The US Housing Crisis

This book aims to draw careful distinctions between the various forms of housing insecurity and personal circumstances research participants experience. While the urgency of the housing crisis in the US has produced a lot of scholarly work on housing, it often fails to recount the real life struggles that the housing crisis is causing. This is where the book provides a distinct contribution to housing studies and urban geography. The author use of trust as an analytical lens, her qualitative approach, and her work with people on the ground aim to move away from a quantitative understanding of the crisis by giving it a human face. The author seeks to bring to light the human costs of the destruction of home as well as the political reactions and day-to-day strategies that residents apply to make ends meet in times of the US housing crisis.

Judith Keller is a postdoctoral researcher in the Geographies of North America working group and at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. As an urbanist, she applies a socio- and cultural-geographic perspective to urban space, focusing on questions of social justice such as access to housing, education, health services, and urban infrastructures. She is most interested in right to the city and housing rights movements and their effect on urban politics. Further, Judith enjoys thinking about the representation of (urban) space in literature and film and about how to integrate creative writing into her scholarly work. In 2021/22, Judith was a visiting research scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in 2022, she joined the editorial collective of the Radical Housing Journal.