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  • Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. by Amanda Huron
  • Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.
Amanda Huron
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019
207 pp., $100.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper); $23.75 (e-book)

Carving Out the Commons by Amanda Huron is an interdisciplinary monograph about the history of the cooperative housing movement and civic activism in Washington, DC, from the 1970s to the present. At the same time that she traces the origins of the cooperative housing movement in the nation's capital, she also theorizes about this process and offers lessons for contemporary cooperative movements in the eras of capitalism, globalization, and neoliberalism.

Throughout world history, a commons was a communal space, largely based in rural areas or small towns, where people shared resources, cultivated agriculture, or raised animals. The commons has long captured the imagination of scholars, but few have turned a critical eye toward urban commons. Here, Huron intervenes in the theoretical literature by adding an urban perspective, considering the philosophies of cooperative living communities.

Trained as a geographer, Huron's work is theoretically based. In Carving Out the Commons, she aims to unite two theoretical perspectives: the institutionalist school that is focused around case studies of common property and the alterglobalist approach that grapples with the commons as an aspiration and a solution to global poverty. She brings these two theoretical literatures into dialogue through her focus on urban commons. Importantly, Huron also brings a feminist critique of urban theory to her analysis because women's labor is often central to subsistence living and the maintenance of community and familial networks. Huron could have enriched this feminist perspective by engaging with the historiographical literature of the welfare rights movement, which was often animated by women's activism to secure decent housing for poor and working-class citizens.

Nonetheless, Huron accomplishes quite a feat in Carving out the Commons. Taking case studies of tenant organizing in diverse neighborhoods throughout Washington, Huron illuminates how, beginning in the early 1980s, hundreds of its residents of color formed limited-equity cooperatives (LECs) as a way to cope with crime, white gentrification, and an overall attitude of neglect. While there have been policy reports on this subject, Huron is one of the first scholars to offer an academic treatment of this activism in Washington, DC.

Despite a wave of recent scholarship, the city of Washington, DC, especially the city in the late twentieth century, remains understudied. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the nation's capital underwent important shifts, marked by the arrival of immigrants from Africa and Latin America, white gentrification, crime and drugs, and most notably, the era of Home Rule. In 1973, residents of Washington, DC, reclaimed the right of self-governance through a mayor, city council, and a congressional representative for this [End Page 134] majority-black city. Still, Washington had not, and still has not, achieved statehood. Voting for the first time since the 1860s, DC residents elected a city council that enacted democratic legislation, whether it was protecting tenants, stabilizing rents, or working to enable vulnerable citizens to stay in their homes. In 1973, citizens founded the citywide Housing Coalition to work for rent control, and four years later, the Rental Housing Act gave residents the ability to try to purchase their building if it was up for sale. Furthermore, the city provided financing to enable participation among low-income residents as long as the building cooperatives retained limited equity.

It was within this new political landscape that DC residents began to form tenant cooperatives. By the early 1980s, citizens formed dozens of LECs, and the six thousand units were spread across the city's four geographic quadrants. Mining rich material from interviews, Huron argues that cooperatives were a deeply significant part of citizenship and belonging for Washington's black residents. But while there were many benefits to cooperative housing, residents also faced financial struggles, barriers to participation, and the inevitable challenges of collective participation and labor. These difficulties have led to the decline of cooperative housing in the nation's capital to...

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