Homelessness Activism – Contesting Private Property from Below

The cross-university working group ‘Urban Conflicts and Property’, funded by the College’s PostdocLab Programme, analyses the contestations of property in urban space. The team consisting of Philipp Kadelke, Nina Schuster (both TU Dortmund University) and Jenny Künkel (University of Duisburg-Essen) explores topics beyond the trodden pathways of real estate financialisation, rent protests and gentrification research. Under a common conflict-theoretical framework, the research group studies the practices and political opinions of private small-scale landlords (Kadelke), conflicts surrounding allotments (Schuster), and how social work organisations assume or assist the role of property owners who rent and manage apartments to homeless people in “housing first” programmes (Künkel). In doing so, the researchers also take the perspective of the affected people into account – i.e., renters, gardeners and, not least, the arguably most precarious group, the homeless.

As one of the first empirical components of the project, the group conducted a workshop with 15 homelessness activists in Berlin in December 2024 – among the participants were two co-organisers from Wohnungslosenstiftung Berlin and 13 activists from different German cities who had been homeless in the past or who are currently living on the street or in shelters. The objective of the workshop was to investigate homeless people’s needs, so it focussed in three steps on 1) main problems for people without housing, 2) potential solutions and 3) concrete strategies to get there. At the same time, this approach allowed for examining the participants’ problem framings, theoretically drawing on the insights of discursive policy analysis that focusses on the ways in which aspects of life become a public problem or not (e.g., Bacchi 2019).

The workshop was facilitated by a very engaged group of discussants. The activists were happy to use the event for their nationwide networking and, more generally, considered it to be a booster to their activism. Homelessness activism had already been on the rise before the workshop, since homelessness became more visible and urgent in the context of multiple crises (e.g., the Covid pandemic, shifting migration patterns, and an accelerated housing crisis in times of inflation and rising energy prices). The numerous unmet demands in the social system that currently contribute to exclusions of migrants and mentally ill people and promote a deprofessionalisation of social work are unlikely to disappear in the near future (Sowa et al. 2024). Yet, due to an EU initiative, and considering the rising numbers of people without housing in Germany, the government at the time acknowledged homelessness in the 2021 coalition contract, proclaiming to end it by 2030, and lanced a (contested) project of counting homeless people in 2022 (Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales 2022).

Activists Criticise Capitalist Logic in Housing Market

Against this background, it is less surprising that activists were not only strongly empowered (“infecting” the PostdocLab researchers with their high spirits) but also proved to be highly informed about housing policy: For example, they questioned property vacancies fostered by tax law, the alleviation of lawsuits for personal use, and forced evictions, especially from buildings in public property (on further demands of the homeless see: Künkel 2025). The specific political background also partially explains why the activists consistently framed homelessness as a structural (environmental justice) problem that can only be resolved by the provision of housing and requires the questioning of private property.

Unlike other highly marginalised and criminalised groups, such as sex workers or drug consumers, whose protests have often invoked liberal anti-discrimination, self-determination or ideal-victim frameworks (e.g., Künkel 2021), the homelessness activist discourse repeatedly pointed to an underlying capitalist market logic. While this meant casting aside some of the more immediate problems such as a lack of security on the streets (where, in the activists’ views, people should not be forced to live in the first place) or possible needs for psychological care, it set a non-individualistic focus on other issues. Both the frequent interpersonal conflicts in homeless’ lives (e.g., with shelter staff or other homeless in crowded shelters or the streets) as well as the degrading conditions in public shelters (e.g., severe lack of hygiene, crowded bunk-bed accommodation and stressed-out staff) were explained by the competitive logics of capitalism. Especially mass shelters for temporary accommodation were seen to be a business model in the housing market which yields high profits. Similar criticism was raised regarding some of the projects operating under the unprotected label “housing first” (which, in its ideal conception, provides long-term individual housing unconditionally rather than placing homeless people in different forms of shared accommodation first to assess their housing competences and treat addictions or mental problems; cf. Güntner/Harner 2021).