Feminist Urbanism and the Housing Crisis: A Q&A with Lo Sontag

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

How can we draw from feminist and urbanist principles to reimagine the housing crisis as an opportunity to build neighborhoods that work for everyone? Helen Bonnyman, a policy associate with the Future of Land and Housing program, tackled that question and others with feminist urban critic Lo Sontag. Sontag is director of the New Jersey Feminist Urbanism Environment Criticism Project, Sprawlism, and a 2025 Next City Vanguard Fellow; the Vanguard program’s conference this year focuses on eliminating poverty for more equitable cities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bonnyman: What is feminist urbanism? And what does our current housing crisis look like when it’s critiqued through that lens?

Sontag: I think this is something that a lot of people are kind of [curious about]. Feminist urbanism is a transformative lens that exposes exclusionary systems and reimagines the city for everyone. And this is a little bit different than just simply applying a women-centric lens onto urbanism—which can be helpful, it’s a good thing. But sometimes it can be a little surface[-level] and exclusionary. Granted, it’s materially impactful to have buses that are wrapped with women trailblazers, or for us to have pink-lighted bus stops. They’re doing that in Vienna. And I’m not mocking that. I do think those are important things.

But feminist urbanism goes beyond that. And I want to stress that this is not urbanism for women or even urbanism for caretakers, which many feminist practitioners discuss. Feminism and feminist urbanism are related but not the same. Feminist urbanism is urbanism for everyone: caretakers, disabled people, unpartnered [people], binary people, seniors, etc. Applying the lens of feminist urbanism to the U.S. housing crisis reveals how exclusionary systems are rooted in gendered economic hierarchies shaped by gender and race. [They] shaped housing equities in ways that harm historically excluded—and historically excluded means we have data—and marginalized groups—[for which] we have editorial proof—while privileging hegemony, dominant power structures. Feminist urbanism doesn’t just ask, do women have housing, but rather: Whose needs are centered in housing policy and design and development, and whose are systematically excluded?

And through this lens, this crisis isn’t just a shortage of units or rising costs. It’s a structural failure that perpetrates inequality by design. And I think that [shows], OK, this wasn’t on accident. Think about housing as an exclusionary system. It’s like we’re looking at policies and the markets and they’re built on these patriarchal, market-based assumptions. And they’re always [asking], who deserves to have housing? What should a home be? We have these nuclear family biases because of zoning laws, which assume there’s going to be a traditionally economically stable household. It looks like it’s going be male [heads of household], ignoring unpartnered parents, multigenerational families.

And then there’s also this gender-neutral affordability metric that we have [baked into income-based rental policies]. But it’s not really gender-neutral. Because they’re assuming it’s the male—they look at the male wage and they go, OK, how much do men make? And on average, women make 82 cents what men make. But here’s the thing, depending on where you are on the social hierarchy, you can make less than that. Then there’s the careworkers’ burden and all of these kinds of things that we aren’t really looking at [when assessing a home’s “affordability”].

So this problem isn’t just high rents or NIMBYism, it’s that housing itself is built on exclusion, is built on power. And also, too, we want to look at things even beyond care.

Bonnyman: Thank you. Yeah, that was a really great articulation of what feminist urbanism is. And one example that’s coming to mind that just really speaks to the way that our current housing system is failing a lot of different people, particularly women and caregivers, is that research from Eviction Lab and their partners shows that women and especially children under the age of five are at highest risk of eviction across the country.

And now I’d love for us to talk a little bit about, getting a little more positive, thinking about some solutions. What does a feminist housing policy look like? And what are some tools that could help make housing more affordable and plentiful that align with this framework?

“Public-private partnerships are great if they’re working, but they’re not working.”

Sontag: There are so many, but I think about social housing expansion via public land banking. Right now we do a lot of private-public partnership where municipalities lease public land to private developers for mixed-use projects requiring 10 to 20 percent affordable units and often 80 percent AMI, which is the [area median] income. I’ll tell you something, for a very long time, even though I had several degrees, I never made 80 percent. I couldn’t even [afford] to live in affordable housing. Public-private partnerships are great if they’re working, but they’re not working.

So then we have community land trusts [CLTs], which steward equity—that’s something that we could do. Then we have progressive land value taxes, another thing that we could be doing. Currently, we have property tax caps, TIFs, or tax increment financing, which are not exactly my favorite thing. They cap property taxes to protect landlords and speculators, and use TIF districts to subsidize corporate development. With a progressive land value capture, we could take the value that we as a community put into land in regards to our work, in regards to our taxes, and we could capture that and create more affordable housing. We could create non-speculative public development banks. And then another thing we can have: universal rent control. We don’t really have these kinds of things [yet]. Currently we have private markets encouraging [high returns for real estate investors].

We have so many tools. But there’s so much that can be used, [like] anti-speculation, anti-racist climate policy. Currently, the investment is flowing to the wealthy areas while frontline communities are facing displacement. We can do reparative zoning [and] redirect capital to Black, indigenous, and migrant communities for community controlled retrofits.

Because the thing is that this is not just about care, even though that’s important. It’s also about the fact that we have a system based in a political economy. And feminist urbanism is looking at the design of this system, not simply: Well, how can we get this person to work? It’s: How can we make this system work for everyone?

I can name more [tools]: participatory zoning, community benefit agreements. And we’re not really doing that. We’re kind of doing developer-driven zone waivers, but not asking, what does the community want? We can have participatory zoning and we have housing cooperatives with solidarity financing, social housing expansion via public banking. So I mean, we have so much.

A lot of times I feel like this is a paucity of imagination. It’s not like, oh, we can’t do this because we don’t know what to do, or, you know, the market will take care of us. It would be wonderful if the market did take care of us, but currently that’s not working. And you can’t keep doing something that’s not working. I think feminist urbanism is such a great framework to make it so that we’re essentially helping anybody who is not super rich, anybody who has to work for a living, so that’s everyone who’s [reading this article] today.

Bonnyman: Absolutely. We really do have so many tools, and it’s nice to enjoy the excitement of that. There is so much suffering and scarcity out there. But I think focusing on the imagination is really powerful. A saying I hear a lot is that “a better world is possible.” And I think that it took me a while to realize what that means is actually imagining, getting creative. I think a lot of the really harmful policies of the past that are not in place today in the form that they used to be in, I’m sure that people at the time found it impossible to imagine a world without those. And so that’s kind of what we need to do today, is imagine a world without the housing crisis.

And so I wanted to follow up on all of those wonderful examples you mentioned. But I was wondering if there were any specific examples, any cities or communities, that you want to shout out that you’re seeing adopt some of these feminist housing policies.

Sontag: Yes, I would like to shout out BuildUp in Portland, Oregon. They have this wonderful program with a universal preschool and affordable housing linked together. And it’s kind of like on-site preschools, on-site childcare at this housing that reduces the “double shift” that so many women and so many primary caregivers have to endure. I think about Barcelona, Spain. Recently, they did their first feminist housing cooperative in Catalonia, in the Nou Barris district. And it has shared kitchens, it’s kind of the dream of [Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel] Herland. I think that those are some really great examples.

But also I want to talk a little about Vienna. Elle Hunt, she wrote this great article in The Guardian that talked about streets [named for] Hannah Arendt, Janis Joplin. That’s why I said I’m not mocking [Vienna]—because sometimes in order for you to do the big things, you have to do those little things first. And the housing design, it’s subsidized, it’s mixed income. I like that. It’s participatory design. And there’s a reason why [urbanists] keep saying Vienna—it’s because they do such a great job.

Beyond that, think about Berlin, Germany. They seized 240,000 apartments from corporate landlords to turn into public housing. That is also feminist urbanism. And people were like, oh, you can’t do that. That seems impossible. Yeah, you can—they did it in Berlin: a rent cap to prevent gendered poverty.

And then we have Oakland, California. All of those [prior examples] are other countries. But we got Oregon and we have Oakland, their community land trust. I know everybody knows about those, but they’re also for climate justice. [CLTs] in Black and Latinx indigenous communities prevent displacement from climate gentrification for working-class people [of all races and ethnicities]—including working-class white people in Oakland, in Los Angeles, and all over.

And then another place is Seoul, South Korea. They have public housing with urban farms, and they have the senior residents helping to farm. I thought that was really cool because I think a lot of times we think about, you know, we think about primary caregivers and we think about children, but we don’t think about seniors. I would love for Manhattan to have a senior village. Can you imagine the East Village? We’d have [a community of] 80-year-old artists and writers, teaching people. Why every time when people get older they have to move far away and we don’t get to learn from them?

And also, I want to shout out New Jersey. We haven’t quite gotten to the feminist urbanist [forefront] in regards to housing, but we do our microforests. And I do think climate mitigation and adaptation is part of feminist urbanism. Rachel Carson and her book, Silent Spring, have really influenced my work, even though I’m an urban critic, but the environment is part of that. Anti-sprawl—all these things are going to help everyone and help the climate.

Bonnyman: Absolutely, thank you. I love how expansive this lens is. In housing policy conversations, it’s so easy for stuff to get siloed, but it really is all connected.

All right, so just to round out our conversation: any call to action? What can policymakers, local leaders, and just regular people—what can all of us do to bring our communities closer to the ideals of feminist urbanism as we confront the housing crisis?

Sontag: Well, there is so much to do. We need policymakers to fund social housing, pass tenant protections, tax land hoarding, [like when landowners] just hold a parking lot—you should be taxed for that. For activists, join a community land trust or a tenant union. Oakland[’s CLT] shows grassroots power works.

“Housing is a commons, not a commodity.”

And for everyone: Go to zoning meetings, demand universal design and climate justice. All these measures are all connected. The key is really rejecting the myth that the market will save us. Housing is a commons, not a commodity. And we have examples all over the world that show all different kinds. It can look all different types of ways and it doesn’t exclude anyone. It benefits everyone. It benefits transgender people, men, seniors, little kids, migrants, working-class people. And I even have rural solutions, [though] we’re talking about urbanism right now. We can’t be in silos. And I think that we need to be radically integrationist, you know, view our whole planet as part of a community. We’re a community, that’s all I would say.

Thank you so much, Helen, for this [conversation]. Before we go, can I give a little bit of a thanks to certain people?

Bonnyman: Absolutely.

Sontag: I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of greats like [Leslie] Kern, [Nourhan] Bassam, Jennifer Deal, Jane Jacobs, James Howard Kunstler, Sam Hall Kaplan, even Dorothy Parker. Urban critics and urbanists and environmentalists, they’ve inspired me, because feminist urbanism really demands that one’s income should not dictate where one lives and one’s gender should not dictate one’s income. It’s all about cooperation and the collective. Thank you, Helen, for this forum.

Bonnyman: Thanks so much, Lo. It was really great to have you here, and I’m excited to continue exploring these ideas.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.