When a House Explodes: Remarks on Emancipatory Politics in Times of Crises

I

Let me start here: A couple of months ago, on June 18th, 2024, a house located at 205 Carbon St on the North Side of Syracuse exploded. Its walls buckled and its roof caved in. The small, two-story house, built in 1920, simply crumpled to the ground in a movement similar to the crushing of an aluminum can. Neighbors along the surrounding blocks had been trying to stay cool while the temperature soared into the upper 90s. They later reported feeling the ground shake at the time of the explosion.

Thirteen people from two different families had been crammed into the two-bedroom, 904 square foot house that afternoon, 12 of whom would eventually be admitted to the hospital. Five, including two toddlers and an infant, were in critical condition, left fighting for their lives after sustaining severe burns and bodily injuries after being crushed beneath cement, drywall, wooden beams, appliances, and downed wires.

The families were members of the Rohingya community. They had gathered in the home that day to celebrate Eid al-Adha. They had fled persecution by the military regime in Myanmar, landing first in a refugee camp in Malaysia, before being resettled – several years apart – in Syracuse, NY, home to a growing Burmese Muslim community. One of the families had arrived in Syracuse just 12 days earlier. Within 2 weeks of resettlement, they experienced life-altering calamity instead of long sought after safety.

First responders reported that when they arrived on the scene, it was ‘sheer mayhem’. The Syracuse Fire Lieutenant Chris Janus said, ‘it was almost like taking ten different alarms and putting them all into one’ (Moss, 2024).

II

I open with this story because it crystallizes something about the moment we’re living through, a moment that many have come to refer to via the shorthand of ‘polycrisis’, a time of ‘sheer mayhem’ that threatens human life, loosens our grip on reality, splinters our attention, and depletes our energy. I know many of us ask ourselves the question, day in and day out: How the hell do we respond when there are at least 10 different alarms going off at once?

The story of the explosion at 205 Carbon St is like a prism, refracting a whole assortment of interconnected and escalating crises—economic, political, ecological. I could, of course, enumerate on many, but I have time to just briefly highlight a few:

The first is deepening poverty and rising economic inequality. The explosion took place in a city that is characterized by extreme levels of poverty, particularly among Black and Latinx families. Over 30% of all households live in poverty. Fully 10% of households make less than US$10,000 per year. Syracuse has the highest child poverty rate in the US, with nearly half (48.4%) of all kids living below the poverty line. This devastating poverty must be contextualized within skyrocketing global economic inequality. The poorest half of the world’s population owns just 2% of total wealth, while the richest 10% of the global population owns 76%. Over the past two decades alone, the gap between the average incomes of the top 10% and the bottom 50% of individuals has almost doubled.

It intersects with the escalation of political violence and state-led campaigns of ethnic cleansing. From Myanmar to Gaza and beyond, we are witnessing an escalation in projects of annihilation and politics of genocide. Every day brings waves of violence, erasure, destruction, and mass killings. We are witnessing the unceasing Israeli assault on Palestinians in Gaza, which has turned homes, schools, and hospitals into mass graveyards. Those affected by the house explosion are among more than a million people who have fled the dehumanization, racialized architecture of control, unfettered violence, and so-called ‘clearance operations’ carried out by the military in Myanmar.

It was set against a backdrop of climate catastrophe. The planet is facing existential threats due to climate change and ecological strain. The explosion took place on one of the hottest days of the summer in what has turned out to the hottest summer in recorded human history. It took place in a city that has long framed itself not simply as a welcoming home to refugees but, more specifically, as a haven for climate refugees, given its long-standing protection from weather-related disasters, its distance from the coast, and its proximity to world’s largest supply of fresh water. It was so unbearably hot that day that as first responders searched for survivors amid the ruins, the city repurposed Centro buses—the city’s only form of public transportation—to use as makeshift ‘cooling stations’.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the story refracts a devasting housing crisis. Since 2020, rents have soared. Over half of all tenants are rent-burdened, spending more than 30% of their gross monthly income on rent. Evictions have spiked in many places across the country and homelessness is at a record high, with more than 650,000 people sleeping outside. The situation in Syracuse is especially dire. As of 2024, the city was named the most competitive rental market in the US (Herbert, 2024). Rents in the city have increased 39% since 2020, a rate that is double that of the roughly 20% increase we’ve seen nationwide. Between January 2023 and January 2024 alone, rents increased 9%, nearly three times as much as the rate of increase nationwide. Homelessness is five times greater than it was pre-pandemic. One out of every 10 students in Syracuse is homeless (Eisenstadt, 2023). Beyond this crisis of affordability lies a more hidden, but just as devastating, crisis of habitability. A study commissioned by the city itself found that substandard/hazardous housing conditions are not an aberration, but the norm for the majority of the city’s low-income renters (czbLLC, 2023). As one tenant matter-of-factly explained it to me: ‘It’s a low bar for what constitutes decent housing here’.

III

Following the explosion, the news media widely reported that ‘there were no active code violations at the time’ (Kirk, 2024).

But, building on Slater’s (2019) agnotological approach, which ‘seeks to dissect ignorance production methods and tactics of messengers of disinformation’ (p. 21), it is important to note that there were no active code violations at the time because there had been no inspection of the property since October 2020. This is despite the fact that the property had a long history of documented problems and failed inspections, stemming from lead paint, collapsed ceilings, a broken front door, dilapidated steps, and raw sewage spewing into the basement.

At the time of the explosion, the property was long past due for an inspection and was not listed on the city’s rental registry. The city had mailed a 60-day notice to the landlord in August 2023, but the landlord never responded.

Had the landlord responded to renew the rental registry certificate, it would have triggered an inspection that presumably would have flagged the violation—an open, uncapped gas line—that ultimately led to the explosion. Both the housing code and the International Fuel Gas Code require that unused natural gas pipes be properly capped.

This was, to put it plainly, an entirely preventable disaster. The fix to the problem of the free-flowing gas that led to the explosion is right here in my hand—a gas cap that costs around US$2.

The pronouncement that ‘there were no active code violations at the time’ deliberately produced ignorance by chalking the tragedy up to mysterious forces. It diverted attention away from the striking inefficiencies of the city’s rental registry program and housing code enforcement. Furthermore, it diverted attention away from the greed, negligence, and depraved indifference on the part of the landlord, for whom the house was not a home, but a vehicle for predation and monetary extraction.

IV

But, of course, this isn’t a story about a singular landlord. It’s a much broader story about class struggle and the organized interests of the propertied class.

Six days after the explosion, while five of the victims still lie in the hospital, a group of major landlords sued the city to prevent code enforcement officers from conducting routine interior inspections of rental properties as a condition of being listed on the rental registry. Let me repeat that: the very same week of this entirely preventable explosion, a powerful group of organized landlords filed a lawsuit in Onondaga County Supreme Court against the city in an effort to prohibit interior inspections of apartments without a warrant (Knauss, 2024).

To be clear, inspections have long been a point of contention. The rental registry ordinance was initially passed in 2007 in the hopes of improving the quality of rental housing in Syracuse, most of which is owned by faceless and difficult-to-identify LLCs. Research has shown that levels of housing disrepair increase when properties transition from individual to LLC ownership (Travis, 2019). To comply with the registry, landlords were required to list a local contact person and submit to property inspections. In 2012, organized landlords—including some of the same plaintiffs in this current case—sued. The State Supreme Court Justice sided with the plaintiffs, concluding that requiring interior inspections was ‘not appropriate’.

The city amended the rental registry ordinance in 2018, so that it now requires either the landlord’s consent or a court warrant for an inspection. The ordinance was also the basis for the city’s renewed effort to address lead poisoning, codified in the lead paint law, passed in 2020, which gave code inspectors the authority and duty to check for lead paint in rental properties during the rental registry inspections.

In the 17 years since it was created, just 46% of the nearly 8500 properties covered by the ordinance—one or two family rental properties, which make up a significant share of the rental housing stock in the city—are in compliance. And under city law, landlords not in compliance with the rental registry cannot rent out properties or evict tenants.

In the current lawsuit, landlords claim that city officials are failing to issue rental registry certificates to landlords who apply and pay the US$150 fee but deny access for interior inspections. They say that the city’s practice pressures them into accepting inspections in order to get on the rental registry, violating their constitutional rights against ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’. The landlords are thus seeking an order that would require the city to issue their rental registry certificates without interior inspections, annihilating what has been one of the only tools at hand – however ineffective – to ensure the habitability of housing.

V

As work becomes an ever less stable basis of collective identity, housing has emerged as an increasingly critical site for the formation of political identities and development of contentious politics. There has been an explosive growth in the number of tenant unions and housing justice coalitions around the country (Appel et al., 2024; Card, 2022; Messamore, 2024; Michener and SoRelle, 2023; Moatasim, 2024).

I’ve spent the last several years working on a project to spawn and support the Syracuse Tenants Union to build the power necessary to address the city’s severe housing crisis. Alongside Jamila Michener from Cornell University, we have been using the tools of social research to help build a base of tenants who recognize themselves as political actors, with a shared set of interests, and help create a blueprint for action and strategy to address the deplorable conditions of housing (Chatterjee et al., 2024).

Just as landlords are taking collective action—to, as I’ve explained, contest interior housing inspections—so, too, are tenants, all in an effort to force landlords to redress hazards and improve the habitability of their properties. The Syracuse Tenants Union drafted a piece of legislation that was signed into law in December 2023 by Governor Kathy Hochul: the Tenant Dignity and Safe Housing Act, which gives renters the ability to easily and expeditiously file a court case to make landlords repair unsafe conditions in rental units. The law allows courts to order monetary judgments against landlords that ignore poor housing conditions or order rent reductions in future payments based on the diminished value of the property caused by unsafe housing conditions. At the local level, STU has launched a tenant-led campaign to expand and improve the city’s rental registry. Finally, STU is organizing tenants to exploit the existing inefficiencies of the program as a tool for eviction defense. Again, half of all rental properties are not in compliance with the law, which means the landlords have no legal basis to evict based on failure to pay rent. The court does not routinely check a property’s status on the registry prior to issuing eviction orders. So the tenant union has been organizing tenants to raise this in their affirmative defense, thereby throwing a wrench into the eviction machinery. It is slowly but surely transforming what has been a deeply entrenched culture of resignation—what Steven Schmidt (2024) in a recent Social Problems article referred to as ‘negotiating neglect’—into a rigorous politics of refusal.

Tenant unions are proliferating across the country, firmly extending the struggle against exploitation beyond the realm of production and into the spaces of social reproduction. I want to briefly highlight two particularly exciting developments. The first is the growing alliance between the labor movement and the movement for housing justice. In cities across the country, including in Syracuse, labor unions are joining in coalition with tenant organizations to address the housing crisis. We’re seeing labor unions put housing at the forefront of their demands. The Chicago Teacher’s Union, for instance, is demanding 10,000 new affordable housing units, with priority given to families with students in the public schools. We’re also seeing tenant unions secure collective bargaining agreements with corporate landlords. Finally, we’re seeing the passage of new legislation, such as the Union at Home bill in San Francisco, codifying tenants right to organize and mandating that landlords negotiate with tenant associations.

The second exciting development is that the tenant movement is scaling up and developing a national strategy. Just this week, I joined more than 360 people from around the country for the official launch of the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a national union of unions (starting off with representatives from tenant unions in Louisville, Kansas City, Chicago, Bozeman, and Connecticut). You might have read the op-ed by Tressie Macmillan Cottom (2024) on this development which appeared in the New York Times that same day. There is some indication that this federation is already shaping national policy. Both President Biden and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris have mentioned support for the Tenant Union Federation’s calls for ‘rent caps’ on federally financed properties. Under this proposal, landlords who own more than 50 units would face a choice: cap rents at 5% annually or lose access to a federal tax write-off that allows property owners to deduct the depreciating value of their assets.

IV

While this US$2 safety cap would have prevented the tragedy that befell the Rohingya refugee occupants of 205 Carbon Street, there is no singular piece of metal that is going to ensure our collective survival in these times of crises.

While the proposed rent cap would limit the rapacious exploitation and racialized dispossession of renters by real estate capital, it won’t, on its own, come close to solving the housing crisis, even it does (at least rhetorically) suggest that the government can and should play a role in shaping the housing market on behalf of tenants.

There is, in other words, no quick fix, no ‘cap’ we can screw on to thwart the crises we are up against.

We need to build multiracial working-class power via the slow but steadfast work of organizing. We need a proliferation of tenant unions to play not only defense, but to play offense, putting forward and popularizing radical proposals for alternative housing futures.