Kenton Card (he/him), PhD, investigates housing policy, with expertise in tenant rights, social movements, and eviction/displacement mitigation. He is an urban planner, sociologist, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, Research Affiliate at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, and Visiting Urban Scholar at the Initiative on Cities at Boston University.

Kenton received the 2024 Janet Smith Emerging Activist Scholar Research Award from the Urban Affairs Association.

Kenton’s professional experience includes designing and supporting passage of Louisville’s Anti-Displacement Ordinance in collaboration with community partners and city planners. Other recent work evaluates how new tenant rights impact the housing market, which he has written about for the general public.

Kenton recently completed his PhD at UCLA, where he worked at the Center for Community Engagement and with the Community Scholars Program. In Germany, he was a Research Fellow at the Berlin House of Representatives, Freie Universität Berlin, and WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Kenton’s dissertation on The New Politics of Housing (2023) examined the evolving dynamics and discourses of rental housing politics across the United States and Germany since 2008, which has been published in Housing Studies, Urban Affairs Review, and Commoning the City.

Kenton is a Scholar Development Editor at Journal of Urban Affairs and former Managing Editor of Critical Planning Journal. Recently, he co-edited Special Issues on housing movements and care (for Antipode) and racial capitalism (for Environment & Planning C).

Kenton’s film Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore won multiple awards at film festivals. See the other pages for details about publications, films, and press.