Country Without a Roof. Cities, Stories, and Struggles Over Housing

The housing crisis exists and we can no longer ignore it. Our cities are becoming increasingly uninhabitable: more expensive, more distant, more precarious, and with fewer services. Thousands of people are concerned about their inability to acquire a home, whether owned or even rented. However, this problem continues to be perceived as an individualized concern rather than the structural problem it truly is.

Based on interviews, research, and court cases, Carla Escoffié – an expert in the right to housing and the right to non-discrimination – maps a route through five cities: Mérida, San Francisco de Campeche, Mexico City, San Luis Potosí, and Monterrey, to understand what it means today to talk about the right to housing, and some of the facets of violations of that right in Mexico. In this journey, she outlines problems such as speculation, forced evictions, real estate bubbles, mega-projects, discrimination in access to housing, lack of tenant rights, precarious settlements, and territorial struggles, and helps us understand the actors and dynamics surrounding them.

País sin techo ("Homeless Country") confronts a basic idea in both ethics and political theory: cities are meant to be inhabited. Housing is territory and, as such, can be dispossessed and accumulated. But, the author tells us, it can also be defended, shared, and reclaimed.