"We Wanted to Talk Plumbing": Organizing and Mutual Aid in Baltimore's High-Rise Public Housing

Abstract:Federal and local campaigns to reform "distressed" high-rise public housing in the late twentieth century resulted in the elimination of thousands of public housing units from cities like Baltimore. Those reform campaigns often defined "distress" in cultural terms, imagining Black women residents as imperiled actors, public housing as an impediment to building normative family life, and housing demolition and privatization as a necessary and normalizing corrective. Oral histories with residents living in these disinvested spaces offer counternarratives and demonstrate how Black women residents theorized their own conditions, fashioned material political demands independent of policy makers and housing reformers, and worked to put these demands into practice. This piece reflects on the mutual aid organizing of two former residents of Baltimore's George B. Murphy Homes. Specifically, it analyzes the practical work they did to address the conditions that disinvestment produced, and the intellectual work they did to fashion a materialist vision for housing reform that pushed back against the drive toward demolition and privatization.