The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan

In The Tenant Class, Ricardo Tranjan beautifully builds a landscape that centres tenants, grassroots organizers, and progressive economics. He uses statistics and data to convince the reader that the housing crisis does not exist but instead, is an always-existent rental market that harvests economic exploitation. By integrating decolonization and social movements into his class analysis of landlord-tenant relations, he reminds us that historically, ‘asking nicely’ has never worked in pressuring upper social classes to give up power and wealth, and that we must “pick a side.”

As a landlord who rents my basement to support my family in affording stable shelter, this book helped reframe my analysis and more deeply support the systemic changes needed to rebalance power in housing. As with any other type of oppression, those of us with privilege must use it to support and centre those in disadvantaged situations to disrupt the system that maintains these immense power imbalances. In fact, Tranjan demonstrates that our dominant discourse of housing as a crisis serves real estate developers and landlords, ignoring the needs of a third of the Canadian population: tenants.

In a society that consistently pushes ‘moving up’ through home ownership, Tranjan’s read was a breath of fresh air with a tidal wave of reality. He destroys common myths about tenancy through carefully constructed economic arguments and paints a real mural of the identities, beliefs, and aspirations of tenants. He uses current tenant social movements, and words directly from organizers, to teach us a lesson on the challenges, strategies, and tactics that social movements consider within the realms of geography, micro vs macro impacts, and electoral politics.

This book carefully led me to conclude that calling this situation a ‘housing crisis’ is an injustice because it lets landlords and governments off the hook by drawing attention away from an always-existent rental market that extracts income from the working class and transfers it to a capitalist-owning class. Through concrete examples of collective tenant resistances, the book provides hope through community organizing. It reminded us that unions have been and need to be involved in these organized resistances beyond institutional tactics.

I loved this book because of its medley of grassroots tenant and organizer voices, macro-economic statistics, and action-orientation. It is a must-read to better understand the Canadian housing market and what can be done to change it.