Institute on Inequality and Democracy

This report summarizes the first eighteen months of the Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), an online legal mutual aid tool that helps any California tenant facing a legal eviction to file a legal answer with the court. Through this intervention, the TPT seeks first to keep tenants housed, but as a threshold onto de-individualizing tenancy through research-supported organizing. The TPT’s backend database provides unprecedented tenant-reported, real-time eviction information by zip code, landlord, tenant race/ethnicity and more. In an otherwise opaque data landscape of evictions, this research-organizing partnership aims to enable tenants to fight their evictions, use the data produced in that process to support ongoing and new local tenant organizing, while also building translocal tenant power at the scale that can contend with the consolidation of rental housing ownership. This report leverages the toolkit’s unique data to provide insights into the racialized eviction and rent debt landscape in post-pandemic California, revealing the activity of the firms and lawyers driving it.