Making the Tenant Class: The Role of Racialized Legal Informality in Tenant Class Formation

• In Event: 40461 - Section on Sociology of Law Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Contested Group Boundaries

Abstract

Housing affordability in the United States has reached a crisis point. Policy interventions such as inclusionary zoning, housing vouchers, and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits often fail to mitigate precarity and displacement. While tenants have increasingly organized to address these failures, scholarship on tenant organizing remains limited, often framing tenant movements as reactive rather than as active agents shaping political opportunities. This article proposes a comparative ethnographic study of Black and Latinx tenant resistance in Miami, examining how tenant class formation influences distinct mobilization strategies and political expressions. Drawing on four cases of Black and Latinx tenant resistance in Miami, this paper examines variations in tenant political expressions. Latinx tenant mobilizations emerged spontaneously in response to eviction crises but dissipated rapidly after failing to secure policy changes. Conversely, Black tenant organizing developed sustained campaigns engaging legal and political mechanisms, culminating in legislative victories such as Miami-Dade County’s Tenant Bill of Rights. To explain this variation, the study develops a theory of tenant class formation, inspired by E.P. Thompson’s work on working-class development and the role of the law as a site of class struggle. It argues that the legal formality of tenant-landlord relations shapes divergent patterns of mobilization. Latinx tenants, often excluded from legal protections due to informality and immigration status, rely on everyday resistance and crisis-driven mobilization. Black tenants, facing formalized landlord surveillance and state policing, engage in protracted legal and political struggles. By situating tenant experiences within broader political-economic forces, this article contributes to scholarship and practical questions regarding racialized housing precarity and class formation.

Author

• Ahmed Mori, Johns Hopkins University