ABSTRACT

As public housing across the U.S. has seen diminished investment, increased repair needs, and management dysfunction, public housing authorities have turned to programs such as the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program to provide critically necessary repairs and in search of future stability. Billed as a cost-neutral private-public partnership by its proponents, RAD and similar programs convert public housing to project-based Section 8, turning over management responsibilities and a property interest to private actors. This Article seeks to uncover the full costs of these programs using three currents of understanding neoliberalism: (1) neoliberalism as a class-based political project seeking to re-establish and expand capital accumulation; (2) neoliberalism as a rationality that infects all aspects of society, including the law; and (3) neoliberalism as a normative theory on the nature of freedom and democracy. Using these lenses, this Article contends that (1) RAD and a similar program, the Blueprint for Change, are forms of neoliberal privatization that ultimately serve to prioritize profits for the economic elite at the expense of tenants; (2) such prioritization is the necessary result of neoliberal logics that have overtaken all areas of life, including the juridical; and (3) these logics lead to the treatment of individuals as only economic actors, undermine wellbeing, and circumvent solidarity.

Specifically, this Article argues that RAD prioritizes profit over tenants because it is designed to facilitate capital accumulation for the economic elite by financializing a public good; using the apparatus of the government to facilitate privatization and uphold the interests of private capital; and redistributing wealth from the poorest (public housing tenants) to the wealthiest (real estate developers/landlords). To carry this out, this Article turns to the Law and Political Economy framework to show how RAD requires the judicial system to adopt neoliberal rationality by prioritizing efficiency for wealth accumulation over tenant power and neutrality over equality. RAD also needs the juridical to give preference for anti-politics over democracy through its interpretation of the RAD statute and contractual transactional documents, as well as by giving deference to administrative agencies9 judgments and decision-making. The legal systems adoption of this neoliberal rationality in evaluating public housing privatization schemes fundamentally undoes the boundary between public housing as a political space for contestation over shared goals and values and as an economic space to advance the goals of capitalism. This shift has resulted in the diminishment of public housing tenants political power and a remaking of democratic practices at public housing complexes, with vast implications for how the most marginalized American voices are heard or silenced. Building on my experiences representing tenants undergoing RAD conversions during my Skadden Fellowship, this Article also takes stock of the myriad effects of privatization of public housing on tenants themselves and on local (and arguably national) democracy, and suggests a path forward for both fixing the distressed state of public housing and re-imaging public housing as an engine of democracy