Resources: Publication: A Crisis of Displaceability: Vacancy, Eviction, and the Uneven Geographies of Housing ()

Abstract

How housing crises are narrated shapes whose precarity becomes visible and what responses are rendered possible. This paper interrogates how crisis is made legible, is circulated, and contested through the case of Zurich, a city conventionally seen as secure for capital and tenants. Drawing on interviews with private sector actors, media discourse, and engagement with housing movements, we show how Zurich's housing crisis is framed through narratives of low vacancy and evictions. These crises are co-constitutive, with responses to one intensifying the other, and their negotiation exposes crisis as a discursive practice that not only describes but organizes material conditions of financialized housing. The paper contributes to efforts to theorize crisis as a multi-scalar and performative process. Drawing on the concept of displaceability, we show how crisis framings mobilize logics of deservingness to determine whose displacement is naturalized and whose residential security is worth preserving.