Kenton Card (he/him), PhD, is a researcher and advocate focusing on the evolving landscape of rental housing politics. He is an urban planner, filmmaker, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs 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 managing an academic team to design and pass Louisville’s novel anti-displacement assessment tool. His latest empirical research debunks the claim that tenant legal protections reduce the rate of housing production, which Kenton has written about for popular audiences.

He recently completed his PhD at UCLA, worked at the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, and in Germany was a guest researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

His dissertation on The New Politics of Housing (2023) examined four processes across the United States and Germany between 2008-2023: struggles over ideas, struggles to collaboratively build new housing models, struggles to create offensive policy change, and struggles to influence new institutions in federal politics (recent publication in Housing Studies).

Kenton is a Scholar Development Editor at Journal of Urban Affairs, and former Managing Editor of Critical Planning Journal. Recently, he co-edited a Special Issue on housing movements and care for Antipode, and on housing movements 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 and films.