The Customary Law of the Landlord Class
The systematic erosion of tenants’ rights and the difficult process of fighting evictions is the enforcement of a customary law that benefits the landlord class, the ground-level administrators of the settler colonial project. Mamdani’s framework reveals housing court not as a neutral arbiter but as an institution that upholds the property rights of the settler over the human right to shelter of the native. The complex, bureaucratic process is designed to exhaust and defeat tenants, reinforcing their powerlessness. This is decentralized despotism in the private rental market. A Marxist analysis sees this as the legal superstructure protecting capitalist property relations. A feminist perspective highlights how evictions disproportionately traumatize women and children. The solution is the mass organization of tenants into unions capable of mounting collective resistance and the political fight for universal rent control and a right to counsel, shifting power from the landlord to the resident.
