Abolish Rent

An interview, a book, a movement.

I’m extremely excited to bring you something a little different today, an interview with a brilliant thinker and organizer, someone who lays out problems without sugarcoating them, then guides us into the necessary and radical solutions we urgently need. Just about everyone who reads this newsletter would agree that housing is a human right. And you’d most likely agree, even adamantly declare, that this shouldn’t be a radical statement; if anything it should be a boring observation of the bare minimum we all deserve. But in this world it is a radical point of view, because it asserts that our basic needs shouldn’t be mined for profit.

So when you hear the title of the book Tracy Rosenthal co-authored with Leonardo Vilchis —“Abolish Rent” — you might balk at its seeming radicality, or you might not. Either way I hope you’ll quickly see how the assertion that the roof over our head shouldn’t be a source of profit, but should instead be seen and treated as a fundamental human need and a site of community and joy, is a very reasonable statement indeed. Getting there, getting to a society where that becomes our reality is a different story, unfortunately. It takes organizing, dedication, and a lot of work. Thankfully, people like Tracy and Leonardo and other inspiring people across the country are organizing tenant unions and starting to transform the discussion around the material reality of tenant life.

Photo by Andreea Popa on Unsplash

Housing has been thrust into the national spotlight because of a housing crisis created by greedy landlords, corporations buying up housing, and deeply flawed housing policy. In response, JD Vance and the far-right are saying that mass deportations are somehow housing policy, instead of brutal fascist immigration policy. But on the other side of the spectrum, out of the spotlight, tenants are doing transformative work. Right now tenants in Kansas City have launched the first-ever strikes targeting federal housing regulators. They’re demanding national rent caps, new owners of these buildings, and collectively bargained leases. This is due to the transformative power built by the KC Tenants, one of the founding unions of the national Tenant Union Federation.

What Tracy brings to you today in this brief interview is the perspective of another founding member of the federation, the LA Tenants Union, the biggest union of tenants in the country. Tracy’s work with the union comes through in question after question, and it is through this organizing that Tracy has developed a vision for our future that’s rooted not just in lofty ideals, but in beautiful and powerful lived experiences. Most of what we discuss below, and so much more, can also be found in Leonardo and Tracy’s new and fantastic book, “Abolish Rent.” Without further ado, here’s our interview:

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JP: So Tracy, let’s start at the beginning. How would you define gentrification? What changes are taking place in our cities right now? What trends do you see?

Tracy: Gentrification is displacement and replacement of the poor for profit. This is the definition the founders of the LA Tenants Union came up with to name the process of gentrification by its outcomes: tenants are ejected from their long-term communities or onto the streets, landlords and real estate investors get richer and hoard more of the places we can live. Gentrification is a collaboration between the real estate industry, politicians, and police. In our book, we tell the story of housing policy as a “War on Tenants.” Like the war on crime and the war on drugs, the history of American housing policy is a story of organized abandonment and organized violence, targeting the poor and people of color with the same results. 

Just as the suburbanization of the country required government intervention (to lure white people to the suburbs) so does gentrification (to lure them back to cities). Geographer Neil Smith called gentrification a “back to the city movement by capital,” situating it after the broad, post-1970s economic restructuring, in which capitalists found there was more money to be made through speculation rather than production (making money by betting on housing and stocks rather than making things). Since 2021, homeowners have made more money a year just from their property values going up than workers get from working the average job. And landlords can charge 4 full time minimum wage jobs for the average two-bedroom rent. This means that after decades of abandonment, poor people in cities, predominantly people of color, are being pushed out. 

Though real estate bribes are common (hello Eric Adams), they are only the tip of the iceberg of state capture. The deeper part is the policy paradigms like Section 8 and “Affordable Housing,” subsidizes for landlords and developers, so-called “solutions” to the housing crisis, as if the cure for the crisis could come from its cause. This is a central trend that we need to track. Our economic system is designed around the constant, unending inflation of property values, which ensures rents will go up and tenants will lose their homes. As former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti once put it, “In a good economy, homelessness goes up.” And because the state lacks an economic solution to poverty, it is increasingly turning to strategies of population management and population control through policing and prisons. We can see this most clearly in ballooning police budgets, the rising criminalization of poor people and unhoused people, and the militarization of our cities as cop cities. 

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

JP: In your experience, when people see their neighborhoods changing and their landlord starts raising the rent, what separates those who feel they might be able to do something and those who don’t?

Tracy: I think every single person who has a landlord, who has to pay rent to secure housing, experiences both fear and defiance. We absolutely shouldn’t minimize how terrifying it is to have your ability to meet a human need in the hands of a person or a corporation driven to seek profit from you. As we talk about in the book, the human need for housing, and the immense fear people have of living outdoors, is a central form of discipline that forces us to accept being exploited, to starve, to give up medication, to double up in our homes or take on twice the work to pay for the same place. But at the same time, every single person who has a landlord understands the injustice, knows the relationship between us and our landlords is deeply unfair, and the instinct to tell our landlords to go fuck themselves, fight back, is present at the same time as our fear. In our experience, the thing that turns people’s already existing defiance into action is organization: if we come together with our neighbors and take a step towards defiance together, we can better distribute risk, arm ourselves with accurate information, and find support through our doubts. If we want to change the balance of power between our landlords and us, we need to build that solidarity and community. We need each other.

JP: For those people who might not have a tenant union in their vicinity, what course of action do you recommend for taking those first steps toward organizing?

Tracy: Any shared problem can be an occasion for organizing. The tools of door-knocking and holding meetings are classic for a reason: often, they work. Here are some examples of what you might ask your neighbors: Do you also have roaches? Are you frustrated that there’s no crosswalk on this block? I am worried that the elevator is often out and our elderly neighbor will get stuck. What issues are you having in your apartment? Can you get management to fix anything in your place? Do you want to build an emergency response system in our building, so we can check on each other in case of another storm? We all live here but we don’t really know each other—do you want to get together as a building? 

JP: And for those who do have a tenant union, but they see it as ineffective, how would you say they can change and improve their unions?

Tracy: First, ask! One of the best things you can do to make your union more effective is to make it more responsive to its members. If you think something needs to change but don’t know what, call a meeting and ask how to move forward. Ask what’s missing, ask what the barriers are, ask what you could do as a next step. Not only will this let your union practice the kind of democracy we’re sorely lacking, it will create buy-in, so that your members have a stake in seeing the changes through. The LA Tenants Union has gone through many transformations in our short life. We invented local chapters when we realized that people couldn’t drive 45 minutes to a meeting. We axed a decision-making space when we realized it wasn’t representing the will of our base. There is no perfect structure for a union that will solve the political crisis we’re facing. But committing to make the organization that you’re building changeable and plastic is an expression of our politics and of the future we want to see. The form of our organization may and must change as we grow, but our commitment to the project of collective tenant control is constant.

Second, eat! The strength of your union is manifest not only in its ability to win demands, but in its power to create local relationships of trust, mutual aid, community, and support. We organize in people’s homes, the site of the most intimate experiences of our lives. Our relationships are the material of our struggle, so we should take care to nurture them. Often, what nurtures a union is not what we think of as the business of the organization, it’s the interstitial convening that makes all the work possible.

Photo by Jason Richard on Unsplash

JP: So, given everything you’ve said so far, what mental moves do you think tenants should make? What are ways for folks to let go of and ideas for folks to adapt their views on renting, housing, and being a tenant, in your opinion?

Tracy: Leonardo and I often talk about acting our way into thinking, rather than thinking our way into acting. Rather than convince ourselves we are powerful, a lot of times we can only recognize our power after we exercise it: only after we send our landlord a collective demand letter, show up together at his front door, or organize food distribution to feed our neighbors in need, do we realize, truly, that we can do it—because we already did. Similarly, we don’t need tenants to have fully formed political opinions before they join our organization. By acting in coordination with our neighbors, by taking and sharing risk, we ourselves are changed. 

But ideas do grip us and trap us in the circumstances we’re in. The American Dream, for instance, is both incredibly potent and incredibly dangerous: it teaches us we’re only a full citizen if we own property, it teaches us security is only something we can have isolated from others, it teaches us we should compete, it teaches us there’s something wrong with us if we can’t make the Dream real. One central experience of living as a tenant in this country is shame. And one of the most important functions of a union is to create spaces where tenants can let go of that shame by learning that we’re not alone. We saw this especially during the pandemic. Alone, tenants could only experience the shame of not being able to pay rent, as if there was something wrong with them, as if they’d failed. We had to work to turn this individual shame into collective anger. Bringing people together to share their struggles helped turn that sense of failure around, not on individual tenants, but on the housing system and the state: the government issued shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders but failed to support us when we lost work and took sick, it put our lives at risk. Calculating the rent debt we accumulated during the pandemic together changed the experience of having it: not only did tenants recognize that they were not alone, that it wasn’t their fault they couldn’t pay, but the meaning of the money itself began to change. Pooled together, we could hold the debt over our landlords’ heads rather than the reverse: we saw just how much we put into our own buildings, how much our landlords need us. Our debt was leverage: we could use it to bring the landlord to the negotiating table, to bargain for canceled debt, and make payment contingent on repairs being made to our homes.

JP: Last but not at all least, what does the horizon look like? In other words, what can we collectively move towards as we build tenant power? As people develop stronger tenant unions, what should those unions push for and push towards?

Tracy: In our book, we claim the abolition of rent as the horizon of our struggle: a permanent and general rent strike, a world without landlords, a world in which housing is respected as a human right. But rent abolition is also a criteria for how we should organize right now. What limits the power of landlords over our lives, of speculators over our cities? How can we recirculate our own resources and win back control of where and how we live? Most important is the struggle we can wage building by building, landlord by landlord, block by block. Building militant tenant associations is only the means tenants have to actually enforce the rights we have, ensuring we live in habitable housing, that we can’t be thrown out of our homes without a due eviction process. But it’s also the only means we have to win more rights, by forcing our landlords into collective bargaining agreements, by taking over our buildings one bankrupt owner at a time, and by building a broader base to extract concessions from the state. We know that only policies toxic to real estate speculation can help us thrive: public housing, which competes with the private market, driving prices down for everyone by housing the surplus army of the poor; rent control, which limits landlords’ power to extract rent from us, bans on evictions, which stop them from using state violence to kick us out of our homes. In the meantime, we see rent abolition as a practice. When tenants work together to take care of the issues in their housing and deduct the costs from their rent, we practice recirculating our own resources now stolen from us by our landlords. When tenants get together to paint a crosswalk or install a bus stop, we practice democratic decision making and collective control over our public space. When tenants go on rent strike we build solidarity, community, and capacity to take on bigger risks, and we experience, temporarily, what it’s like to have abolished rent.

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It’s hard to add much to all that Tracy has said. All I can say is that the many compelling stories in “Abolish Rent” showcase the reality of everything said above. The experiences of tenant organizing across Los Angeles show how taking action changes minds, changes attitudes, and changes lives. Tracy and Leonardo give us countless examples of how one conversation can lead to a building being organized, and dozens or hundreds of lives being changed, because people built power with their neighbors to resist displacement and take control of this fundamental aspect of their lives – namely their homes. But in the process tenants have also defended their place in their neighborhood, and their place in this world. I can’t recommend the book highly enough, and beyond that I can’t recommend investing time in tenant organizing, or encouraging and helping others to do the same if you’re not someone who rents. I hope Tracy has helped plant a seed for you here today; and I know that seed is just the beginning of the movement to “Abolish Rent.” Solidarity, and god speed!  

You can (and should) get your copy of “Abolish Rent” here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent 

Learn more about the Tenant Union Federation here: https://tenantfederation.org/

The Autonomous Tenants Union Network also has great resources here: https://atun-rsia.org/

Tracy’s website is here as well! https://tracyrosenthal.com/