Architecture of AppropriationArchitecture of Appropriation

Enterprise Community Partners is a non-profit organisation that offers an interesting mix of experiential expertise and policy-oriented action. Enterprise Community works with local partners to promote initiatives that aim to improve the quality of life of Chicago residents who have a low income. This strategy embraces regional sustainability goals, equitable growth-oriented development (eTOD) and urban racial justice goals. Chandra Christmas Rouse is a programme officer at Enterprise Community Partners and a Rad Lab + Outside the Walls fellow at Three Walls.

"In Chicago, the fight for affordable housing is not new. However, comprehensive strategies around preserving the city's small, two-to-four-home buildings remain limited. Over a third of the city's working-class residents live in this housing typology and it has been a crucial source of affordable homes, especially those that include basement apartments that tend to be among the most affordable in the city. Covid-19 and subsequent government regulations endanger this housing stock by accelerating its loss. Chicago's vulnerable renters, low income and Black and Brown residents, could be impacted by massive displacement, leading to further widening of spatial inequities along racial and class lines.

From renters going on strike to activists calling for the state's rent control ban to be lifted, solidarity among residents has been growing to protect affordable homes like these.

These coordinated efforts aim to prevent the impending wave of evictions and foreclosures as well as the rapid flipping and deconversion of this housing stock into single family homes. Any solutions for affordable housing must address the diversity of Chicago's building types and housing models beyond the nuclear family model and place at the centre those who are most marginalised."

This conversation is part of a series of interviews and contributions on the concept of "domestic solidarity", or solidarity within alternative forms of housing and cohabitation. The other contributions were created in dialogue with representatives of Macao, Enterprise Community Partners Chicago, Pension Almonde and NieuwLand, among others.The series builds on the long-running Architecture of Appropriation project, which investigates, archives and represents the vulnerable, collective and often criminalised spatial practice of the squatters' movement.