A galvanizing story of how everyday people built a powerful anti-eviction movement in gentrified San Francisco.

In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an "eviction epidemic" of long-term tenants. Yet these changes also drove an inspiring housing justice movement that exposed gentrification as far from inevitable.

In Anti-Eviction, anthropologist and scholar-activist Manissa Maharawal tells the story of how residents built a powerful anti-eviction movement and how they fought—and sometimes won—a right to their homes and their city. Focusing on the stories of tenants facing eviction, Maharawal describes the different strategies for resistance that emerged as well as lessons for the broader national housing crisis, beyond California. This illuminating book offers not only actionable models for activism and resisting gentrification, but also a powerful study of how ordinary people came together to organize for housing justice and change their city.

About the Author

Manissa Maharawal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, and a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

Reviews

"In Anti-Eviction, Manissa Maharawal brings readers inside the housing justice movement in a crucial time and place: the San Francisco tech boom of the 2010s. The city prefigured the crisis that has gone national since, and this beautifully written book not only shows how activists fought back, but demonstrates the power of activist researchers to put their expertise to work changing the world. This is a work of scholarship that reads like a novel, driven by narrative and characters you won't forget, while illuminating the complicated roots of today's housing crisis."—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

"With Anti-Eviction, Maharawal delivers a major new contribution to the study of protests and social movements. Her ethnographic insights will be as essential to activists and policymakers as they are to scholars."—Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State

"From the Google bus past to the technofascist present, Maharawal dissects the forces evicting ordinary people from our cities while showing in compelling ethnographic detail how these forces can be resisted—and why they must be. Beautifully relaying the lives and struggles of working-class San Franciscans, Anti-Eviction is politically vital and strategically essential reading."—Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits to Capital

"Anti-Eviction is a must-read in this political moment for anyone looking for leftist resistance. From the inside of the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco, Maharawal gives us the nuts and bolts of how to build a successful housing justice movement through deep relationships, storytelling, direct action, and a politics of collective care. May her book ignite in all of us the fire necessary to build a more just and equitable urban environment where everyone has the right to safe and affordable housing."—Nicole Fabricant, author of Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore

"Vibrant and engaging—a vital snapshot of the community organizing that rose up against displacement in the age of the Google bus."—Rachel Brahinsky, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Politics, University of San Francisco