ABSTRACT
Though they are often overlooked, struggles over housing have been at the center of many moments of social upheaval. For the people who experienced these events at the time, a lack of adequate housing was cited as the major cause of the Zoot Suit riots, the Watts riots, and the Detroit riots of 1967. Rent strikes were a tactic during the Great Depression, and protests of segregated housing were as integral to Civil Rights era strategies as the more famous protests of segregated buses and lunch counters. Frederich Engels wrote that “all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly” from lack of adequate housing (Engels, 1872). Whether it is a cause or an effect of inequality, housing is one of the many human necessities that is distributed unequally, and yet it is profoundly different from most other goods.
