University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change
Publication Date
Summer 2024
Document Type
Article
First Page
174
Abstract
This Article explores the burgeoning movement for housing justice in the United States by focusing on recent examples of tenant organizing and law reform campaigns in New York City and San Francisco. In the case of New York, a coalition of tenants successfully mobilized in 2019 to strengthen the rent laws for the first time in decades. Those efforts flowed into a campaign for statewide good cause eviction protections that became law in 2024. In San Francisco, in 2022, tenants organized for—and won—a local law recognizing their right to form tenant unions that can compel landlords to meet and collectively bargain over their housing conditions. This Article assesses these law reforms in terms of their capacity to advance toward the political horizon of housing justice, a horizon that denotes the democratization and decommodification of property. While it is beyond dispute that tenants in this country face an intensifying housing crisis, the latter is not an exceptional feature of our housing system; rather it is intrinsic to capitalist spatial development, through which housing is produced and distributed primarily as a commodity to enrich the few, instead of as a social good. In this political-economic context, the commodification of housing is a site of political struggle between tenants and landlords that is legally constituted, as a range of interlocking legal regimes has been deployed to encode housing as primarily economic and profit bearing. Further, housing is an integral part of the infrastructure of racial capitalism, which is predicated upon severe inequalities that are legitimated and saturated by racial thinking and practice. In this respect, the effects of the housing crisis—rent burden, eviction, homelessness—impact Black and brown tenants at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts, a social fact that poses a steep challenge for solidarity-building efforts. Collective mobilizations of tenants are responding to this situation critically and creatively. They are organizing, on the terrain of law and across traditional lines of difference, to curb real estate speculation and prevent displacement while at the same time building tenant power. Recent examples of law reforms for strengthened security of tenure and for tenant unions, in New York and San Francisco, respectively, encode housing’s decommodification and facilitate tenant organizing. Taken together, they represent an advance toward the horizon of housing justice.
Repository Citation
John
Whitlow,
Toward Housing Justice: Law, Tenant Power, and the Decommodification of Urban Property,
27
U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change
174
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jlasc/vol27/iss3/2