Tenant Organizers' Perspectives on the Housing-School Nexus: Families, Youth, Schools, and Fights for Housing Justice

• In Event: Placing Housing at the Center Toward an Equitable Education System in the 21st Century

Abstract

Overview
While education scholars across disciplines articulate the relationship schools have to housing –from the role schools play in shaping home values to the spatial (re)construction of
cities and suburbs (Dougherty, 2012; Lipman, 2013; McKoy & Vincent, 2008) –less is known
about what the housing shifts today mean for schools and families in metropolitan regions. This includes the systemic housing insecurity – where no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a fair market rent two-bedroom apartment (Aurand et al. 2020), where low-income and minoritized families face rising housing burden --particularly stark in rental markets (Larrimore & Shultz, 2017), and where the (wall street) financialization of housing is restructuring rental housing (Aalbers, 2016; Farha, 2017). This paper examines the implications of the exclusionary rental housing on families, youth, and schools by drawing on interviews with tenant right organizers, in addition to documents and policy analysis in an East Bay city and neighboring suburbs.

Theoretical Framework
I operationalize a metropolitan framework to understand how housing policies take shape in my sites of study, in relationship to each other, and in the broader metropolitan region. More specifically, I draw on the concept of geography of opportunity which recognizes that opportunity structures in metropolitan regions are the result of deliberate policy decisions across all levels of government, which cannot be separated from housing and race, nor metropolitan processes (e.g., exclusionary zoning) (Briggs, 2005; Squires & Kubrin, 2005; Tate, 2008). I couple this concept with interdisciplinary scholarship in the areas of critical education (Lipman, 2013; Scott & Holme, 2016); critical geographies of education (Gray, 2019) and (sub)urban sociology (DuBois, 1899/1996; Lacy, 2016).

Methods and Data
Data from this paper comes from a larger study that uses case study and critical policy analysis methods (Young & Diem, 2017) to understand how Black and Latinx families and youth are navigating the systemic housing insecurity, the broader housing and educational policy contexts they are situating in, and the advocacy/organizing taking shape to disrupt inequities in housing and education in my sites of study. This paper uses critical race spatial (Annamma et al., 2017) and critical discourse (Wodak, 2012) analyses to interrogate the relationship between housing, education, and place in each site of study and in relationship to each other.

Findings
Across contexts, tenant organizers speak to the tacit nature of violence that they work hard to disrupt, particularly considering the disadvantaged status renters occupy socially, economically, and legally (Drier, 1985; Pattillo, 2013). The pandemic has both ameliorated, and exacerbated this in the city and suburbs, while taking distinct shape based on the legacies of housing organizing and the strong or minimal eviction moratoria they were able to win. Tenant organizers identify the various ways in which families and youth are impacted by the political economy of rental housing and the implication this has for learning, educators, and the overall wellbeing of youth and families. They also discuss the possibilities for deeper collaborations with schools, and relatedly, alternative structures that can support housing and schools.

Author

• Maria Velazquez, University of Wisconsin - Madison