My summer research as an ERI/PS2 fellow consisted of curriculum development and planning for a 6-week movement school in Los Angeles, CA on the techniques of strategic property ownership research applicable to tenant organizing. The movement school will take place in January 2025 and will be a collaboration between the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a scholar-activist collective of which I am a member, and The Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), which operates eleven tenant union locals across the city. In recent decades, landlord ownership structures have become increasingly opaque and complex, and the tenant movement has risen to the challenge by building property ownership research into its organizing. AEMP has for the last ten years, produced research and developed tools for the tenant movement to respond to this landscape, helping to facilitate the proliferation in recent years of multi-building tenant associations organized by tenants with shared landlords in California. This school will help to further develop LATU’s capacity to conduct strategic property ownership research to support them in waging campaigns in Los Angeles.
This summer, I developed a reusable curriculum for the school in collaboration with LATU and AEMP. The school will run over 6 weeks in January and February of 2025, meeting for two-hours weekly at a movement space in Los Angeles. The course will take the form of guided project-based learning, with participants divided into project teams that will each choose a relevant local landlord for investigation. Participants will learn how to collect, use and visualize public data to investigate the beneficial ownership, corporate organization, business practices, and investment strategies of landlord enterprises useful in the context of developing tenant associations (union campaigns) and engage in collective bargaining with the landlord. They will learn how to make use of common, freely available digital tools and public datasets to create and execute a research plan that addresses these issues, culminating in the production of a full scope strategic corporate analysis of a landlord enterprise relevant to their community. Participants will gain familiarity with the various relevant online resources for conducting this research, including public records on code-enforcement, corporate registrations and filings, court records, property and tax records, ethics and contributions records, and various third-party data aggregators. Combining theoretical interventions with empirical rigor, we will explore political education on the landscape of landlordism built into the curriculum, and the class will collectively develop political education materials on the forces which affect their position as tenants. Analyses of difference will be central, as we will read and discuss how race, class, gender, and colonialism are made and remade through tenancy in Los Angeles.
In developing the curriculum, I sought to foster a critical, inventive, and generative space of knowledge production outside the academy, over which tenant participants have ownership. Not only will the school produce situated geographical knowledge in a tradition of tenant struggle, but it will also materially change the terms of the struggle in the world. This project is inspired by Bill Bunge’s pedagogical practice within the Detroit Geographical Expedition, David Harvey’s call for a “people’s geography,” and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s critical approach to scholar activism and call to organize through teaching in Abolition Geographies.
Author
Terra Graziani
PS2 Public Research Fellow
Terra Graziani is a researcher and tenant organizer whose work focuses on property, race, and personhood. She helps run the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
(AEMP), a digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and
resistance in solidarity with gentrifying communities through research,
oral history, and data work, and she founded the Los Angeles chapter.
She is currently a doctoral student at CUNY Geography and a researcher
at UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
