Shared and Hidden Housing: The (Re)Commodification of 21st Century Boarding Houses in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Daniel Pasciuti, Georgia State University
Joy Dillard-Appel, Georgia State University

While processes of financialization and governance of urban spaces shift over time, the underlying contradiction between Capitalism and housing remains (Engels; 1935 [1872]). As such, housing is continuously reorganized utilizing newer technologies and mechanisms to obfuscate and proliferate commodified housing arrangements. In recent years, platform-based cohousing, such as Alcove, Padsplit, Zillow, HotPads, Ollie, Common, and others, have moved to develop mechanisms to connect tenants with owners from a variety of backgrounds and to offer alternative housing choices for a wide range of people in diverse geographies. These forms of hidden housing are often missing in existing discussions as they are often perceived as quasi-legal and lacking social legitimization. Thus, the ability to access data about and evaluate them remains elusive. In this paper, we describe the operation of one national platform-based co-housing mechanism in which service providers connect operators of mostly single-family rental homes with tenants via a membership-based software platform. Utilizing a comparative-historical framework, we situate the contemporary process, whereby new technology has created conditions for housing to be platformed and commodified, allowing the proliferation, obfuscation, and reformulation of alternative shared housing. We compare the development of this modern form of co-housing with traditional boarding houses and the historical changes in housing, to understand the reinvention(s) of hidden housing mechanisms. Differing from but also mirroring traditional boarding houses, these arrangements aspire to a standardized model for people seeking access to affordable rental housing, where all tenants engage equally in maintenance of the space, re-formalizing the model of shared housing that was mostly lost in twentieth century urban spaces in the United States.

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 Presented in Session 210. The Politics of the Built Environment