Posted: June 6, 2025
See our conversation about Daniela Aiello's comparative ethnographic research looking at tenant organizing around two sites of extreme housing exploitation in Vancouver, BC and Atlanta, GA. Drawing on two examples of legal "wins" for increased tenant protections and rent control, she discusses how approaches directed toward achieving legal protections can potentially backfire against the most vulnerable residents. Through this discussion, Daniela explores what a politics of deep relationality can contribute to tenant organizing.
Daniela Aiello
Session Description
In present day North America, struggles for housing justice are eminently rooted in complex legal and ongoing racial and colonial processes. In this talk, I draw on insights from my comparative ethnographic research across two sites of extreme housing exploitation: the single-room occupancy (SRO) and extended-stay hotels of Vancouver, BC and Atlanta, Georgia. Across these different geographies of severe precarity, uninhabitability, and landlord violence, I consider two examples of legal "wins" for increased tenant protections and rent control. Though housing struggles are so often strategically directed toward the law and achieving legal protections, these examples demonstrate how such ‘brokering’ approaches are severely limited by the landlord-property-law power nexus, and at times, backfire against those most vulnerable and with the least control over their housing. Ultimately, I ask what a politics of deep relationality, that resources the generative livingness of tenants through organizing, reveals about what tenant power (re)possesses toward renewed political practices around place and home.
The recording of this talk is available upon request. Email jlindemann@psu.edu to request access.
Storyteller Bio
Daniela Aiello is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State and an urban geographer studying colonial racial capitalism and its contemporary manifestations in housing injustice in North America. Drawing on qualitative, comparative, ethnographic, and a research-as-organizing approach, her work examines the historical-present of dispossession through the context of multi-racial urban social movements for tenant organizing and eviction defense.
About the Series
The focus of the "Stories from the Field" series is on the "why" and "how" of community engagement and applied research. For each session, we invite the speaker(s) to tell us about their work and share stories that illustrate why they approach their work the way they do and how it looks and feels on the ground. After speakers share stories to springboard conversation, we open a facilitated discussion with attendees about the challenges and opportunities of doing work with and for communities, businesses, non-profits, and the public sector. Stories from the Field is hosted by Penn State's Center for Economic and Community Development, an applied research center dedicated to strengthening local and regional development in Pennsylvania and beyond.
