Organizing As the Youth, for the Youth: How the Youth Are Taking on the Old Urban Housing Problem

This presentation explores how organizing as the youth and utilizing the shared experience of a generation can reinvigorate social movements. In particular, I analyze how youth organizing can elevate old intractable issues of urban housing unaffordability, weak tenants’ rights, and outright extortion of tenants’ lump-sum deposits by landlords. In South Korea, a youth social movement organization (SMO) known as the “Unshelled Snail Union” is bringing renewed awareness to these longstanding issues by refracting them through the lens of generational injustice and inequality. By centering the holistic lived experience of the youth, the SMO also situates the housing problem within the “polycrisis.” For example, from the perspective of the youth, the crisis of housing unaffordability is compounded by the crisis of youth unemployment. In addition, the government’s neoliberal response to these problems—expanding access to debt—has served only to layer a crisis of youth indebtedness on top of the existing crises. This relational perspective pushes the youth-led SMO to criticize stopgap measures and effectively advocate for structural fixes. Through this case study, I analyze how youth activism that began one decade ago by foregrounding college students as a particularly vulnerable housing class has not only expanded its agenda to speak to a wider and more general audience but is now leading the charge to claim housing as a human right. Much has been written on the ability of youth activists—as digital natives—to capitalize on their savviness in connecting and amplifying their voices through social networks. I build on such scholarship and others that theorize the unique power of the youth-led activism by further analyzing how the youth, by leaning into their generational experience and offering distinctive articulations of deep-seated social problems, can be an effective engine for change.