The Housing Monster

A house is more than four walls and a roof. From its design and production to the way it is sold, used, resold, and eventually demolished, it is crisscrossed by conflict.

The Housing Monster is a scathing illustrated essay that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing--a house--and looks at the social relations that surround it. Moving from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, it reads alternately like a worker's diary, a short story, a psychology of everyday life, a historical account, an introduction to Marxist critique of political economy, and an angry flyer someone would pass you on the street.

Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from individual belief, suffering, and resistance to structural division, necessity, and instability. What starts as a look at housing broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole. The text is accompanied by clean black-and-white illustrations that are mocking, beautiful, and bleak.

This new edition includes analysis situating and exploring the text's impact around the world by Lazo Ediciones in Argentina, Ben Kritikos in Scotland, and Sean KB in the US.