Tenants on the March: An Interview With Cea Weaver

Tenants on the March: An Interview With Cea Weaver

“Organizing tenants has the potential to shape the political landscape for decades to come.”

In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis. New York State’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, San Francisco’s 2022 collective bargaining ordinance for tenants, and Los Angeles’s 2022 “mansion tax” represent new forces in local politics—and alternative bases for the struggle over power within our society. These initiatives use the state to reshape the business models and ownership patterns pushing workers and their families further away from their jobs, into smaller, more expensive living situations.

To learn more about the tenant organizing that’s been happening in New York, I spoke with Cea Weaver, director of Housing Justice for All, the coalition that won the 2019 rent law. We spoke before November 5, but the election results have only made conversations about how tenants have organized themselves all the more urgent. An analysis from Cornell University shows that when candidates support tenant protections, the owner-renter voter turnout gap gets cut in half. Strong tenant protections also boost renter turnout: according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, a 1 percent reduction in residential evictions increases voter turnout by nearly 3 percent.

In city after city, voters described the rental housing crisis as front of mind when heading to the polls. But after a lukewarm nod to rent caps early in her campaign, Kamala Harris abandoned the policy. The collapse of turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee below Biden’s levels in 2020 made up the margin of defeat for the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The struggle over housing regulation and production is, however, more than a plank in campaign platforms: it is also key to the question of how to create and shape economic growth. Investors are banking on federal and state permitting reform laws to unleash a private building boom, accelerate growth, and ease pressure on the economically beleaguered commercial real estate industry. Absent greater public financing, landlord regulation, and alternative ownership models, such growth will create a kind of city little different from the present—in which quality housing requires an ever greater share of workers’ paychecks. Such visions of urban renewal centered on yuppies and YIMBYs are not going to save our cities.

The answer to the housing problem is, therefore, central to a broader vision of what the relative powers, privileges, and responsibilities of business and elected government in the U.S. mixed economy should be. Who can step in to offer a new direction for urban politics? Ten...