No place for trust—the significance of trust in housing development

Trust has become a popular term in current political and social debates, but it usually remains a vague concept. This paper aims to introduce trust as a sociospatial concept for the study of urban developments. More precisely, trust is used to analyze the housing markets of two U.S. cities, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, both of which are shaped by the forces of a global real estate market, rendering housing unaffordable for many local residents. Trust serves as a lens through which we can examine the tensions in the housing market and the struggles of local residents. We argue that these tensions sever urban trust relations by undermining the home as an essential building block for trust. Securing access to adequatehousing is thus regarded as a first step toward building urban trust networks, enabling residents to partake in urban life and make use of their right to the city.