Remote Evictions

Keywords: housing, eviction, activism, platform urbanism, datafication, communication technologies
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This presentation addresses the rise of “remote” eviction proceedings as an emerging terrain of landlord-tenant contest. It situates conversations about the financialization and datafication of real estate in the context of battles over housing as a state-mediated arena of property relations. The very technologies that underwrite platform urbanism, I suggest, increasingly operate as the means by which tenant evictions are pursued and serve as the sites where displacement is resisted.

Much ink has been spilled on how – in the context of Covid-19 – remote labor technologies like zoom have reconfigured the relationship between work and home among professionals. Mainstream economists even argue that technologically induced transformations in live/work arrangements contribute to housing market distortions. Less attention has been paid to how pandemic conditions simultaneously triggered an intensification of conflict over space and induced “innovations” in the process of adjudicating tenant-landlord disputes. A growing number of people might be able to “work from home” today. But so too are people increasingly – if unevenly – vulnerable to being “evicted from home” via remote court proceedings.

Drawing on media coverage and the work of grassroots organizations across the U.S., this presentation probes remote eviction proceedings as domains of socio-technical controversy. It asks: How have remote proceedings emerged in relation to novel methods of tenant surveillance and property valuation? How are they not just responses to the pandemic but effects of financialization and the technologies that enable it? And how have anti-eviction activists worked under these conditions to resist tenant displacement?