Tenant Power: Organizing In and Beyond Crisis

Keywords: tenant, organizing, housing, COVID-19, crisis
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Though the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge of evictions and increased precarity for renters, it was only labeled as the “next housing crisis” in the perpetually unstable US housing market (Vesoules, 2021). The convergence of the public health crisis with the long-term, systematic housing crisis exacerbated the otherwise mundane, everyday nature of eviction and opened new spaces for tenant organizing. Though some tenant organizations have been able to successfully transform this convergence of crises into sustained organizing power - KC Tenants in Missouri serving as a prime example - tenants still lack significant power in the US. With each “next housing crisis” hitting sooner and sooner, understanding the opportunities and challenges to building tenant power are more central than ever, yet tenant organizations remain understudied. In this presentation, I plan to 1) discuss the ways in which tenant organizations mediate between different scales of crises and politics, bringing new imaginations and possibilities into reach and 2) draw from a case study of a tenant organizing coalition in Syracuse, New York to explore how organizers respond to crises in the short and long-term, connecting structural crises with everyday experience, and how these dichotomies can also operate in tension.

Vesoules, A. 2021, February 18. Millions of Tenants Behind on Rent, Small Landlords Struggling, Eviction Moratoriums Expiring Soon: Inside the Next Housing Crisis. TIME. Accessed on October 25th, 2022 at https://time.com/5940505/housing-crisis-2021/.