Resisting Eviction centres tenant organizing in its investigation of gentrification, eviction and the financialization of rental housing. Andrew Crosby argues that racial discrimination, property relations and settler colonialism inform contemporary urban (re)development efforts and impacts affordable housing loss.
How can the City of Ottawa aspire to become "North America's most liveable mid-sized city" while large-scale, demolition-driven evictions displace hundreds of people and destroy a community? Troubling discourses of urban liveability, revitalization and improvement, Crosby examines the deliberate destruction of home--domicide--and tenant resistance in the Heron Gate neighbourhood in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin land.
Heron Gate is a large rental neighbourhood owned by one multi-billion-dollar real estate investment firm. Around 800 people--predominantly lower-income, racialized households--have been demovicted and displaced from the neighbourhood since 2016, leading to the emergence of the Herongate Tenant Coalition to fight the evictions and confront the landlord-developer. This case study is meticulously documented through political activist ethnography, making this book a brilliant example of ethical engagement and methodological integrity.
What People Are Saying
“Andrew Crosby masterfully exposes and interrogates the municipally sanctioned, predatory, underhanded practices and tactics of corporate landlords and real estate investment firms across the unceded and unsurrendered lands of Algonquin, Anishinabek territory within the so-called City of Ottawa. He calls into question the carceral, settler colonial processes of urban renewal and gentrification that have culminated in the ongoing destruction of the community of Herongate, an ethno-racial enclave once home to a significant, distinctly racialized, working-class portion of Ottawa’s population via mass demoviction and displacement. With rigorous, dedicated honesty and tireless devotion, Andrew Crosby meticulously unpacks systemic, racist, and death-making policies and property relations, as well as the complicity of state and institutional actors, that have left the once-bustling and life-soaked Herongate fractured, but still resisting.” Nima Hussein, Herongate Tenant Coalition organizer
“Resisting Eviction offers an illuminating account of a fierce community struggle against developer-driven displacement in Ottawa’s Heron Gate neighborhood. Critically emphasizing the settler colonial context, Andrew Crosby combines a careful analysis of the forces driving displacement with collaborative inquiry into community-based efforts to fight it. This is the best kind of partisan scholarship, both meticulously researched and firmly rooted in grassroots organizing.” Chris Dixon, author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements
“A powerful account of the racialized dispossessive machine that is financialization, and the struggle to secure home under logics of racial capitalism” Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University
About the Author
Andrew Crosby is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, with a PhD in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. He is co-author of Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State (2018, Fernwood).
Table of Contents
- Revitalization and Settler Colonial “Improvement”
- The Racial Logics of Property Relations in Urban Settler Formations
- Domicide in the Liveable City
- Research Methods and Design
- The Heron Gate Community and the Onset of Racial Stigma and Strategic Neglect
- Heron Gate and the Financialization of Rental Housing
- Demoviction 2016: Domicide and Redevelopment in Heron Gate
- Demoviction 2018: Tenant Resistance to Domicide
- Community Wellbeing in the Liveable City: A Social Framework for Domicide
- Racial Discrimination in Housing and Human Rights