Tenants as Class Enemies: The Race Politics of the Housing Markets Movement

Keywords: Housing, tenancy, rent, property
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The current historical conjuncture of the housing question in the U.S. is one marked by deepening precarity, manifested in looming mass evictions and growing rental debt. It is a misnomer to call this a housing crisis since, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reminds us, “it’s just housing under capitalism.” Indeed, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, one of the founders of the LA Tenants Union, insists that the crisis must be named as one borne by tenants: “When we call this crisis a housing crisis, it benefits the people who…profit from housing.” In this paper, I examine the discourses and demands of the purveyors of the housing crisis, specifically those that seek to cure this crisis through the magic of housing markets. Often self-identified as YIMBYs, these market ideologues mobilize key urbanistic frameworks such as neighborliness and density and claim to be fighting racial technologies such as exclusionary zoning. Yet, they are also at war with rent-burdened tenants, even declaring tenants, notably the “rent-controlled tenant” as a class enemy. Especially striking are their alliances with, and defense of, the real-estate industry, from local developers to institutional investors. I argue that such alliances are pivotal to the reproduction of racial capitalism, mediating a new round of racialized dispossession in U.S. cities under the guise of making housing markets work for all. In particular, I am interested in how, at a time of growing Black and Brown tenant power, YIMBY ideologies are reinscribing notions of tenancy, property, and rent to the benefit of landed interests.