For A Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010. By Edward Murphy (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) 343 pp. $27.95 paper $27.95 e-book

For A Proper Home is a well-researched and thoroughly detailed account of the movements and programs for property and propriety (that is, dignified housing) in Chile, or a nexus that Murphy calls “the urban politics of propriety” (5, 266). He walks readers through Chile’s tumultuous political history from the decades just before and immediately following the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Murphy shows that Chile’s government was always involved in the homeless movement, in one way or another (266). Under the Christian Democrats, the state attempted to co-opt and soften the radical goals of the movement. Although the Popular Unity government sought to advance these goals, its strict adherence to Marxist rhetoric alienated the “less law abiding” members of the marginalized communities. The Pinochet regime physically attacked and even eliminated the communities (166), while simultaneously calling upon the activists to use their homes to work “for the progress of the entire...