About the book
Dispatches from the Thresholdis an emergent archive of the burgeoning movement for housing justice in North America and beyond.
Housing insecurity turned catastrophic during the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing thecruelty of threadbare tenant protections and state hostility toward unhoused people made worse by mass unemployment, a public health crisis, and racist police violence. Since 2020, tenants have successfully fought back against evictions and encampment policing, pushed their governments to extend and fortify eviction moratoria, strengthened tenants’ rights and protections for unhoused people, and thought beyond strategies that primarily appease landlords and lenders. At the same time, the urgent work of stemming immediate eviction, displacement, and surveillance hassat in tension with long-haul movement work and cross-movement organizing.
This book brings togetheractivists, scholars, and legal practitioners directly involved in tenant organizing tocontextualize and cataloguethe traction and tensions of the movementacross seventeen cities in five countries. Contributors connect housing justice to struggles against criminalization, surveillance, and policing, andto debatesabout social reproduction, precarity, organized labour, abolitionist praxis, and political strategy.These dispatches areas much a chronicle of organizing in a moment of crisis as an invitation to build solidarities across movements to ensure enduring justice for all.
With contributions from Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Winnipeg, Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Newark, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Lexington, Belgrade, Melbourne, and Khori Gaon.
Class Inequality Urban Studies
What people are saying
Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart“The authors remind us that housing crises are one of many routinized catastrophes of capital, and yet reading this book is not to drown in crisis but to rise with the power of tenants. Read it, and get organized.”
David Madden, co-author of In Defense of Housing“This book merges the energy of a housing protest with the analytic insights of critical social science. It offers a clear perspective on our current crisis and a much-needed picture of what tenant power looks like.”
Ricardo Tranjan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of The Tenant Class“The fight for housing justice is gaining momentum, but individual battles are geographically dispersed, immersed in local dynamics, and not always visibly related. This volume compiles rich accounts of many of these battles. Unrestricted by theoretical or political frameworks, the authors describe housing struggles as they happen on the frontline. Each story is unique. Yet, the forces behind tenant exploitation and displacement are the same everywhere, and the political responses of organized tenants share many similarities. If capital is an international force, tenant power is pushing new boundaries. This book documents this process and helps advance it.”
Nick Bano, barrister and author of Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis’“A multi-point perspective like this is exactly what we’ve needed to understand the struggle for adequate housing. This work is a rich, collectively woven tapestry. It is not just a record of a unique and useful moment of crisis, but it is crammed with wisdom and experience. It is full of hope, insight, and vital lessons in how to have each other’s backs.”
Josh Akers, Urban Praxis“This collection illustrates the audacity of collective action in the face of our most difficult obstacle: insecurity. It captures the struggle for immediate relief and the gift these movements and their participants provide us all—a glimpse of more just, humane, and radical urban futures and the imagination, language, and tools to realize it.”
Raquel Rolnik, former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing“This book is an essential document for this dystopian century, a powerful account of collective resistance, imagination, and thinking that can provide hope and illuminate possible futures.”
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Authors
Rae Baker
Rae Bakeris a critical geographer, policy practitioner, and researcher focused on community-led inquiry and action. Their research and activism address housing inequality, land rights, and racial injustice and surveillance technology. They are an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Research for Social Change and Education and Community Action Research graduate programs. They contribute community-drive research to Urban Praxis Workshop.
Alexander Ferrer
Alexander Ferreris a PhD student and movement-based researcher in Los Angeles. He works with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, the Debt Collective, and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
Samuel Stein
Samuel Stein is a geographer, urban planner, and housing policy analyst living and working in New York City. His writing on planning politics has been published byJacobin, theJournal of Urban Affairs, theGuardian, and many other magazines, newspapers,and journals.
Contents
- Introduction: Dispatches from the ThresholdRae Baker
- 1. Tenant-Centred Public Health in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Aaron Bailey, Dani Aiello, Bryan Jacobs, and The Right to Remain research collective
- 2. The People’s Housing: The Stella Wright Rent Strike and Community Control of Public HousingAri McCaskill and Peter Blackmer
- 3. Rehabilitative Capitalism in Winnipeg’s Rental MarketStefan Hodges
- 4. Squatters Unite! Leveraging Land and Housing Occupations in PhiladelphiaAmanda Ricketts and Claire Herbert
- 5. No Place Like Home: A Reassessment of Housing and Home as Key Sites of StruggleNina Medvedeva
- 6. How Hotlines and Digital Information Networks Support the Movement for Tenant PowerNatalie McLaughlin, Dani Aiello and Karimah Dillard-Mickey, Housing Justice League
- 7. Contradictions in Infra-Commoning Networks in SerbiaAna Vilenica, Vladimir Mentus
- 8. Detroit Renter CityRae Baker
- 9. Against Landlord Technology in San Francisco Erin McElroy, Matthew Martignoni, and Jeantelle Laberinto
- 10. Eviction Court Watch: Monitoring the EvictorsColleen Carroll, Graphics by Saiyare Refaei
- 11. Considering the Lawyer’s Role in the Housing Justice Movement Greg Bonett, Faizah Malik, Katie McKeon, and Doug Smith
- 12. Confrontations in Kentucky: Housing Justice in the Bluegrass StateLukas Bullock
- 13. Envisioning Collective Bargaining Rights for RentersPierce Nettling, Rebecca Kantwerg, Anna Gabriela Doebeli, Ben Ger, Ryan Hong, Alex J. Kiczales, and Alex McLean
- 14. Organized Precarity: The Emergence of a Political Renter Class in So-Called AustraliaDavid Kelly, Prashanti Mayfield, Eirene Tsolidis Noyce, Traça DeBarra, Zachary Doney, and Jordan Adams
- 15. Banished: Mapping Conviction-Based Housing Restrictions in ChicagoCelia Magnone
- 16. Organizing During Forced Eviction in Khori GaonIshita Chatterjee
- 17. Improvising Spatial Solidarities: The Public Park as a CommonsAnna Kramer and Jesse Upton Crowe
- 18. Bulldozers and Barricades: Encampment Evictions in Washington DC Aaron Howe and Shannon Clark, Remora House
- 19. Nothing About Us Without Us: Unhoused Tenants and the Struggle for Housing LiberationAnnie Powers and Ashley Bennett
- 20. Housing Should Not Be a LuxuryMarena Skinner
- AfterwordAlexander Ferrer