2025 CDS Annual Conference

Description: This paper illuminates lived experiences of housing informality in an unincorporated North Texas subdivision. Theoretical literature describes housing informality as transgression against, or lack of protection from, regulations; thus, housing informality is a product of the relationship between state and society (Harris, 2018). Housing informality occurs in one of five regulatory regimes: property rights, property transfer, land use and zoning, subdivision regulations, and building codes (Durst & Wegmann, 2017). Drawing on three years of participatory action research–observational methods, household surveys, oral histories, and photovoice–we reveal real-world examples of the relationship between state and society through different regulatory regimes. 
Conference Theme: This paper illuminates how an informal subdivision in North Texas moved from latent informality to straddling between diffuse and embedded informality over multiple decades (Harris, 2018). I also highlight how residents’ lived experiences of regulatory regimes result in housing informality and precarity in the subdivision. In this sense, we connect directly to the conference by describing the outcomes of changing regional economic and social dynamics. Likewise, we highlight how residents enact housing informality as an innovative—though often precarious—response to regional lack of affordable housing and speculative land markets. This relates directly to the theme of people-driven solutions. The paper, like past research (Bayat, 2000; Harris, 2018), shows that housing informality is not always an act of conflict with the state, but rather acts of non-compliance emerge from resident desires for affordable home ownership, ignorance of confusing and complicated regulations, and efforts to navigate poverty and government restrictions. This research pushes the field of U.S. housing informality to root theory in the lived experiences of residents. This again focuses on the conference theme of people-driven solutions by empowering diverse voices in description of problems and solutions. Likewise, we recommend that U.S. policymakers and planners learn from the participatory policies of the Global South to assist resident-driven informal housing and improve residents’ living conditions.
References
Bayat, A. (2000). From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South. International Sociology, 15(3), 533-557.
Durst, N.J., & Wegmann, J. (2017). Informal Housing in the United States. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(2), 282-297.
Harris, R. (2018). Modes of Informal Urban Development: A Global Phenomenon. Journal of Planning Literature, 33(3), 267-286.