Tenants Against Corporate Landlords

This thesis analyses the cycle of urban tenant struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. It conceptualises this struggle as an emerging urban class conflict by weaving together the field of financialization studies and the literature on tenant movements. While these two fields have increasingly become intertwined, there is a lack of engaged research analysing how the political economy of housing, particularly the private rental sector (PRS), is being contested and shaped by the politics of tenant movements. This thesis contributes knowledge on this question by analysing the contentious politics that the Tenants’ Union of Barcelona (TUB; Sindicat de Llogateres) has deployed against corporate landlords. Hence the analysis proceeds in two dialectical moments. On the one hand, this research analyses the shifting political economy of housing in Spain after the great mortgaging period that burst in 2008. In doing so, I trace the ascendancy of corporate landlords and the servicing industry in Spain, while I argue for a novel and significant rearrangements of the real estate/financial complex. Through a qualitative approach, this research explains the process through which corporate landlords have transformed non-performing loans into profitable rental yields in the housing system. Unlike previous research which has focused primarily on the role of the public ‘bad bank’ and the rise of investment funds, this thesis unveils the crucial role of private-funded asset management companies (AMCs), also known as servicers. On the other hand, this research this research builds upon several years of my engaged research in the TUB, and it aims to provide the tenant movement more tools to un-derstand the housing processes in tow, and to formulate appropriate collective strategies in response. While a well-established scholarship has analysed the Platform of Mortgage-Affected People’s (PAH) repertoire of contention, far less research has focused on the expansion of tenant struggles in the private rental sector. I examine the emergence of the TUB in 2017 not only as the result of a new cycle of capital accumulation through housing financialization, but also as the result of the prevailing housing movement’s repertoire of contention. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted during a year of fieldwork in Barcelona, this thesis makes two core arguments. First, it claims that the existing repertoire of housing contention laid the groundwork for the rise of tenant struggles, which expanded urban housing struggles in Barcelona by unfurling new effective antagonisms against private landlordism. Second, it contends that the TUB’s Stay Put campaign introduced tactical innovations to the PAH’s repertoire of contention to gain bargaining leverage against landlords, to foster organisational growth, and to garner public support in order to change and improve legal protections for tenants.