Participation instituted against tenants’ associations? Competition and cooperation between landlords and tenants

This article looks at current negotiations between landlords and tenants in social housing. Although tenants’ associations have played a major role in the past, making demands and mobilizing people, they often appear outdated today: old-fashioned, discredited by social landlords and unknown to most tenants. As a result, the participation institutionalized by social housing organizations often has the (more or less hidden) aim of bypassing these associations and creating new interfaces for dialogue “with the silent majority” of tenants (to use the words of one rental management manager). However, the surveys we have carried out reveal ambivalent relationships, and even more or less constrained collaborations, between social landlords and these associations, which suggest that the latter are far from disappearing as the literature sometimes claims. Tenants’ associations still have resources that enable them to retain margins of power: detailed knowledge of the area, a position as mediator, and militant capital, which social housing organizations take advantage of insofar as it serves their interests. In many cases, a system of cross-interests has been set up, in which social landlords rely on tenants’ associations, which they find difficult to do without, while some tenants’ associations try to get involved in institutionalized participation schemes, which may (perhaps) enable them to regenerate themselves and continue to fight for tenants’ rights.