Sheltergrabbing and Tenantarianization: A Class Analysis of the Rental/Tenant Housing Crisis

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Housing Policy

Abstract

This paper presents a political economic analysis of the current tenant housing crisis in the United States in the context of crisis theory, financialization, rentier capitalism, dispossession, and class exploitation. Several new terms will be introduced to organize the analysis: sheltergrabbing, tenantariat, and tenantarianization. This work is informed by research from the Jax Rental Housing Project at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville on patterns of rental property ownership and the consequences for tenants. As a representative Sunbelt city, Jacksonville has experienced some of the largest incursions of financialization of rental housing and increases in monthly rent in the United States. We attribute this to what many have termed the corporate landlord invasion and what we describe as the “financialization of human shelter”. Under the current state of US capitalism, the overaccumulation of wealth and capital alongside diminishing opportunities for profitable investment in production generates both the search for and creation of alternative investment opportunities. The financial sector, and the associated financialization of the economy, has played this role. In order for this accumulation strategy to be successful, certain conditions and strategies are required. The analysis will draw parallels between the labor-capital relationship under the capitalist mode of production and the tenant-landlord relationship under the capitalist rental housing system. More specifically the conditions required for the success of the two systems to successfully extract labor and rental income. This includes forms of accumulation by dispossession and the unequal distribution of productive and housing property that involves “primitive accumulation” and “proletarianization” under the capitalist mode of production and “sheltergrabbing” and “tenantarianization” under the rental housing system. Stripped of housing ownership through corporate “sheltergrabbing”, renters join the tenant class, or tenantariat, compelled to enter into an exploitative relationship with the landlord class.

Author

• David D. Jaffee, University of North Florida