The Radical Housing Journal began in 2016 when a handful of scholar-activists, sparked by discussions at events like the Cardiff Anarchist Book Fair, sketched out plans for a publication challenging conventional housing studies. Michele Lancione, then in Cardiff, rallied collaborators including Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Mara Ferreri, Erin McElroy, and Melissa Lamarca, drafting procedures amid endless spreadsheets through 2017. The collective expanded to 13 members scattered across continents, launching publicly in Leeds in 2017 and Minneapolis in 2018. Their first issue appeared in April 2019, followed by 12 more by 2025, all peer-reviewed by academics and housing organizers, with hundreds of submissions flooding the initial call.
Published semiannually from Sheffield by the RHJ Collective, this open-access outlet carries ISSN 2632-2870 and imposes no fees on authors, who retain copyrights under a CC BY-NC-SA license. It spans articles, interviews, reviews, and conversations from global contributors, probing housing as inseparable from home, eviction, homelessness, and resistance amid systemic inequalities.
The journal fosters transdisciplinary exchanges between scholars and grassroots actors, blending ethnography, intersectional analysis, and transnational views on rent struggles, squatting, and tenant organizing—from Roman squats to Lagos networks and Asian colonial homelessness. Recent outputs include Ana Vilenica's dialogues with American tenant movements and Veda Popovici's mapping of European networks, feeding into edited volumes like Housing Justice. Though one founder stepped down in recent years for personal reasons, the 15-member group endures, prioritizing horizontal, anti-racist, and ecological politics in its operations.