Housing policy in Liberal Political Philosophy: A Commentary on Ronald Sundstrom’s Just Shelter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What constitutes just housing policy in a racially and class divided society?In ways that we seldom realize, housing policy shapes our day-to-day existence including where we live, where we work, how we get to work, to what schools we send our kids, etc. Unsurprisingly, it's a central issue during local elections.Housing raises ongoing concerns about racial division and disadvantage.And recently, it has become a recognized crisis due to the rise of urban encampments and the significant increase in people who live unhoused on the streets of even the smallest towns in North America.Just Shelter makes a significant contribution to understanding the complex normative issues at stake in housing policy by proposing a normative framework, which Sundstrom calls 'spatial justice', by which to analyze the complex challenges of housing policy in the United States today.The main concern of this book is that housing policies reflect and perpetuate racial disadvantage and yet political theories of justice have said little about the subject.The project constructs a theoretical approach, based on liberal egalitarian values, capable of addressing housing insecurity and its harms.One can't finish the book without being convinced of its main thesis and impressed by the complicated theoretical and empirical terrain on which housing policy and racial justice are together situated.However, here I want to suggest that the book gestures towards deeper and more radical solutions to the problem of racism and housing policy even though it is unwilling to embrace these solutions.Sundstrom adopts what I consider an overly tentative position about integration due to three features of his argument.First the argument is too attached to individual choice as an index of liberty.Second, it is committed to a liberal framework when many of its features are radical, not liberal.And third, the argument undervalues the dialogical heart of a normatively defensible version of racial integration.As Sundstrom shows, ill-conceived housing policies entrench racism by denying resources and stigmatizing those who live in marginalized places.Housing policy also sustains legacies of racial injustice by entrenching patterns of settlement originally imposed by segregationist governments but now sustained by voluntary choice.Using a wealth of empirical resources, Sundstrom traces the ways that unjust housing policy thwarts equitable community development, perpetuates the unfair distribution of resources, and allows people to hoard opportunities while others lack access to decent schools, jobs, public transit, parks, and social capital because of where they live.Housing reflects racism but it also makes racism.As Martin Luther King famously said, "Segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality."Sundstrom addresses the complexities of the housing problem using the resources of liberal theories of justice.He draws from the rich and growing body of political theory known as 'black radical liberalism'
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.048 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".