Beyond Tenant and Landlord: How State and Legal Mediation of Residential Exploitation Shapes Tenant Politics

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

To understand contemporary tenant politics, we must examine the state and legal institutional arrangements that mediate how residential exploitation is structured, regulated, and mediated. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this article asks how these arrangements condition tenant political expression across three sites in Miami-Dade County: (1) a mobile home park facing redevelopment where mobilization stabilizes into a homeowners association oriented toward contractual bargaining over compensation; (2) a Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) building where collective action emerges spontaneously in response to managerial abuse but dissipates after the offending manager is removed; and (3) a public housing site undergoing Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) conversion where political expression is sustained but concentrated in legally recognized resident council leaders navigating technocratic redevelopment processes.

Rather than treating tenant mobilization as emerging solely from material deprivation, this article conceptualizes tenant conflict as distinct regimes of residential exploitation – configurations of legal entitlements, authority structures, and collective standing through which landlord and/or state power is exercised and contested. Legal entitlements of tenancy refer to the bundle of contractual, statutory, and regulatory rights that structure security of occupancy, eviction protections, compliance obligations, and enforceable claims. The configuration of authority concerns the location and proximity of decision-making power. And collective standing and representational structure refer to whether tenants possess legally recognized collective vehicles through which to act. These dimensions organize the terrain on which mobilization occurs by erecting limits of possibility, helping shape the arena of contestation and the ceiling of escalation. Tenant political expression thus unfolds within institutional terrains that permit bounded victories while stabilizing the underlying structure of residential exploitation.

Author

• Ahmed Mori, Johns Hopkins University / School of Arts & Sciences