Dispatches from the Threshold is an emergent archive of the burgeoning movement for housing justice in North America and beyond.

Housing insecurity turned catastrophic during the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing the cruelty of threadbare tenant protections and state hostility toward unhoused people made worse by mass unemployment, a public health crisis, and racist police violence. Since 2020, tenants have successfully fought back against evictions and encampment policing, pushed their governments to extend and fortify eviction moratoria, strengthened tenants’ rights and protections for unhoused people, and thought beyond strategies that primarily appease landlords and lenders. At the same time, the urgent work of stemming immediate eviction, displacement, and surveillance has sat in tension with long-haul movement work and cross-movement organizing.

This book brings together activists, scholars, and legal practitioners directly involved in tenant organizing to contextualize and catalogue the traction and tensions of the movement across seventeen cities in five countries. Contributors connect housing justice to struggles against criminalization, surveillance, and policing, and to debates about social reproduction, precarity, organized labour, abolitionist praxis, and political strategy. These dispatches are as much a chronicle of organizing in a moment of crisis as an invitation to build solidarities across movements to ensure enduring justice for all.

With contributions from Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Winnipeg, Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Newark, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Lexington, Belgrade, Melbourne, and Khori Gaon.

Rae Baker is a critical geographer, policy practitioner, and researcher focused on community-led inquiry and action. Their research and activism address housing inequality, land rights, and racial injustice and surveillance technology. They are an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Research for Social Change and Education and Community Action Research graduate programs. They contribute community-drive research to Urban Praxis Workshop.

Rae Baker's profile page

Alexander Ferrer is a PhD student and movement-based researcher in Los Angeles. He works with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, the Debt Collective, and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Alexander Ferrer's profile page

Samuel Stein is a geographer, urban planner, and housing policy analyst living and working in New York City. His writing on planning politics has been published by Jacobin, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the Guardian, and many other magazines, newspapers, and journals.

Samuel Stein's profile page

“This collection illustrates the audacity of collective action in the face of our most difficult obstacle: insecurity. It captures the struggle for immediate relief and the gift these movements and their participants provide us all—a glimpse of more just, humane, and radical urban futures and the imagination, language, and tools to realize it.”

Josh Akers, Urban Praxis

“A multi-point perspective like this is exactly what we’ve needed to understand the struggle for adequate housing. This work is a rich, collectively woven tapestry. It is not just a record of a unique and useful moment of crisis, but it is crammed with wisdom and experience. It is full of hope, insight, and vital lessons in how to have each other’s backs.”

Nick Bano, barrister and author of Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis’

“The fight for housing justice is gaining momentum, but individual battles are geographically dispersed, immersed in local dynamics, and not always visibly related. This volume compiles rich accounts of many of these battles. Unrestricted by theoretical or political frameworks, the authors describe housing struggles as they happen on the frontline. Each story is unique. Yet, the forces behind tenant exploitation and displacement are the same everywhere, and the political responses of organized tenants share many similarities. If capital is an international force, tenant power is pushing new boundaries. This book documents this process and helps advance it.”

Ricardo Tranjan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of The Tenant Class

“This book merges the energy of a housing protest with the analytic insights of critical social science. It offers a clear perspective on our current crisis and a much-needed picture of what tenant power looks like.”

David Madden, co-author of In Defense of Housing

“This book is an essential document for this dystopian century, a powerful account of collective resistance, imagination, and thinking that can provide hope and illuminate possible futures.”

Raquel Rolnik, former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing

“The authors remind us that housing crises are one of many routinized catastrophes of capital, and yet reading this book is not to drown in crisis but to rise with the power of tenants. Read it, and get organized.”

Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart