Abstract
Housing and care relations are deeply gendered. Analyzing these relationships through consideration of cisheteropatriarchal structures facilitates a deeper understanding of systemic contexts shaping tenants’ experiences of care in housing crises and the protection of property ownership through normative hierarchies of gender and sexualities. Yet, understandings of how tenants’ care work is situated within cisheteropatriarchal relations remains limited. To address this gap, I engage archival materials to analyze interactions between tenants and Vancouver, Canada's Rental Accommodation Grievance Board, a state-led mediator between landlords and tenants that operated from 1969–1975. I theorize the multifaceted approaches through which tenants demanded care from local state infrastructure in housing crises, as shaped by cisheteropatriarchal structures. Tenants provided care work to themselves, landlords, and the state and this labour was shaped by cisheteropatriarchal contexts. Tenants’ demands for local state care through landlord-tenant laws often resulted in gender-based landlord violence and harassment towards tenants. Tenants resisted cisheteropatriarchal care norms that categorized their care needs as secondary to the protection of profit and property. I situate these care contexts within a cisheteropatriarchal housing system to argue that the reliance on tenants as careworkers in housing crises exacerbates gendered inequities and harms for those already vulnerable to housing precarity.
Introduction
In the summer of 1974, as Vancouver, Canada faced a state-declared housing crisis, two women tenants received a twenty-five percent rent increase from their landlord. The legal maximum was eight percent. The tenants, Katherine and Deanna, 1 notified the landlord that he needed to provide proper notice, but still agreed to accept the increase—suggesting that he could use the extra money from the illegal increase to repaint their apartment. They then received an improper eviction notice backdated to the initial rent increase notice so the tenants informed the landlord that they would not leave. The tenants reported that within the week, their phone was disconnected and strange men walked into their apartment unannounced, saying an advertisement was placed in the newspaper identifying their apartment for rent and inviting people to stop by whenever to look at it. For over a month, the tenants were subject to additional forms of harassment, including garbage dumped outside their front door, electricity outages, and verbal abuse. This was not the first retaliatory eviction notice they had received from the landlord: the previous year, they received a notice after they asked if the building could get a fire extinguisher. According to the tenants, the landlord said that, “it would get stolen and that anyway he was heavily insured and he didn’t care if the building burnt down.” The tenants wrote letters to and met with the Vancouver Rental Accommodation Grievance Board (RAGB), local state care infrastructure established to mediate conflict between landlords and tenants. The tenants said they contacted the RAGB asking for help because they wanted what happened to them to be on record. The conclusion of the case is not documented in the archives (Chronological File A, n.d.).
I open with the story of Katherine and Deanna because their case immediately lays bare the stakes of tenants’ experiences of precarious housing and how these experiences are shaped by the absence or presence of care relations. Care describes relational practices and politics that provide individual and collective support. In housing, this includes things like how tenants take care of their apartments, housing policies that aim to reduce housing insecurity, and tenants supporting other tenants in retaining their homes. In the case of Katherine and Deanna, they reached out to local state actors through the infrastructure of the RAGB to demand state care, when other state care infrastructure, in the form of landlord-tenant laws, failed them. Prior to contacting the RAGB, they attempted to provide care for themselves and each other, by refusing to leave their home when the landlord was illegally threatening eviction; by continuing to advocate for themselves and supporting each other as the landlord enacted violence and harassed them. Yet, their care work for themselves was only necessary because of a housing system in crisis whereby landlords as property owners hold greater power than non-propertied tenants, aggravated by the ways that structures of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy are embedded within discourses, transactions, and experiences of housing and home. Not insignificant is the fact that these two tenants, both women, were violently harassed by their landlord, who was a man. His actions put their health, safety, and lives at risk through his decisions to prioritize housing as a source of profit rather than a potential site of home.
As Fields et al. (2024: 744) argue, “Housing systems are the key infrastructures that organize how people give and receive care in most places across the world and inequitable access to housing drives care inequality.” Recent calls in care scholarship emphasize an urgent need to attend to analysis of the role of care in urban housing contexts, as a means of identifying how care (or lack thereof) intentionally shapes who the city is for through acts of inclusion, displacement, and dispossession (Power and Williams, 2020; Rodriguez, 2024). Care analyses contribute conceptualizations of housing beyond colonial concepts of private property and housing commodification (Summers & Fields, 2024). Further, I utilize care as a means to centre tenants’ housing knowledge and expertise in the creation of housing scholarship, as an “everyday praxis” that is used and understood by tenants as they describe their own experiences (Lancione, 2023: 206). I engage Lancione's (2023: 211) thinking here, as they argue that, “Demanding more from care means to stop questioning its absolute value and to demand clarity about its purpose and sense of direction.” Thus, this paper aims to closely examine the everyday relations of care that occur as tenants interact with state care infrastructure, with attention to how these relations are shaped by cisheteropatriarchal housing systems. I ask: What are the impacts of cisheteropatriarchal housing systems on the conditions in which tenants are able to conceive, experience, and enact care through state responses to housing crises and how does this (in)access to care shape their experiences of urban housing security?
In this paper, I draw on archival materials to analyze how interactions between tenants and Vancouver's Rental Accommodation Grievance Board are impacted by cisheteropatriarchal housing structures that affect possibilities of care in housing crises. I situate these RAGB care interactions within the context of a cisheteropatriarchal housing system to argue that the reliance on tenants as careworkers in housing crises exacerbates gendered inequities and gender-based harms for those already vulnerable to housing precarity within settler colonial racial capitalism. In what follows, I begin with an overview of extant literatures on cisheteropatriarchal relations in housing, empirical context of Vancouver, and methods. I then develop this argument through three entry points. First, I discuss types of care labour that was provided by tenants to landlords and the state through the RAGB and demonstrate how this labour was shaped by cisheteropatriarchal contexts. Second, I illustrate how in the case of the RAGB, requirements that tenants provide care labour in order to access state care triggered gender-based violence and harassment. Finally, I show how tenants resist cisheteropatriarchal norms of who is deserving of care and where care ‘belongs’ in housing through individual and collective care acts. In developing a close examination of these everyday interactions with local state housing care infrastructure, I contribute to our understanding of how cisheteropatriarchal structures within both housing and care intersect to impact the conditions under which tenants seek state care within settler colonial racial capitalist housing systems and the resulting gender-based harms that state infrastructure reliant on tenants’ care can exacerbate.
Cisheteropatriarchal relations of housing and care
Access to housing is uneven and shaped by structural impacts of intersectional power. Cisheteropatriarchy, which embeds power in cisgender, heterosexual, and male identities, is one such axis of social power which shapes normative property relations and housing inequities for housing systems in Canada. I draw on Arvin et al.'s (2013: 13) definition of heteropatriarchy: “the social systems in which heterosexuality and patriarchy are perceived as normal and natural, and in which other configurations are perceived as abnormal, aberrant, and abhorrent.” Heteropatriarchal structures are reinforced through heteronormativity, which normalizes an assumption that “individuals’ sexual identities conform to a social norm of heterosexual love, sex, and reproduction” (Hubbard, 2008: 643).
The resulting spatializations and impacts of heteronormative power are complex (Knopp & Brown, 2003). Oswin emphasizes that heteronormativity “is a set of norms that makes not just heterosexuality, but particular expressions of heterosexuality seem right,” such as marriage, notions of domesticity, and nuclear family structures (2010: 260). Connecting “cis” to “heteropatriarchy” signals the ways that heteropatriarchal relations, through cisnormative constructs, reinforce gender binaries that limit legible gender identities to cisgender men and women, at the violent exclusion and harm towards a spectrum of genders, including transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary individuals. Cisheteropatriarchal structures embed cisnormative, heteronormative, and patriarchal hierarchies with power. Each of these normative structures intersects with additional power axes that uphold hierarchies of race, class, disabilities, citizenship, and other identities—or the “non-cisheteropatriarchal other” (Oswin, 2010). Therefore, cisheteropatriarchy describes the structural social organization of power that privileges and normalizes white, cisgender, heterosexual men. Cisheteropatriarchal structures ‘other’ and devalue relationships, bodies, and identities that do not conform to this norm and this extends to housing and home (Reddy, 1998). Cisheteropatriarchy impacts housing in a number of key ways, including: shaping conceptions of private space and the home; heteropaternalism which reinforces property ownership as a masculine sphere; and normalizing relationships of the domestic economy through care labour.
Public-private spaces of housing and home
Cisheteropatriarchal structures shape conceptions of private space and the home which in turn structure relations of housing and property ownership. The home is “arguably the most concentrated space of heteronormativity” (Peake, 2017: 2). While concepts of housing and home are often conflated, critical theorizations of the home have illustrated that it is a complicated space that can be supportive, safe, secure, and key to identity formation, as well as a place of instability, violence, and isolation (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Elwood, 2000; hooks, 1991; Thompson, 2023). I utilize housing and home interchangeably in this paper not to collapse their distinctions, but rather to emphasize the ways the two concepts are entangled in the case of the RAGB. Utopian ideals of the home have long been rooted in gendered relations that frame it both as private space and as a nurturing space created by women for men to return home to after participating in the public spaces of the city (McDowell, 1999). Massey explains that early characterizations of home are often rooted in perspectives “from those who have left” rather than those who “stayed behind” where the white man leaves to participate in the business of urban life (1994: 166). Such discourse precludes the home as a site of paid and unpaid domestic care work, resulting in the reproduction of cisheteronormative nuclear family structures of husband, wife, children and the nature of these relationships (Peake, 2017).
Home discourses that normalize gender roles and power dynamics of heterosexual relationships are thus rooted in cisheteropatriarchal structures where the home is positioned as the “man's castle” (McDowell, 1999). Home as the ‘man's castle’ reinforces the cisheteropatriarchal power of men in property ownership and over housing in general. This logic places a cloud of privacy, secrecy, invisibility, and concealment over the home that normalizes gendered power relations in housing as well as gender-based or intimate violence (Datta, 2015; Donovan & Barnes, 2020). McDowell (1999: 88) demonstrates that the ‘man's castle’ narrative, “in combination with the idea of the home as a private place for personal relations, led to official tolerance by the state of unacceptable forms of male power over women.” Though, potential privacy of the home can also offer needed protection from violence outside of it, including as spaces of care and identity formation for queer and trans individuals (Gorman-Murray, 2012; Malatino, 2020). Further, as Brickell and Speer (2020) have argued, there are distinct gendered dimensions to displacement and forced evictions and the organizing of anti-eviction and anti-displacement tactics (Brickell, 2020). Positioning housing as private space shapes the possibilities for tenants’ experiences of care, particularly in responses from the state.
Heteropaternalism and property ownership
Structures of housing, property, and landlords are further gendered through processes of heteropaternalism. I draw on Arvin and colleagues’ (2013: 13) definition of heteropaternalism as “the presumption that heteropatriarchal nuclear-domestic arrangements, in which the father is both center and leader/boss, should serve as the model for social arrangements of the state and its institutions.” They note that both heteropaternalism and heteropatriarchy rely on “very narrow definitions of the male/female binary, in which the male gender is perceived as strong, capable, wise, and composed and the female gender is perceived as weak, incompetent, naïve, and confused.” Operations of heteropaternalism cement privilege and masculinity into property ownership, positioning the father as a responsible figure and property ownership as the endeavour of a responsible citizen. Power and Gillon (2022: 459) remind us that, in a system where homeownership is “an expectation of responsible citizenship,” renters often perform the role of the ‘good tenant’ to compensate for their perceived “lack of responsibility or will to achieve home ownership.”
Property ownership is always situated in cisheteropatriarchy and therefore, regardless of the genders or sexualities of individuals, the structural power embedded within cisheteropatriarchy remains. The enforcement of gender norms in housing relations has consequences for those who are not protected by cisheteropatriarchal structures. For example, scholars have emphasized that trans and gender non-conforming individuals disproportionately experience housing precarity due to anti-trans violence and discrimination (Glick et al., 2019; Yarbrough, 2023). Experiences of housing are always intersectional experiences of a system that devalues anyone who is not white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, property-holding and a man (Crenshaw, 1991, Hill Collins, 2019). This is illustrated through the uneven representation of tenants experiencing housing precarity who are Black, Indigenous, or people of colour, as well as women, disabled, queer, trans, gender non-conforming, or nonbinary individuals (Lichtenstein & Weber, 2015; Whitley, 2022).
Moreover, who is able to claim care from state infrastructure, in the form of tenants’ rights or otherwise, is rooted in these same power structures and bound by ideas of social citizenship and accompanying legal entitlement. Extant literatures on urban social movements and housing precarity demonstrate that the ability to access secure housing and tenants’ protections is shaped by notions of citizenship and normative property discourse (Blomley & the Right to Remain Collective, 2021; Roy, 2017). Notions of citizenship are contested, but the concept of citizenship does help us to consider how rights are assigned through hegemonic liberal logics (Lister, 2000; Mouffe, 1992). For example, Pateman (1989: 183; cited in Lister, 2000: 44) describes the “patriarchal separation” that treats “irrelevant to citizenship whatever occurs in the ‘private’ sphere and has thereby helped to sustain the power of male citizens.” Considering tenants’ rights posited through landlord-tenant laws is about the governance of housing relations that are at once tied to private and public spaces.
Further, long histories of Black feminist scholarship in particular have demonstrated that the state does not adequately care for those who deviate from “responsible citizenship” and that labour from urban residents has long been responding to the resulting failures and exclusions of state infrastructure (Gilmore, 2020; Hawthorne, 2022; Summers, 2021). For example, Akira Drake Rodriguez (2021) employs Black feminist spatial politics to illustrate how tenant associations mobilized resources to demand social, political, and economic inclusion for Black residents in the face of white supremacist spatial logics that shaped public housing governance. Moreover, community relations, collective care and resource organizing are vital for urban survival (Muñoz, 2018; Ramírez, 2020; Spade, 2020). In contemporary housing contexts, many movements for housing justice pursue strengthened tenant protections as one pathway to improving the lived housing realities of lower-income renters. Thus, in this paper I extend existing literatures that recognize the roles of grassroots rights demands through consideration of what it would mean to theorize these acts not only as a vital form of advocacy, but also as a key site of care work and care relations in housing.
Housing care infrastructures
Cisheteropatriarchal structures grant institutional and structural power to landlords and property owners which establishes the context of landlord-tenant relationships. To theorize the complex ways these relationships operate through cisheteropatriarchal structures, I engage feminist geographies of care (Byrd et al., 2018). Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) define care as, “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” Through Tronto's work, there are five categories of care: caring for, caring about, receiving care, caregiving, and caring with. Similarly to home discourses, care too is problematically associated with private spaces and feminized labour. Analyzing care sheds light on the networks of relationships, lives, politics, and work that are typically undervalued or devalued under cisheteropatriarchy. The undervaluing of care results in a care gap, where the amount of care needed by all of us individually and collectively remains a need that is generally unmet (Rodriguez, 2024). To address this care gap, additional (typically unpaid) care work is conducted where people are caring for themselves and their communities.
Dominant public care discourse also position care relationships within a cisheteronormative gendered and racialized power hierarchy of the care provider holding power and care receivers being “vulnerable ‘others’” without power results in paternalistic relations between caregiver and receiver (Cox, 2010; Rodriguez, 2021). Often, individuals have to wrestle within and against normative categories in order to be perceived as ‘deserving’ of state care infrastructure (Chouinard, 2010; Power & Gillon, 2022). Care infrastructure describes “socio-technical systems” that organize how care is provided, received, and negotiated in different spaces (Williams & Tait, 2022: 2). The ‘infrastructural turn’ in geography emphasizes that infrastructures are co-constitutive to urban life, as more than objects—instead as wholly relational structures (Amin, 2014; Kapsali, 2020). Theorizing housing systems as fundamental to the organization of care infrastructure expands beyond housing as a site of care work to also consider “how care (and neglect) flows through housing materialities, modes of governance including the work of policy agents, and housing markets” (Power & Mee, 2020: 485). As with all analyses of care, attention must be paid to care infrastructures as not equally experienced or as systems that are inherently positive or ‘caring’, which can produce injustice, and violence (Williams & Tait, 2022; Neely & Lopez, 2022). Care infrastructures are not only relational through systems and people, but are also shaped by notions that care is private and that what occurs in private spaces, such as the home, should be outside the purview of local state actors.
Understanding these impacts is vital in comprehending how cisheteropatriarchal structures shape experiences of housing crises, especially in how tenants interact with state infrastructure and how tenants interact with each other. The care-housing relation considers ways of moving beyond solely market-oriented theorizations of housing and crisis and to instead focus on the everyday experiences, negotiations, and work of people experiencing housing precarity in crisis (Bowlby & Jupp, 2020; Desroches & Poland, 2023; Power, 2019). For example, Marvin (2019) emphasizes the particular importance of intergenerational care in queer and trans communities due to the prevalence of bio-family rejection. The relationship between housing and care includes activities like tenant rights education, developing supportive housing, tenant mutual aid, and enacting ‘caring’ housing policies. As Puszka (2020:3) argues, “Housing is understood as both a site and a resource of care”: housing offers a potential space where care work and relationships are navigated and negotiated, while also shaping care materialities through the provision of shelter and potential creation of home.
Housing and care relations are deeply gendered. Analyzing these relationships through consideration of cisheteropatriarchal structures facilitates a deeper understanding of systemic contexts shaping tenants’ experiences of housing crises and the protection of property ownership through normative hierarchies of gender and sexualities. Considering these approaches across home and private space, heteropaternalism and property, and care and housing, there remains a gap in our understanding of the ways tenants’ experiences and labour of care are situated within cisheteropatriarchal relations and further, the differential work that is required in order for tenants to be deemed worthy of care and to access care infrastructures in housing crises.
Local state care infrastructure in crisis
In a contemporary context, Vancouver faces a pervasive, longstanding housing crisis, and tracing tenant histories can deepen our understandings of the ways discourses of urban housing crisis remain persistent even as crises continue to be framed as exceptional, rather than the system working as it was designed (Madden & Marcuse, 2016). Archival data from 1969–1975 was selected as it represents a period of development, displacement, and shifting housing relations in Vancouver. The city began the 1970s navigating state-proclaimed housing crises and local governments seeking ‘solutions’ to their respective crises. This time was marked by shifts in urban governance: as cities became increasingly extrospective, entrepreneurial, and guided by neoliberal principles of privatization, competition, and individualism, principles that extended into local rental markets (McCann, 2017). This was accompanied by changes to the Canadian welfare state: a hollowing out of resources and capital that resulted in an increased reliance on individualized care or care responsibility shifted to the non-profit and volunteer sectors (McKeen & Porter, 2003).
The Vancouver real estate industry continued to grow in power and profit: the real estate, insurance, and finance industries grew by a total of 207 percent between 1961 and 1981 (Donaldson, 2019). Large-scale development projects, under the banner of urban renewal, contributed to widespread displacement of lower-income tenants, disproportionately Indigenous individuals, seniors, racialized residents, and immigrants (Donaldson, 2019; Francis, 2022). Tenants also faced unrestricted evictions, rapid rent increases, and low vacancy rates. While there were some landlord-tenant laws that protected tenants, overwhelmingly minimal restrictions on things like rent increases, eviction notices, and security deposits meant that the power differential between landlords, as property holders, and tenants, as non-propertied subjects, worsened.
In response, the Vancouver Tenants’ Union was established in 1968 and their organizing led to the passage of some tenant protections via amendments to the BC Landlord and Tenant Act in 1970. Changes included: the landlord-tenant relationship shifting from a “semi-feudal arrangement” with few tenants’ rights to a contractual one; prohibiting landlords from taking tenants’ goods; placing rules on security deposits; recognizing tenants’ right to privacy; prohibiting landlords from changing locks; and maintenance standards for rentals (B.C. Civil Liberties Association, 1970; Landlord and Tenant Act Amendment, 1970). A position paper published by the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) expressed concerns about the limited nature of these changes and how the revised laws would be enforced. Changes to the Act also made way for the creation of landlord and tenant advisory bureaus, which in Vancouver became the Rental Accommodation Grievance Board (RAGB) (B.C. Civil Liberties Association, 1970; Donaldson, 2019).
During its tenure from 1969–1975, the RAGB served as a mediator between landlords and tenants and in its initial years also had the authorization to settle grievances. While the creation of the RAGB did not ‘solve’ the housing crisis, arguably this state care infrastructure had material impact on the lives of some tenants. If tenants or landlords had an issue, they could reach out to the RAGB and ask for support or guidance. From 1969 to 1973, residents (primarily tenants) could file a request for a grievance hearing with the RAGB to resolve a housing dispute. The board was authorized to arbitrate landlord-tenant conflicts via hearings that eventually occurred four times per week. Once the board issued a ruling on the grievance, anyone who did not follow the order was subject to a fine of up to $500, three months’ imprisonment, or both (City of Vancouver Bylaw No. 4448, 1969). Not every issue escalated to a grievance: in some cases tenants sent a copy of correspondence with their landlord to the RAGB as well as way of ensuring there was a landlord watchdog, and in other cases tenants were simply asking for advice. Prevalent issues raised by tenants to the board related to rent increases, repair issues, eviction notices, or withheld security deposits. In its first year the RAGB dealt with 378 grievances and eventually had enough notoriety that tenants from other cities were writing to the board for advice as well, even if their own city had similar infrastructure (Vancouver RAGB, 1969–1974).
The RAGB is a form of local state housing care infrastructure, as are the landlord-tenant laws that they respond to. Through its function as infrastructure that served as mediator of the power dynamic between landlords and tenants, the RAGB at once served to “order and create difference” (Power & Mee, 2020: 488). The (re)creation of difference is apparent not only in how the board responded to tenant asks for support, but in the structure of the board itself. The RAGB's infrastructure was shaped by cisheteropatriarchal norms of property owners and who is a care receiver versus care worker. The RAGB consisted of three appointed members, all of whom had real estate industry ties and access to wealth (The Vancouver Sun, 1973 May 1). The lack of tenant representation on the board, despite demands from the Vancouver Tenants’ Union, positions people with access to wealth and property as reliable, capable state actors who can rule on landlord-tenant conflict and tenants as ‘vulnerable others’ who must turn to the state to ask for help and care, a relationship upheld by cisheteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism (M. McCann & Lovell, 2020). While the RAGB had a positive impact for many tenants, when analyzed through the lens of care, the complex impact of cisheteropatriarchal structures and uneven power in these relationships becomes apparent.
Locating care in state archives
I draw on archival materials from Vancouver, BC, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish First Nations, to analyze encounters between tenants and local state infrastructure between 1969 and 1975. I employ archival relational analysis of files gathered from the City of Vancouver Archives, which are the state archives at the urban scale in the city. I conduct a dual reading of landlord and tenant claims, which involves reading the claims in relation to one another as well as individual artefacts. I focus specifically on local state archives in order to assess how tenants interact with state actors and infrastructure, as well as interpreting how the state perceives state care obligations and efficacy. Materials included letters and other communications between local state actors and urban residents and organizations, petitions, press releases, and records of board or committee proceedings and decisions. Analysis of archival materials consisted of a brief deductive phase, where I used etic codes connected to research questions and field notes to develop an initial coding frame. I then moved to inductive coding, analyzing data for emergent themes that were missed during deductive coding. I identified the types of landlord-tenant laws with which tenants were interacting (e.g., rent increase notices, repairs/pests, eviction) and the relationships of care they discussed (e.g., landlord-tenant, tenant-tenant, tenant-state). I identified themes across each of these broader code categories to deepen analysis. The recounting of tenants’ experiences via letters is not to reproduce narratives that suggest tenants are vulnerable or helpless without state care, as is too often done in research on marginalized groups, but rather to make explicit the conditions that tenants are responding to when demanding care, pushing back on narratives that suggest tenants seeking safe and secure housing are ‘entitled’ or ‘whiny’.
Engaging feminist methodologies as a guiding compass, archives are understood as incomplete and inaccurate in their portrayal of history and are themselves representative of power relations shaped by cisheteropatriarchal, racist, colonial systems (Marshall & Tortorici, 2022; Stoler, 2002; Van Sant et al., 2020; Wideman, 2024). For example, it is likely that predominantly white, cisgender, heterosexual tenants would feel safer demanding care from state infrastructures in the first place, because the colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, racial capitalist system protects whiteness and cisheteronormativity. To this end, I do not presume identities of individuals represented in the archives. Where identities are described in my analysis, I rely on self-identification of the person or group: through how they describe themselves explicitly or through letter sign-offs (e.g., Mrs., Miss., Mr). Even as I rely on these formal signifiers, they represent cisheteropatriarchal relations and will not necessarily be wholly accurate or complete representations of those whose lives and experiences have been placed in state archives.
Tenants as crisis careworkers
To understand the impacts of cisheteropatriarchal housing systems on the conditions in which tenants are able to conceive, experience, and enact care through local state care infrastructure, I will begin by discussing how Vancouver's Rental Accommodation Grievance Board essentially required that tenants provide their own care labour in order to access state care. As state housing care infrastructure embedded within settler colonial racial capitalism, the caring capacity of the Rental Accommodation Grievance Board was limited and privileged the needs of subjects privileged under cisheteropatriarchy. Further, care from the RAGB became possible only through the work of tenants. On paper, many landlord-tenant laws in this period were established with an intention of providing care to tenants by offering protection in a housing system that does not serve non-propertied residents. In practice, the laws were unevenly enforced and the onus was on tenants to decide if they were going to attempt (and had capacity) to get their landlord to follow the law so they could receive care through their housing. In their encounters with state care infrastructure, tenants became crisis careworkers for landlords, the state, themselves, and other tenants. 2 Tenants’ multifaceted care work was impacted by heteropaternalism and shaped the nature of care in housing crisis.
Tenants provided care labour by educating landlords about landlord-tenant laws and informing state actors that their own laws had been violated. In responses to tenants requesting information about the law, the RAGB suggested that tenants notify their landlords of the law that had been broken, or file an application for a grievance hearing. In some cases, the landlord refused to believe that the tenants were correct, even with the backing of the RAGB, which required further labour from tenants as they had to continue communicating with both parties. As Mr and Mrs. O’Brien stated, “He [the landlord] steadfastly insists that he is right” (Chronological file C, n.d.). Heteropaternalism positions property ownership as “responsible citizens” who are capable and wise: even when faced with information from tenants about the law, many landlords were reluctant to admit they were at fault or rectify the situation (Arvin et al., 2013).
In some grievance hearings, landlords brought other tenants to testify as witnesses in favour of the landlord, or to provide translation services (though whether or not tenants can consent to this labour, given the power differential, is questionable). Tenants’ care work in these contexts was in addition to the other care work that tenants provide in their lives: many letters recounted that the substandard living conditions were impacting the health of tenants’ children. The labour of tenants to educate landlords, support them during grievance hearings, and take care of their properties challenges care discourses that position non-propertied individuals as only care receivers, while also illuminating the complexities of care (Cox, 2010). Given the situations of harm and housing insecurity the legal violations placed tenants in, tenant care provision to landlords occurs in a structurally unequal relationship. Tenants educate landlords while also attempting to care for themselves: with the hope that upon learning the laws the landlords will rectify the illegal eviction notice, living conditions, or rent increase. However, due to their propertied power, landlords involved in grievances often did not respond to tenants’ care labour with reciprocal care.
In addition to their care labour for landlords, tenants’ care demands facilitated the functioning of the Rental Accommodation Grievance Board. In order to potentially access care from the state, tenants had to contact the RAGB, file a request for a grievance, gather the evidence needed for the grievance, and attend the hearing. While evidently not all tenants reached out to the RAGB for support, that was not necessarily a choice that was made: for example, there was a significant time investment needed (including the potential for lost wages) and for many tenants the state was not a source of care as state infrastructure has often been used to escalate violence against marginalized communities (Spade, 2015). Tenants were aware of the extent to which state care infrastructures relied on their care labour, as Mr and Mrs. O’Brien write: We wish to state, respectfully, we are dumbfounded that the onus is on the tenant to advise the landlord on the Landlord and Tenant Act. Being a businessman he should be aware of the law. (Chronological file C, n.d.).
Labour that supported the functioning of the RAGB emphasizes the gendered nature of care and domestic work. In grievance applications where the issue was related to a withheld security deposit, male tenants often recounted how their wives and daughters had thoroughly cleaned the unit before they moved out. As one grievance detailed, “My wife took a day off work and cleaned the apt [apartment] the day we moved. The manager and his wife were quite satisfied” (Awaiting Grievance, 1971–1973). This illustrates how women's labour is differentially valued and the reference to “the manager and his wife” suggests that cisheteropatriarchal norms of who is a property owner shape non-propertied relationships as well (Blomley & the Right to Remain Collective, 2021). Further, as the (unpaid) care work of women created evidence to support grievance claims (at the expense of paid work), cisheteropatriarchal structures reinforces the uneven gendered responsibility for care work across the public-private spaces of housing (Peake, 2017).
Even as state care infrastructure relied on the labour of tenants, the impacts of a cisheteropatriarchal housing system positions tenants as unreliable, irresponsible, and naïve citizens, which meant that tenants often engaged in additional labour to try to render themselves deserving of state care (Rodriguez, 2021). They expressed hope that they would receive the support they needed which allows local state actors to perceive themselves as caring. This perpetuation of the ‘myth of the benevolent state’ reinforces perceptions of the state as a heteropaternal, legitimate authority that is responsible for providing protection, support, and care to citizens (Marcuse, 1978). As I will discuss in the next section, the reliance of state infrastructure on these tenant care relations exacerbated gender-based violence on tenants as they sought care in their housing.
Care demands and landlord violence
The second entry point through which I consider the impacts of cisheteropatriarchal housing systems on tenants’ access to state care infrastructures is a close examination of the ways that state infrastructure reliance on tenants as careworkers triggered gender-based violence and harassment in various forms, which intensified care inequities. Tenants’ invocation of their rights under the law in many cases exacerbated the violence of housing crises for people already experiencing housing precarity: where landlords responded to tenants’ care needs with verbal and physical violence and harassment.
In early 1974, Mrs. Grayson received an illegal notice of a rent increase from her landlord. The landlord had not followed the legal requirements of a rent increase, so Mrs. Grayson stayed in her unit. According to the tenant, the landlord became “abusive with harassment and surveillance” (Landlord and Tenant Act, n.d.). Mrs. Grayson reached out to local state actors for support, including a Vancouver Alderman who advised her to remain in the unit. Notes taken by the RAGB state that the landlord attempted to strangle the tenant and that she was now requesting a letter to advise the landlord of her rights. In their response, the RAGB wrote: We have your request for some information regarding Tenant's rights. This is a topic which is quite extensive and would take a long letter to fully explain it. We would suggest that you go to one of the nearby book stores, and ask for a copy of the British Columbia Landlord and Tenant Relations … attached is a copy of Section 51, of the Landlord and Tenant Act, which deals with rent increases and this you could hand to your Landlord to bring him up to date on this question. We hope that this will help you with this problem. (Landlord and Tenant Act, n.d.).
The violent and disproportionate responses from landlords to tenants’ care needs were mirrored in other cases as well: landlords would give tenants eviction notices when tenants informed them they broke the law; remove tenants’ belongings and then change the locks; keep security deposits without cause; enter units without consent or notice; and use their power to bring other tenants to grievance hearings to testify against their neighbours. In one case, a tenant moved out of her place without notice because the landlord repeatedly entered her apartment without consent (Minutes Nov. 69-June 1970, 1969–70). One tenant acknowledged that she did break a rule by having someone over for tea late at night, but the next day the landlord walked in, without knocking, “and grabbed my clothing at my neck and threatened me with his fists almost punching my chin” (Complaints, 1973–1974). The tenant was so frightened that she immediately left her home and was too scared to get her belongings. Her brother tried to help her but they struggled to get her stuff back. Responses from landlords and the RAGB to tenants’ care demands in these instances suggest that embedded power and state tolerance of gender-based violence via patriarchal separation and “man's castle” discourses is extended to landlords and their property, at the expense of the tenant who actually lives in the housing (Pateman, 1989; McDowell, 1999).
Through landlord violence and other behaviour, tenants were often exasperated at the ways landlords were ‘uncaring.’ One tenant described their landlord as having “utter disregard for tenants living here” and another wrote, “In short Mrs. Landlord does not seem to understand the plight of the poor and how sincere I really wish to be happy” (Awaiting Grievance, 1971–1973; Landlord and Tenant Act, n.d.). Landlords' failure to respond to tenants or responding with violence against women in their homes reproduces normalization of gender-based violence in housing, that does not require state response or intervention because it is not exceptional under cisheteropatriarchal relations (Datta, 2015). Tenants took on risk to demand care from state infrastructure, but the RAGB's failure to provide adequate care escalated already vulnerable position of tenants within the housing system. That some landlords felt able to respond to tenants’ rights-claiming with violence and harassment speaks to the unequal power dynamic between landlords and tenants in a cisheteropatriarchal housing system that privileges white, straight, propertied men. This is further evidenced by the fact that letters detailed incidents of overwhelmingly men landlords who were assaulting women tenants.
Alongside recounting their experiences of harm, in letters to the RAGB tenants often expressed hope that they would receive the support that they needed. For example, as one tenant wrote, “I hope you can help me” (Awaiting Grievance, 1971–1973). Alongside expressions of hope, tenants tried to rationalize their asks for care by demonstrating they had “put up with it” as much as they could. As Miss. Torres wrote, describing issues with water shortages in the building: “I can put up with a lot as these people [her neighbours] are not rich either and I cannot move as I have had 4 funerals in 4 months that have to be paid for” (Awaiting Grievance, 1971–1973). Another tenant explained that they had been dealing with issues in their housing for two months: We have now lived here two complete months with various inconveniences. Because of their constant presence, we began to think of the workmen as roomates [sic]. (Grievances in abeyance, 1970–71).
The limits of “putting up with it” are shaped by the need to be a ‘good tenant’ in order to secure housing, tenants’ rights, and survive the violence of a cisheteropatriarchal housing system. McCann and Lovell (2020) suggest that white property owners, through their intimate relationship with the state, are designated as deserving of rights and positioned as rational, disciplined, and conventional—in contrast to non-propertied groups who are framed as erratic and undeserving of rights. Tenants therefore have to negotiate when and how they will push back, in order to reduce the risk of further distancing themselves from rights—and care—access. As I will explore in the next section, tenants’ care work pushes back against pervasive cisheteropatriarchal social categorization that positions them as less deserving of rights and citizenship and normalizes often violence that arose in response to their care demands (Rodriguez, 2021).
Resisting normative relations of state care infrastructure
The third entry point through which I examine linkages between state care infrastructure and tenants’ conditions to conceive, experience, and enact care is an analysis of tenants’ resistance to cisheteropatriarchal norms of who is deserving of care and where care ‘belongs’ in housing. The juxtaposition of tenants’ care work to responses from state actors and landlords to tenant care needs suggests that cisheteropatriarchal structures shape these care relationships in that tenants are care workers while not perceived as deserving of care because they deviate from “responsible citizenship” under heteropaternalism (Arvin et al., 2013). Yet, many tenants resisted care norms that categorized their care needs as secondary to the protection of profit and property. This resistance occurred primarily through tenants directly challenging the normalization of propertied power and what ‘belongs’ in private spaces, exhibiting self-care through the act of letter-writing, and collective care through the act of witnessing. I am not employing self-care in this context in order to suggest that this is where care in housing should be taking place: rather, I follow Kim and Schalk (2021), and Lorde's ([1988] 2017) use of self-care to reference care for the self that is rooted in survival, made necessary through crises inherent to cisheteropatriarchal housing systems.
Tenants used the act of letter writing to repeatedly challenge hegemonic property logics that privilege property and capital over life and housing as shelter. Instead, they suggested that rent increases were unwarranted and unjustified, that they deserved to live in housing that met their health, housing, and care needs, and that they should not be evicted or faced with violence simply for asserting their rights and demanding that landlords follow the laws. Letters written, primarily by women, to the RAGB were a form of care labour that specifically represented care for the self. To challenge these cisheteropatriarchal norms, tenants questioned the fairness of landlord behaviour that resulted tenants losing money or their housing, especially when they perceived the behaviour to be illegal under landlord-tenant law. For example, as one tenant wrote: I’m rather tired of unscrupulous landlords that always seem to think that once you have paid them $25 damage deposit, it is theirs as a gift.
The act of writing letters to the RAGB was a form of self-care because tenants took on significant risk to write the letters in the first place, in order to advocate for themselves (Kim & Schalk, 2021). This was evident in the fear expressed in tenants’ letters, where people asked to remain anonymous as a form of protection against landlord retaliation. Letter-writing was a significant undertaking of labour: in the actual writing itself, which often took multiple exchanges with the RAGB; the personal risk of violence that tenants were taking on by challenging landlords and issuing complaints publicly; and the evidence gathering that required not only trying to navigate landlord-tenant laws, but also often involved recounting intimate details about their lives. While ‘man's home is his castle’ narratives normalize the concealment of what occurs in private spaces of the home, by writing letters tenants resist these norms by bringing landlords’ actions in tenants’ homes into direct sight of state actors, forcing it into the public (Brickell, 2012; McDowell, 1999).
Tenants’ resistance to cisheteronormative care norms also occurred through collective tenant-to-tenant care, through the labour of witnessing and believing. In parallel with conceptualizations of ‘caring-with’, tenant-to-tenant care subverts dominant discourse that positions low-income tenants as ‘vulnerable others’ rather than care actors who can provide care for themselves and each other when state care infrastructure is inadequate (Power, 2019; Thompson, 2023). In their letters, many tenants noted they had a witness, usually a neighbour or friend, who could corroborate the details the tenant was sharing with the RAGB in order to receive state care. In addition to the signoff from the tenant, sometimes there would also be the signature from their witness. The act of witnessing for another is care labour and is a crucial component of receiving care in a system that designates tenants as unreliable, irresponsible, and less believable. Witnessing is an act of solidarity that tells the tenant that they are reliable, responsible, and worthy of being believed, while simultaneously increasing their opportunity to receive care because they become more legible to the state. This stands in contrast to what some tenants had to navigate when they alerted landlords to the law violation. As Miss. Boothby wrote, “I feel the worst thing about it, is the fact that after studying the rules I cannot find anything we have done wrong” (Grievances in abeyance, 1970–71). Notably, when witnesses had to also attend grievance hearings, they too were taking on additional labour in order to increase the likelihood that tenants could access care from the state care infrastructure of the RAGB. The labour of witnessing and collective protection becomes necessary to access care in a heteropaternal system that also portrays feminized tenants as less believable and less capable than masculine landlords and state actors (Arvin et al., 2013).
Finally, some tenants operated collectively in order to challenge the power imbalance between themselves as non-propertied subjects and landlords as property owners. Grievance applications were filed with signatures from multiple tenants in a building. Roommates also submitted letters or grievances together. In one case, a former tenant of the landlord came to the hearing in order to support the current tenant's grievance. In navigating broken landlord-tenant laws, tenants were often supported by friends, family members, roommates, and neighbours who helped them navigate the grievance proceedings, obtain their belongings, and communicate with state actors and landlords. Tenants conferred with their neighbours to see if they too had received rent increases, before contacting the RAGB. Collective organizing with neighbours and other tenants runs contrary to cisheteronormative structures that prioritize the heterosexual nuclear family as the main relationship that occupies the private home (Oswin, 2010).
In some cases, tenants contacted the RAGB after they had already left their unit, or even if they were uncertain they would be able to stay. As one group of tenants wrote: “As this woman has been ruthless in her earlier transactions, we are taking any steps we can at this time to prevent abuse of future tenants on this property, whether that be us or someone else” (Chronological file C, n.d.). One group of tenants who wrote to the RAGB to inform them of illegal rent increases were also supported by a law student. The collectivity of this care work as tenants care with one another strengthens tenants’ care demands and provides support for the significant amount of tenant labour required to access state care infrastructure (Power, 2019). This increases the power of tenants and might also provide protection from negative state or landlord reactions to care demands. Collective witnessing ruptures one of the consequences of the privacy and secrecy of cisheteropatriarchal property relations: if events occur in homes that are not meant to be seen in public, it reinforces the discrediting of feminized tenants’ experiences (Arvin et al., 2013; Brickell, 2020). Collective witnessing, in public grievance hearings, disrupts this process and forces state care infrastructure to also witness events and make a decision about whether or not they will enact care for tenants.
Conclusion
Hegemonic discourse in housing crises positions tenants solely as care receivers in need of saving. Tenants’ access to care, including through local state care infrastructure, is shaped through structural impacts of a cisheteropatriarchal housing system. While some tenants turn to local state infrastructure for care, the limits of local state care means that we must pay careful attention to the possibilities of care accessible to tenants in crisis, through the state and beyond. Considerations of the state's role in care provision require paying close attention to how state care currently functions under cisheteropatriarchy in settler colonial racial capitalist housing systems and the resulting impacts on tenants. In doing so we can gain clarity for future possibilities for care in housing, be that via state care or otherwise.
With this intention, in this paper I have analyzed care interactions between tenants, landlords, and the Rental Accommodation Grievance Board within the context of a cisheteropatriarchal housing system to argue that the reliance on tenants as careworkers in housing crises exacerbates gendered inequities and gender-based harms for those already vulnerable to housing precarity. Further, I have shown that without the care work of tenants, local state infrastructure's capacity to provide any form of care would be significantly limited. This paper contributes to theorizations of how cisheteropatriarchal structures across housing and care shape the conditions through which tenants can receive or demand state care and the resulting harms from state care infrastructure that is reliant on tenants’ care.
I illustrated that the very structure of the RAGB reinforced notions of men and property-owners as the capable, paternal figures responsible for doling out care to other populations. The enforcement of landlord-tenant laws compounded such discourse, because the labour of ensuring laws were followed was put on tenants who then had to turn to the paternal RAGB in order for the issue to possibly be addressed. Men landlords who responded to women tenants’ enactment of their rights through violence remind us of the complex orientation of housing as public and private, where domestic space is too often situated as an intimate space of violence beyond the purview of the state. Further, tenants’ role as crisis careworkers extended in other directions: from educating landlords about the law to providing care for state infrastructure so that the RAGB could function, which emphasized the gendered nature of care and domestic work.
Moreover, the processes of the housing system are inherently violent: through displacement, dispossession, and eviction. This was further evidenced in the ways that landlord violence in response to care demands occurs inside people's homes and is at once intimate and inescapable (Blunt & Varley, 2004; Neely & Lopez, 2021). While there is a tendency to place capitalist relations in the public sphere, away from the private sphere of the home and care work, the behaviour of these landlords serves as a clear reminder that private and public spaces are not bound by rigid borders and are always interconnected. The relegation of the home to private spaces, as a ‘man's castle’, allows for cisheteropatriarchal domination through the concealment and hiding of gendered violence against tenants by landlords.
In response to these conditions, the letters that tenants, many of whom identified as women, wrote to the RAGB challenged dominant property logics and discourses of tenants as uncaring actors. These acts illustrate the potential for different types of self-care: in writing these letters tenants asserted that they deserved care through safe, secure, reliable housing. Tenants’ collective care with each other through labour in witnessing, believing, and organizing continued to cement care demands that challenged the power imbalance between hegemonic concepts of the masculine, reliable, and propertied subject versus the feminized, unreliable, unpropertied one, under a racial capitalist, colonial housing system.
Letters sent to the RAGB pointed to the structural power of landlords as propertied subjects: the consistent, pervasive pattern of landlords not responding to tenants, or responding with retaliation, violence, and delegitimization of tenants’ claims reveals the structural workings of propertied citizenship. The letters demonstrate that tenants who navigated broken landlord-tenant laws were not the result of one ‘bad egg’ landlord or the individualized ‘failures’ of a tenant, but rather symptomatic of a system-wide issue of uneven power dynamics between landlords and tenants. All tenants are deserving of care through housing. This care must be accessible without further exacerbation of violence and displacement in housing crises.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My sincere gratitude to Sarah Elwood for her invaluable, ongoing mentorship and willingness to join me with curiosity and compassion in digital archive spaces. Thank you to Kim England, Larry Knopp, Eugene McCann, Rebecca Walter, and Jeff Masuda for the support and feedback on earlier drafts. Many thanks as well to the archivists and staff at the City of Vancouver municipal archives. I am grateful to Gurpreet Kambo, Helen and Karl Varga, Zoë Thompson, Julian Barr, Caitlin Alcorn, and the Place + Space Collective for their ongoing support. Thank you to Charlie and Diesel for being my most consistent writing companions. Finally, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers, editors, and staff at EPD: Society & Space whose generative feedback and labour improved and supported this paper through to publication. Any remaining errors are mine.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, (grant number 752-2020-0434).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.