Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

"We Deserve Rent Control": Digital histories of rent control debates in Seattle, USA and Vancouver, Canada

This project brings together archival material and interviews in a StoryMap to trace digital histories of rent control debates in Seattle, USA and Vancouver, Canada. Understanding the cities’ shared stories of rent control, despite their diverse national contexts, helps us to conceptualize the ways that urban politics are situated within racial capitalist and settler-colonial histories/presents of housing development. The purpose of the project is to provide a tool to strengthen understandings of ways that housing politics are situated within power structures of race, gender, sexuality, and class as we engage with one piece of housing history is of particular importance because of the prominence of rent control debates in contemporary housing debates.