Beyond Ownership: Land, Housing, and the Fight for Equity

From skyrocketing rents, to restoring environments & retreating from neighborhoods threatened by climate change, questions of landownership lie at the heart of society’s most pressing issues. Typically grouped together with buildings as real estate, land is rarely discussed in our political discourse. Yet as the writer Audrea Lim describes in FREE THE LAND: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos, America’s treatment of it as property and a commodity for profit has not only precipitated racial injustice and environmental destruction, but continues to fuel inequality and the housing & climate crises today.

In this conversation, Lim and the artist Amy Ching-Yan Lam discuss how real estate ownership is woven into our cities, societies, relationships and psyches. “It’s fucked up that my parents worked their whole lives (sometimes two jobs) and still can’t afford to buy their own house,” muses Lam in PROPERTY JOURNAL, a record she kept of every conversation concerning real estate, property or housing in 2022. “Not that everyone needs to own a house, but in the absence of other forms of security, what else is there?”

Childhood friends from the suburban oil city of Calgary, Canada, Lim and Lam reflect on the false promises of the American (and Canadian) Dream, and how the system of real estate ownership profoundly shapes our personal and collective futures.