Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in Times of Crisis

Dispatches from the Threshold is an emergent archive of the burgeoning movement for housing justice in North America and beyond.

Housing insecurity turned catastrophic during the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing the cruelty of threadbare tenant protections and state hostility toward unhoused people made worse by mass unemployment, a public health crisis, and racist police violence. Since 2020, tenants have successfully fought back against evictions and encampment policing, pushed their governments to extend and fortify eviction moratoria, strengthened tenants’ rights and protections for unhoused people, and thought beyond strategies that primarily appease landlords and lenders. At the same time, the urgent work of stemming immediate eviction, displacement, and surveillance has sat in tension with long-haul movement work and cross-movement organizing.

This book brings together activists, scholars, and legal practitioners directly involved in tenant organizing to contextualize and catalogue the traction and tensions of the movement across seventeen cities in five countries. Contributors connect housing justice to struggles against criminalization, surveillance, and policing, and to debates about social reproduction, precarity, organized labour, abolitionist praxis, and political strategy. These dispatches are as much a chronicle of organizing in a moment of crisis as an invitation to build solidarities across movements to ensure enduring justice for all.

With contributions from Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Winnipeg, Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Newark, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Lexington, Belgrade, Melbourne, and Khori Gaon.

Rae Baker is a critical geographer, policy practitioner, and researcher focused on community-led inquiry and action. Their research and activism address housing inequality, land rights, and racial injustice and surveillance technology. They are an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Research for Social Change and Education and Community Action Research graduate programs. They contribute community-drive research to Urban Praxis Workshop.
Alexander Ferrer is a PhD student and movement-based researcher in Los Angeles. He works with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, the Debt Collective, and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
Samuel Stein is a geographer, urban planner, and housing policy analyst living and working in New York City. His writing on planning politics has been published by Jacobin, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the Guardian, and many other magazines, newspapers, and journals.