“The Rent Is Too Damn High!”: Organizing for Housing Justice

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

Over a third of Americans are "cost-burdened," spending more than 30% of their income on rent, leaving little for essentials like food, healthcare, or childcare. Housing that is affordable is often unsafe, unhealthy, or inaccessible: posing other threats to the safety and well-being of its residents. Meanwhile, housing costs continue to rise, with no signs of abatement. This is often treated as an inevitable market reality, rather than something produced through deliberate policy choices. However, there are many actors who seek to challenge this system by organizing to protect or support the growth of affordable, accessible, and safe housing. This panel focuses on both grassroots movements and organized institutional campaigns that seek to address housing injustice. We welcome scholars, activists, and practitioners to analyze and discuss the diverse ways in which individuals and communities are fighting for equitable housing systems. We are particularly interested in papers that explore how housing insecurity exacerbates and is exacerbated by existing axes of inequality, such as race, class, gender, and immigration status, as well as the ways that different actors and organizations seek to undo and remedy these inequities.

Sub Unit

• Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section / “The Rent Is Too Damn High!”: Organizing for Housing Justice

Presider

• Michelle Smirnova, Rice University

Individual Presentations

• Forging Solidarity through Narratives that Bridge Racial and Class Divides - Jamila Michener, Cornell University; Yusra Murad, University of Minnesota; Norman Porticella, Cornell University

• We Believe That We Will Win: Tenant Unions and the Future of Housing Justice - Tara Raghuveer, Founding Director of the Tenant Union Federation

• Making the Rent Up: Landlords, Development and Short-Term Rent Shock in Low-Income Housing - Andrew Ford Messamore, University of Texas-Austin

• Housing Precarity and Anti-Blackness in the Multicultural City: Understanding Displacement Pressures Facing Black Communities in Toronto - Prentiss A. Dantzler, University of Toronto

Session Organizer

• Michelle Smirnova, Rice University