By Mike Ma, May 18, 2023

Last night I attended the book launch for Ricardo Tranjan’s new book: The Tenant Class. It was an exciting and super well attended book launch. In addition to the traditional author talk it also included a panel discussion with tenant activists that grounded the event in activism and community advocacy. In his presentation, Tranjan described how the crisis of housing is not a crisis at all, but rather, is a feature of a system that greatly favours landlords at the expense of tenants. That is, it is a deliberate and harmful transfer of wealth from the tenant class to the landlord class. It is designed to privilege the landlord and never the tenant. He shared a funny story about his negotiation with his young son to clean up his room that served as an appropriate analogy of how that negotiation wasn’t a negotiation at all; it was just a way for his son to game the system. And it was a funny and useful framing of the failed landlord/tenant system we have today. I’ve got a copy of the book now and I’m excited to read it.