Nowhere land: The evicted space of Black tenants' rights in Montreal.

Ted Rutland

doi:10.1177/02637758211041120

Abstract

Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a well-organized tenants’ movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants’ rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal ‘ghettos’, and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants’ rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants’ rights. The racial limits of tenants’ rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject – a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants’ rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.

Highlights

Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change
What happens when we look beyond property ownership? What happens when another social class – tenants – struggle to improve their social position within property relations? Are ‘prevailing ideas about racial superiority’ subverted in these political developments? Or do racial ideas instead inform, and result from, important divisions within the social group whose rights suddenly gain new recognition and protection?
In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants’ rights, including the ‘right to remain’, presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place

Summary

Introduction

Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wellorganized tenants’ movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants’ rights in the city. Keywords Property, housing, tenants’ rights, race, blackness, Montreal The city government, in addition to supporting the police campaign, employed new policies and programs to evict and otherwise displace criminalized Black tenants, an action seemingly anathema to the government’s commitment to tenants and their newly recognized right to remain.

Results

Conclusion