Abstract

This chapter looks at the varied and precise causes, mechanisms and effects that can be attributed to social housing’s gentrification in diverse global landscapes. In many parts of the world, the privatization, demolition, reduction, replacement or transformation of social housing has become inseparable from processes of urban renewal and regeneration which enact the displacement or removal of lower-income groups from revalued city land in order to reach their goals of ‘middle-classification’. Mixed income policies have often been behind such programmes. Social housing is also of course, more than an instrument of policy. At its core, it is a lived experience of home and community. Its gentrification must therefore also be understood through the eyes of residents resisting these moves and proposing alternative logics of urban (and suburban, rural or peripheral) life. The chapter also looks at political resistance to the gentrification of public housing.