Tech Gentrification and the Right to Housing

Manissa Maharawal and Samuel Stein in conversation

From coast to coast people are fighting back against gentrification and for the right to housing and we are pleased to welcome Marissa Maharawal and Samuel Stein, the authors of two new books, to discuss their findings and help us continue to fight.

About Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

A galvanizing story of how everyday people built a powerful anti-eviction movement in gentrified San Francisco.

In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an “eviction epidemic” of long-term tenants. Yet these changes also drove an inspiring housing justice movement that exposed gentrification as far from inevitable.

In Anti-Eviction, anthropologist and scholar-activist Manissa Maharawal tells the story of how residents built a powerful anti-eviction movement and how they fought—and sometimes won—a right to their homes and their city. Focusing on the stories of tenants facing eviction, Maharawal describes the different strategies for resistance that emerged as well as lessons for the broader national housing crisis, beyond California. This illuminating book offers not only actionable models for activism and resisting gentrification, but also a powerful study of how ordinary people came together to organize for housing justice and change their city.

“This beautifully written book not only shows how activists fought back, but demonstrates the power of activist researchers to put their expertise to work changing the world. This is a work of scholarship that reads like a novel, driven by narrative and characters you won’t forget, while illuminating the complicated roots of today’s housing crisis.”
—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

About A Right to Housing?

A radical blueprint for universal housing meets an unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won—from the best-selling author of Capital City

In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. This book is both a road map and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experience of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein presents practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself.

With raw honesty, he then explores why these visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path—from the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions—and captures the complex feelings of a left that has lost faith in the future.

Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.

“What a pleasure to see inside the doubting mind of Samuel Stein as he grapples with the impossibility of our housing quagmire. If you too have the uncomfortable suspicion that solving housing might be hopeless: read this book.”
—Amanda Huron, author of Carving out the Commons

About the Authors

Manissa Maharawal is a scholar of eviction, displacement, housing, race, inequality, social movements and cities and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, and a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. She was born and raised in Brooklyn.

Samuel Stein is the author of the books A Right to Housing? and Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. He works as a housing policy researcher and advocate in New York City. His writing on urban politics and planning has appeared in The New York Review of Books, n+1, The Guardian, and many other publications.