Tenancy in the Housing-School Nexus: Suburban Parent Tenant Advocacy and the Broader Educational Policy Landscape

• In Event: Racial Capitalism Perspectives on Educational Inequality

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the nexus of tenancy and schools, an area of study that can inadvertently, or intentionally, be neglected by scholarship on the housing-school nexus. This neglect is glaring when Black and Latiné renter households with children can face the heaviest rental burdens (while earning less and having less wealth) (Davalos et al., 2021; Desilver, 2021; Larrimore & Shultz, 2017). Drawing on a racial capitalism framework, I interrogate the nexus of tenancy and schools in a suburb in the California Bay Area and how it informs the subjectivity and resistance of low-income Latiné and Black parents in the rental housing market. Moreover, I situate the educational policy landscape that low-income renter parents and their children can navigate in the suburb.

Theoretical Framework
I draw from a racial capitalism framework (Kundnani, 2020; Robinson, 2000) that considers the role housing plays as a race-making institution and its connection to the carceral state (Bonds, 2019). This framework enables a critical examination of the “ongoing settler colonial displacement, urban fiscal crisis and infrastructure, gentrification, eviction, and speculative planning and development, and the proliferation of mechanisms to securitize [sub]urban space” (Bonds, 2019, p. 576). I couple this framework with a metropolitan framework that considers the role of suburbs in the “political and economic relationship with central cities, competing suburbs, and their region as a whole” (Kruse & Segrue, 2006, p. 6).

Methods and Data
Data come from a larger study that examines the connections between tenant housing and schools through the advocacy and organizing of Latiné and Black parents in two suburbs in the California Bay Area and a follow-up study in these suburbs, amongst other cities in the Bay Area. This paper draws from multiple years of observations in city council and school board meetings (2019-2024) and interviews with parents and community advocates and organizers. Critical policy analysis (Young & Diem, 2017), multiple case study (Stake, 2006) and critical discourse analysis (Wodak, 2012) are used to interrogate the interconnections of race, class, housing tenure, educational policy, and place.

Findings & Significance
Latiné and Black parents’ tenant advocacy and organizing centers on (1) the gaps in tenant housing policy and related accountability mechanisms that shape their housing precarity and (2) how these gaps and the broader exclusionary landscape in housing informs their wellbeing and that of their children. In the educational policy landscape, disproportionality in discipline, limited resources, and the need to better support minoritized students are ongoing concerns of families and community advocates. In both arenas, despite efforts to disrupt racialized tenant housing precarity and race and class inequalities in schools, discourses and policy (in)action seek to normalize the status quo and can sustain white supremacy in suburbia. Yet, important concessions were born from ongoing organizing and advocacy that help reframe who belongs in suburbia and the types of policy making that can be prioritized. This study provides empirical and theoretical contributions to the extant scholarship on suburban education and the housing-school nexus via a focus on tenancy and the school nexus.

Author

• Maria Velazquez, Stanford University