When Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two of the founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, organized tenants in rent strikes such as the mariachis in Boyle Heights, they saw tenants could refuse to pay rent, win better conditions and still keep their homes. To tenants’ surprise, “their keys still open the locks” and “their home, though they have not paid for it, persists,” they write in Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.
Rosenthal and Vilchis said they saw, after years of activism, that fighting to reform the private housing system seemed only to produce laws that were not enforceable and low-income housing developments that were not affordable.
As gentrification engulfed Los Angeles in the 2010s, they concluded rent had to be abolished outright, and renters could build enough power to make it happen. Landlords, they argue, are effectively holding apartments for ransom from individuals who should control where they live. They want a massive expansion of public housing and tenant-controlled housing to replace private rentals.
They concede that rent abolition may not happen in their lifetimes, but they argue that tenants in L.A. are already taking steps forward by organizing their buildings and by going on rent strike. According to Rosenthal and Vilchis, the task of the tenant union “is to grow the power of our movement enough to make rent strikes general and — finally — permanent.”
Capital & Main recently sat down with the authors to talk about the housing crisis and rent abolition.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: Why do you feel that simply building more housing will not solve the housing crisis?
Tracy Rosenthal: When we look at the research about the effects of new private development, what we see, if we give the people making this argument the most generous reading, is that more construction doesn’t produce lower rents, but rather rents that rise less quickly. Everyone agrees on that. What they’re asking tenants to do is to wait for the benefits of new housing to trickle down to us, and that is an insult to the poor and working-class people who are experiencing this crisis every day in their apartments and are out on the street.
Our intervention is about situating the housing crisis in the context of a larger class struggle. For us, what will solve the crisis that produces this reality is transforming those power relationships between tenants and landlords.
Why should rent be abolished?
Rosenthal: The abolition of rent seems like an incredibly radical demand, but what we’re saying is that if something is a human need, you shouldn’t have to pay to access it. The fact that we have to pay rent to our landlords, the fact of a monthly tribute that we make to people who are already richer than us… this itself is the crisis. What we say in the book is that we pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun. That’s another way of expressing that this relationship between landlords and tenants is built on exploitation and domination. It’s fundamentally part of an economic system designed to extract wealth from us. We have to pay rent because housing is a human need. Rent is a fine for having a human need.
We also pay rent because landlords can use the threat of state violence to force us to pay. That is, if we don’t own property and we don’t pay our rent, landlords can call on the cops to use physical force to throw us out of our homes. And if we end up outdoors after we’re evicted, the police can harass us, jail us, fine us, stick us in a cage. We have to pay rent — because it’s a crime not to pay it. In other words, it’s a crime not to be exploited by a landlord.
Leonardo Vilchis: Everyone has a right to housing. But in Boyle Heights we see whole families being evicted and then moving from two- or three-bedroom apartments to single-bedroom apartments. It’s normal to see eight families sharing one kitchen and two bedrooms. People are being pushed into the most dire, most horrible conditions, and all of it has to do with the idea that rent and housing is some kind of marketable good, and that is just ridiculous.
What about smaller landlords? Should their rents be abolished too?
Vilchis: There was a time, and I’m thinking about the early 1980s, when having a mom-and-pop landlord was much more of a reality in Los Angeles. Most of those landlords have sold their housing to bigger landlords that still call themselves mom-and-pop landlords but they own from five to 10 properties, so they’re really not. [Between 2000 and 2018, the portion of the rental housing stock owned by individuals fell from 55% to 40% nationwide, according to census records. A 2021 study conducted by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a tenant advocacy group, found that investment firms owned roughly two-thirds of rental housing in Los Angeles.]
But the relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant is still the same [no matter the size of the landlord]. The owner of the property considers themselves the controller of the lives of the people in their property no matter if the owner is an individual or a corporation.
Rosenthal: And in my experience organizing, a small landlord in many cases chooses to use direct violence more often than bigger landlords do. We’ve seen small landlords sic dogs on people, break down doors with a pickaxe, pour concrete into tenants’ toilets. Massive landlords have resources to harass tenants with legalese and notices, to exploit them with fines and fees — those are so common with corporate landlords — to bully people in the court system and shield themselves from accountability. Small landlords don’t have the luxury of that distance, and that often makes them more violent, not less.
Do you think change is possible within the law, and what do you say to people who are uncomfortable with breaking it?
Rosenthal: It was mass rent strikes on New York’s Lower East Side that brought the first building codes. When the housing you live in has to meet certain habitability standards, you have organized tenant rebellion to thank for that. We quote James Boggs in the book, who said, “Rights are what you make and what you take.” What we’ve seen is that organized tenants can change the very structures that govern their housing. We saw this in the mariachi strike: a group of tenants in a 24-unit building in Boyle Heights who, through a yearlong rent strike, won a collective bargaining agreement that was the equivalent of rent control for their housing in a market rate building. They invented new rights. So it’s not just that the tenant union is a mechanism to enforce rights, it’s a mechanism to change them — to take more rights.
Vilchis: Every time you resist an unjust or unfair law, we’re trained to think that you’re doing something wrong. There’s this feeling in America that everything is perfect and done and we just need to work within the system that’s already there, but that’s not true. During the pandemic, of course, everybody, by law, was supposed to pay their rent, but people couldn’t do it. And people decided to say, you know what, we need “food not rent” [Vilchis is referencing a pandemic-era campaign of the Los Angeles Tenants Union], and they stopped paying rent. That was an example of people rebelling against an unjust system and taking steps toward rent abolition. Enforcing the law and evicting those people would have been a disaster.
If rent abolition is a far-off goal, what are you doing to help renters now?
Rosenthal: The tenant union is constantly winning renters’ repairs, getting landlords to actually get rid of mold, fighting rent increases and winning rent reductions. But rent abolition is also a practice that exists right now. You might think about rent abolition as a permanent and general rent strike. Tenants are on rent strike in Los Angeles right now, and they’re experiencing that liberation from landlords, that liberation from real estate’s control over where and how we live.
Vilchis: One example of this was the unhoused community at Echo Park Lake. In the first year of the pandemic, they built showers for themselves, they built a kitchen for themselves, they started planting fruits and vegetables so they could feed themselves, they created a harm reduction program to help each other. And guess what happened? The state, instead of rewarding that initiative and that sense of autonomy, had the biggest operation, the most costly [encampment sweep] I can think of in the city.
But for a time that community was an actual example of people not paying rent, building a community that they needed and they deserved in a time of crisis. Imagine outside of the crisis what they could have built in that space. [In March of 2021, the city deployed an estimated 400 police officers, according to a UCLA report, to clear the Echo Park Lake encampment. The UCLA researchers found that, a year after the sweep, just 17 residents had been placed in permanent housing; six had died.]
Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis is out now.
Copyright 2024 Capital & Main.
