the threat that concentrated wealth posed to a democratic social order. Once positive state policy guaranteed the conditions of distribution, government could step back from the market and give private property rights free reign. But if the distribution of land embodied the goal of independent proprietorship, laissez-faire principles extended to all forms of property. Even as an older order of landed property relations finally gave way to the ideology of a free market that preserved the principle of access to proprietorship, a new system of property relations had begun to emerge. In a development prefigured by the absentee ownership of land, corporations organized individual property rights as claims not on the direct use of land, labor, or other resources but as rights to revenues, benefits severed from use. And even as new corporate institutions and powers of absentee ownership emerged, liberal New Yorkers began to formulate a new defense of state regulation of individual private property rights in the use of city land and housing.


Housing Reform

New York City's first housing reform movement, responding to conditions twenty years in the making, took another twenty years to achieve its legislative goals. By the 1850s, the housing crisis had received a decade of publicity from city officials faced with the task of explaining and controlling the rising mortality rate, from newspaper editors who called upon capitalists to undertake philanthropic building ventures, and from private charity leaders who found their agenda for moral reform overwhelmed by housing conditions that contradicted the very definition of morality attached to respectable home life. Whereas reformers of the 1820s and 1830s had focused on the contamination of particular neighborhoods tenanted by "vagrants," by the 1840s respectable New Yorkers were beginning to view housing conditions throughout the city as cause and symptom of new and dangerous social divisions. Indeed, housing conditions became a primary field of social interpretation and debate which incorporated a range of mid-century intellectual and political currents.

Discussions of agrarian land reform spilled over into the Whig Courier's attack on the "practical Fourierism" of working-class neighborhoods and Horace Greeley's Tribune editorials advocating western migration. Irish and English immigrants applied their own radical brands of land reform in attacks on parasitic city landlords. Physicians, drawing on English investigations, added a scientific gloss to moral reform efforts, stressing the impact of the social environment on individual character and the value of professional medical expertise in investigations of the problem. Utilitarian merchants who defined the public interest as an ever-expanding economy warned that poor housing conditions and the social disorders they bred would scare away investors, customers, and new city residents. Manufacturers saw in high rents the fuel of worker militancy and in tenement life the corruption of disciplined work habits. Nativists and Whig politicians warned that unscrupulous Tammany politicians would exploit ethnic neighborhoods to their own advantage by trading drinks for votes.[22]

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The principle gained in the first housing reform legislation was an important one: the state could set limits on strategies of profitmaking -- sanctioned by private property rights. The old common law principle that restrained a landowner from usingproperty in such a way as to injure the interests of a neighbor had been effectively recast: the city as a whole constituted the neighborhood. And in separating housing from other forms of private property, reformers sought to consider its distinctive spatial and social attributes and the consequences of inadequate shelter within a shared landscape. Yet this very separation also exposes the limits of housing reform as a solution to the social costs of capitalist property relations. The appropriative powers buried in the historical construction of "individual" property rights in land and housing, a householder's right to dependents' labor, had become class rights to the value of society's labor.

Those limits could be seen more clearly in one of the nineteenth century's most radical social movements -- Henry George's campaign for a single tax on land. In his 1879 Progress and Poverty, George drew on antebellum land reformers' critique of the social monopoly of natural resources to argue that "the great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land." The solution therefore was to eliminate the benefits of landownership when it was severed from land use, to tax away landowners' "unearned increment," the ground rent they collected from appreciating land values. The community created that value through its labors, and no individual could claim exclusive rights in the common property of natural resources. With a single tax on land, George argued, "no one could afford to hold land that he was not using, and consequently, land not in use would be thrown open to those who would use it."[35]

It was a remarkable critique and program in a nation that had enshrined private property rights in land as its unique heritage and the foundation of republican government. George rejected the call of antebellum land reformers for the distribution of public lands through homesteading policies. Having spent time in San Francisco, he had observed at firsthand the monopolization of western lands by railroads, speculators, and mining companies. Any measures which merely permit or facilitate the greater subdivision of land," he insisted, could not offset the "tendency to concentration." Instead, George called for a single tax that would inhibit speculation and landlordism and restore land to the people who occupied and used it; such a measure would not infringe on property rights in improvements that contributed to material progress.[36]

The abolition of rentiers' right to expropriate social wealth in ground rent, George argued, would free capitalists and workers to cooperate in the shared project of increasing that wealth. Thus, though he abandoned earlier agrarian land reformers' faith in homesteading, he shared their producerist assumptions and analysis of land's benefit to industrial workers. If the alternative of independent proprietorship was restored, "competition would no longer be one-sided. Instead of laborers competing against each other for employment and in their competition cutting down wages to the point of bare subsistence, employers would everywhere be competing for laborers, and wages would rise to the fair earnings of labor.'' Furthermore, employers would bid ''against the ability of laborers to become their own employers upon the natural opportunities freely opened to them by the tax which prevented monopolization."[37]

George brought his program to New York City, and in 1886 he formed an alliance between the city's trade union movement and middle-class reformers and ran for mayor as the United labor Party candidate. Few labor leaders shared his optimism that the single tax represented a permanent solution to poverty or that the elimination of land monopoly would reconcile the interests of capital and labor. Yet in the 1850s the cooperative labor movement itself, and particularly the Knights of labor, had moved far beyond shop-floor relations to experiment with multi-issue community organizing.[38]

George's mayoral campaign found its institutional base in the independent political culture that had sprung up in the city's ethnic neighborhoods. As the historian David Scobey has shown, the George campaign organized "pledge drives, neighborhood meetings, and street-corner rallies . . . supported by informal social networks within the working-class community and by the rhetorical traditions of organized labor." Unlike efforts at housing reform twenty years earlier, the George campaign mobilized wage-earning families who saw improved housing conditions as only one of the benefits of abolishing land monopolies. And though the insurgent party was defeated, the threat of working-class militancy prompted propertied New Yorkers to renew discussion of housing reform as a solution to class conflict.[39]

Yet George's ideas were symptomatic of the larger problem of limiting a critique of private property to only one of its forms. By the late nineteenth century, rentiers who collected an unearned increment were not simply landowners, for land no longer stood at the heart of the American economy, and its unequal distribution was not the only source of social inequality. A program that captured the landed wealth of an Astor or a Vanderbilt left untouched the even greater wealth -- and appropriative powers -- of a Morgan, Rockefeller; or Carnegie. Nor would the abolition of property in land affect the power of the stock-and bondholders who "owned" the means of industrial production. Property relations had moved beyond the family and market relations that determined labor's access to land and housing as resources for independent subsistence. Corporate absentee ownership had "socialized" the ownership of capital -- and claims on the value of labor -- without risking the principle of exclusive appropriation. Capitalists in effect paid landowners the private tax of ground rent in exchange for the historical legacy and legitimacy of private property rights. If George, no less than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, declared that property in land was theft, socialists took the argument the next step and called for the abolition of all private property.[40]

The first half of the nineteenth century yielded contradictory concepts of private property rights within the liberal tradition. On one level, the triumph of laissez-faire claims to absolute property rights reinforced the concept that the state exists only to protect those rights. On another, nineteenth-century housing reformers formulated the concept of an overriding public interest that justified the expansion of the state's police power to restrain the exercise of property rights that infringed on the "domestic tranquility" of the community as a whole. The two conceptions opened the way to the weighing of private interests and public consequences so characteristic of land-use regulation today. And in a sense George's single-tax campaign recovered a third tradition of property rights -- that of common rights in natural resources. New theories of social limits on private property rights have emerged when the social costs of exclusive appropriation have been felt to be too great. These debates continue as New York City once again faces a housing crisis.[41] In order to address the contemporary housing question it is necessary, as it was in the past, to look at how the larger structures of property and labor relations have emerged and worked together to determine people's access to shelter. To view these relations as having a history is also to see the possibility of their future transformation.

[see original source for all footnotes]