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Abstract
This dissertation examines how housing tenure inequality (i.e., renting versus owning) manifests as political inequality in the United States. I tackle both the relational politics and the formal politics of renters, renting, and rental housing in the United States. I unpack how the American state shapes renting and rental housing, as well as how politics unfolds between landlords and tenants. In doing so, I develop concepts, explanations, and approaches to bring political science into dialogue with issues in rental housing. The dissertation proceeds through three main chapters. Each chapter stands alone and takes a different approach to the politics of rental housing in the United States. My methods are primarily qualitative. Together, the chapters chart a set of questions, problems, and issues in rental housing and landlord-tenant politics. The chapters explain the origins of the state of affairs in rental housing, theorize the political dynamics of landlord-tenant relationships, and map the contours of renters’ experiences of power and politics in housing.
The first chapter primarily addresses the role of the state in the politics of rental housing and explains how things came to be the way that they are. I use historical-institutionalist methods to explain how renters were excluded from state-provided housing benefits during policy developments from 1916 to 1954, with enduring consequences for renters today. I begin by introducing the concept of an “anti-renter regime” to conceptualize the durable alignment of ideas, interests, and institutions that privileges homeowners and developers at the expense of renters. I argue that American housing policy disadvantages renters materially, symbolically, and participatorily. My historical analysis then tracks the generative events and reproductive mechanisms that formed this durable policy regime. I show how key decisions made by Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department in the 1920s and New Deal Democrats after WWII created path-dependent processes that favored the nascent real-estate industry and reproduced anti-renter ideas, and how an alternative pathway was foreclosed when a proposal for a more transformative public housing proposal failed in the 1930s. These developments created a durable policy regime that denies material and symbolic housing benefits to renters and creates barriers to renters’ political identification and group formation.
The second chapter starts with a provocation: what if we think of landlords as petty tyrants? I work through a conceptual toolkit to theorize politics, power, and demobilization within landlord-tenant relationships. I draw on theories of “private government,” republicanism, and need to argue that cost-focused theories of rental housing miss key dynamics of power, rule, conflict, and participation. I argue that rental housing is a sphere where people are subject to substantial unaccountable power in ways that drastically limit their autonomy, that is, domination. I foreground domination as a key concept to understand the relations of rule in landlord-tenant politics. I apply this domination-centered approach in a critical assessment of contemporary American rental housing and housing policy. I conclude with a framework for housing policy organized around “countervailing power” that establishes supports for tenants’ collective action.
The third chapter turns to contemporary landlord-tenant politics. I draw on 38 in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with renters from the Far North Side of Chicago to explore relational dynamics of power and resistance in rental housing. I investigate how renters report their experiences of power and resistance in rental housing. I extend the theory from the second chapter to specify some of the terms and modalities of domination. I also dig into renter respondents’ reported propensities towards formal and informal politics, especially towards collective action among renters. I additionally make use of a divide in the sample between subsidized and market-rate renters to examine how public social provision in the context of race-class inequality affects experiences of domination. Low-income subsidized renters report more experience with landlord disrespect and maintenance neglect, while market-rate renters report substantial concern about rent hikes and residential instability. I argue that low-income renters, while protected from the insecurities of market-rate rents, still experience substantial housing domination through material and symbolic race-class marginalization. Low-income renters, however, report more experience with housing-related political participation and enthusiasm about future political participation. Through these empirical findings, I develop an argument for a more generalizable approach to the study of power. I argue for an analytical and empirical approach to the experience of power as a way to integrate the varieties of power and politics that I unpack more thoroughly into political science. I argue that studying the experience of power can orient political science to a more comprehensive view of real-world political phenomena.
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