Community Versus Commodity: Tenants And The American City
by Stella M. Capek /
1992 / English / PDF
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This is a significant contribution to the literature of rental housing and of tenants as a social group. A major portion of the book is a comparison between Santa Monica where a 'rainbow coalition' of renters, seniors, environmentalists, and liberals put together an extraordinarily progressive government, and its free-enterprise antithesis, Houston. Santa Monica's success in coalition politics led to a strong rent control law, affordable housing, low density development, and homeless shelters. By contrast, America's least regulated city, Houston, suffers from deplorable low-income housing and a host of other unaddressed urban problems. The contrast is drawn in a riveting and absorbing piece of writing.
