TO SOCIAL AND political demands, the state answers with technical and economic processes that only facilitate capitalist accumulation. Under this paradigm, the call for public housing is answered with privatization schemes. The call for community investment is answered with gentrification. The call to solve the housing crisis is answered with affordable and carceral housing. The actions of tenants in struggle point to the direction we can follow to overcome these contradictions. Just as tree roots slowly break up the sidewalks that order the spaces where we live, we can cultivate our movement over time, through the patient, everyday activity of organizing, which Ella Baker called “spadework.”

The tenant as a political category collects the landless and propertyless, the disenfranchised and undocumented, those placed outside the category of citizen, even outside of the category of human. To reclaim a place is to struggle for, with, alongside, and because some of us are made to be “out of place” by the logic of policing and property. By deepening relationships with our neighbors, we can resist displacement and build lasting institutions of tenant democracy. We fight dispossession not with possession but by cultivating new forms of belonging.