Tenant Organizing as a Pathway to Decoupling Wealth and Power

In the United States, property is wealth, and wealth is power. Racial wealth inequalities are (in part) the enduring result of this confluence. But today, as accelerating financialization transforms the relationship between property ownership and wealth, a rapidly expanding tenant movement is working to break the entrenched power of economic elites, and build the collective power of renters. Drawing insights from members of tenant organizations across the US, this article offers a framework for conceptualizing tenant organizing as a practice that inherently threatens the racial wealth gap by decoupling property ownership—a key mechanism of wealth creation—from power. We argue that one important way tenant organizing can unsettle the relationships between housing, wealth, and power is through narrative change that destabilizes normative assumptions about property ownership and opens up pathways for securing community control over housing and land.