From Housing Stratification to Class Exploitation

The article reviews Ricardo Tranjan’s book The Tenant Class (2023), which examines housing inequality and class relations within the rental housing market. The study aligns with current developments in Canadian housing sociology, a field that is undergoing a period of active institutionalization and theoretical renewal. Tranjan advances the Marxist political economy tradition, conceptualizing tenants as a social class subjected to economic exploitation by landlords, and argues that Canada’s so-called housing crisis is not an accidental phenomenon but a stable system of power and income redistribution. The review notes that, despite the book’s conceptual proximity to the housing class theory of J.Rex and R.Moore, Tranjan does not explicitly engage with their framework, limiting his analysis to the categories of class struggle and exploitation. This narrows the book’s theoretical depth but enhances its political relevance and public resonance. The work is regarded as an important contribution to housing sociology, reintroducing the notion of “class” into both academic and public discourse and uncovering the political foundations of housing inequality. The book may be of interest to sociologists, scholars of social policy and urban studies, as well as educators and housing activists concerned with issues of affordability and tenant organizing

Marxist philosophy · Politics · Public housing · Social class · Social stratification · Social theory · Working class · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Urban Planning and Governance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• Ricardo Tranjan, The Tenant Class

  Simon Vickers•Urban History Review•2024

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