For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010 by Edward Murphy (review)

In For A Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010, Edward Murphy blends anthropology and history to tell the story of generations of Chileans who have fought for the right to a home of their own. No other quest, he argues, has so absorbed Chile’s successive political regimes than making possible universal home ownership. Right wing governments believed that home ownership would turn urban rabble into obedient subjects. Christian Democrats believed that home ownership would weaken support for Marxist parties and turn the urban poor into moral and proper citizens. Even Chile’s Marxist parties prioritized home ownership, building thousands of single-family homes when they were in government and mobilizing illegal land occupations when they were outside.

Murphy begins his book by discussing a personal dilemma: how to best help a poor family deal with the immediate and dire circumstances they are confronting. Ironically, the family’s desperate situation coincides with the fulfillment of their dream of home ownership. They are one of an array of families whose lives Murphy follows over a period of decades. In the course of their valiant, almost futile, efforts to secure a home of their own, the families face illness, job loss, drug addiction, beatings, torture, arrests, and multiple indignities. By the end of the book, most of these families have attained a home of their own. Contrary to their expectations, however, their suffering is far from over. By insisting that home ownership is an essential and non-negotiable right of citizenship, Murphy argues, Chileans now find themselves “constrained by their achievement of home ownership and bounded notions of poverty reduction” (270).

Tracing the theoretical literature, Murphy ponders the paradox of Marxist parties promising private property in the form of family homes. In “Part One: Unsettled Foundations,” he takes us back to mid-19th century Santiago to explain exactly how that happened. In colonial Chile, poverty and homelessness went hand in hand. President Vicuña Mackenna (1831–1886) constructed a sanitary buffer to protect Santiago’s “elegant,” “civilized,” and “enlightened” center from the barbarian and diseased “African hordes” on its periphery (45). The barrier rived the city in two, a spatial layout that—despite the shift of the wealthy from the center of Santiago to the northwest suburbs—remains a defining feature to this day.¹ Although President Mackenna renovated some existing tenements and low quality housing stock, his effort only succeeded in driving up rents, leading to the mushrooming of makeshift shanties and the spread of disease.

Anarchist and Communist organizers in Santiago and Valparaiso responded to the homeless crisis by launching massive rent strikes in 1925. A representative of the Renters League, “the umbrella group that had spearheaded the protests,” made the following demand: “We want each worker or employee to have his own hygienic and comfortable home… That is patriotism” (54). Not only did the Left make home ownership a central feature of the society they proposed to build, they rhetorically mirrored the elite’s equation of home ownership with moral caliber, “personal discipline, and appropriate forms of behavior” (57). The homeless crisis grew more acute during the Great Depression. Migration from the countryside soared, continuing to climb even after the country recovered. Between 1940 and 1970, Santiago tripled in size. Migrants slept in temporary shanties, pubic parks, and under bridges. Their dire situation made housing a central issue for the left wing parties that constituted the Popular Front (1938–1942) as well as for the center left and center right governments that followed. Beginning in the late 1950s, Marxist parties embraced illegal land occupations as a principal tactic and form of class struggle.

In “Part Two: Insurgent Ownership,” Murphy focuses on the failures of both the Christian Democrats and the Marxists to resolve the crisis of homelessness. Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) declared a “revolution in liberty,” and promised to build...