Tracy Rosenthal and Leo Vilchis’s new book, “Abolish Rent,” is a call to action for tenant power.
It provides a how-to lesson for forming a tenant group, and a thesis asking tenants to conceptualize rent as a form of extraction.
Tracy Rosenthal and Leo Vilchis first met in 2012 through an activist art project in Los Angeles called the School of Echoes. The project took Vilchis, Rosenthal and others to six different L.A. communities on listening tours to hear residents’ concerns. The concerns they encountered were largely about displacement, gentrification and the feeling that people were being pushed from their communities.
Their attempt to address these problems led to the creation of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has a membership of 3000 due-paying households. And over the past 9 years, the pair has worked alongside some of the union’s local chapters to coordinate some of the most public, and often successful, organizing fights on behalf of tenants in the country.
The autonomous tenant union uses protest and direct action to fight against unsafe living conditions and evictions and to push for rent controls. The union organized the largest rent strike in Los Angeles history. They have organized with Hillside Villa tenants to win a promise from the city to purchase a building where the landlord sought to boost rents. (This has yet to happen, but the city provided $15 million in rent assistance to Hillside Villa tenants this year.) The group was also instrumental in the fight to keep the Echo Park encampment open, before it was swept in a high-profile and aggressive police raid in 2021.
Now, Vilchis and Rosenthal have published a new book, “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis,” about their struggles in the tenant movement, their victories and their lessons. At a time when most “solutions” to the housing crisis remove the agency of people actually living in most housing, the book is a call to action for tenant power, a how-to lesson for forming a tenant group, and a thesis asking tenants to conceptualize rent as a form of extraction. The duo spoke with us about the book and the state of tenant movements and homeless activism.
Why was it important to create the LA Tenants Union within the framework of a union, which has dues-paying members? Unlike labor unions, tenant unions usually don’t have bargaining power.
Vilchis: When we talk to a lot of different organizations — more developed, more grown — they always want to have all the right answers to everything. And in one of the meetings that we were having, people were really interested in moving forward and building the tenants union. But we got into the question, how do we do this? And in one of the questions somebody said, well, what makes a tenant union? Well, a tenant union has members. And Tracy basically said, “Well, then, here’s my membership, so we can start a tenants union. I’m the first member.”
Rosenthal: We were just at Socialism Conference, and LA Tenants Union was talking about their practice. And we heard from Inez, a tenant that we write about [in Abolish Rent…describing] that dues are a declaration of our autonomy and they’re also a declaration of commitment. Our dues are $1 a month.
When we ask this question — what in the mainstream press would be articulated as “how are we going to solve the housing crisis?” — the answer to that question is usually about minimizing or even dismissing the role of tenants in that process, and foregrounding politicians who are capable of tinkering with legislation [and] legal services who are only able to deal with these crises in states of emergency.
They’re only dealing with states of emergency and through other forms of client services, which are all really about individualizing this crisis and keeping tenants very individualized. A union is a way of understanding that landlords are organized. Landlords can draw on state power to evict us. We see this in the most spectacular form in the new cartel that is Real Page, the monopolization being set through an algorithm — but that process happens across the board. Landlords as a class are organized to exploit us. Tenants together have access to something that they don’t have on their own, which is forms of material leverage, like their rent check, and forms of social support, like solidarity, that make new power arrangements possible.
Building on that experience that we have seen through tenants organizing to win repairs to get rent debt canceled, to get collective bargaining agreements for rent control in a non-rent-controlled building. Organization makes things possible that client services does not.
Also engaging with a state that has to a large extent been mobilized and captured by the real estate industry to deliver profits to landlords and real estate speculators, what we’ve experienced is that organization makes possible things that the legislative and legal process cannot. We’re looking at the expertise of tenants who are living through the crisis, and the expertise that they are building through the process of fighting back.
Vilchis: In our early days, we had a lot of senior citizens and elder people who were part of these meetings. These are the tenants themselves getting together to figure out what to do about the demolition of their housing. This is tenants themselves trying to organize to respond to the crisis that they’re dealing with. And they’re meeting in a parking lot in winter, one of the coldest winters in Los Angeles.
They came to us as organizers and said we need a place to meet. At that time because of the nature of the project the nonprofits and the community organizations were in support of the demolition of the housing projects. They didn’t want to do anything. They didn’t want to get involved with us in terms of providing us a place to meet.
So a group of women got together and raised the funds to get the deposit and the first month of rent for our office. Having the ability to collect your own resources, to make your own decisions, is very crucial in this process.
When we look at the housing crisis as it’s been defined, it’s a crisis of production or a crisis in the legal system. You’re talking about building more and more homes so eventually people can buy their homes, or you’re talking about giving more and more rights to people so people can fight in the courts. But the reality is that a lot of this fight is happening on the streets under many different circumstances, and many different people have been affected differently, so the people themselves have to decide what they have to do to fight back.
Then you have the nonprofits who want to negotiate what is possible, what is winnable, in the middle of a crisis, and they’re not going to be concerned by the most negatively affected. They will come up with solutions that are middle ground, long-term projections, that are not going to provide anything to people who are fighting here and now. When tenants put together the resources, they are able to decide what to do with those resources at the economic level, and decide where to use them, [and] how. At the social level, when tenants put together the resources as a group, as a collective, you’re building unity that is necessary to fight. They’re making a commitment to build this organization. They’re making a commitment to sustain the organization, and they’re making a commitment to fight together and to support each other. Once they’re making this commitment, they’re also developing the vision of what it is they’re trying to build.
And in the context of a fight from the perspective of tenants, where we’re talking about the right to remain, the right of return, a right to dignified life, the people that are most affected are the ones who have to make that decision, not the board of directors of a nonprofit, not a foundation [that] makes a strategic decision based on who’s winning in the party or what’s the most sexy policy. It has to be the tenants themselves. We’re in the middle of the crisis, and tenants have to take the leadership. The union is the form that makes it happen. And that’s why we may not be like a labor union with bargaining negotiations and all that stuff. But we’re able to create those because we own an organization, and we have the social and economic and political means to make that happen.
The book sets out to define “rent” in a really specific way, as a form of class warfare against tenants. Why did you think it was important to set out that definition?
Rosenthal: We are trying to articulate a theory that begins with the expertise and experience of tenants themselves. Rent is often defined as a neutral outcome of supply and demand. But what we experience as tenants is first, the deep and abiding fear of being without a home. Structuring a market around a human need is inherently going to be exploitative. To name rent as a power relation of exploitation and domination was really central to us, because it articulates how value is created through our precarity. We say, “we pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun.” How rent is created, how it is that we are forced to hand over the majority of our wages as a monthly tribute to a landlord who does, on average, four hours a month of work maintaining their apartments, how that relationship is shaped was really central to wanting to give tenants an understanding of the social forces reproducing that reality every day.
For us, that relationship is an inherently exploitative relationship, because it is based around commodifying a human need, and that market couldn’t exist without the resources of state violence that allow landlords to draw on the police power of the state to forcibly evict people, remove them from their housing, and then, when they are out of their housing, right to criminalize them.
What we’ve seen right recently with this Grants Pass decision is that the [government] has made it legal to criminalize homelessness full stop, to fine, ticket, jail, arrest unhoused people simply for existing outside. We have to pay rent because it is a literal crime not to do so. It is a crime not to be exploited by a landlord, those are the terms. That’s part of the agreement. When we sign a contract to pay rent every month, that’s not listed in the contract, but those are the relationships that shape what that contract can be.
There’s often been a lot of disconnect between the larger housing movement and the movement to support unhoused people. Do you agree that’s the case, and what do you think explains that?
Vilchis: It’s not the way the movements have structured themselves. It’s very important to give attention to how struggles are organized by the economy, and the political economy of struggle. These [struggles] have been segmented by foundations, by policy organizations, and nonprofit organizations. In a lot of levels, nonprofits are subcontractors of the major foundations, and these foundations determine and segment what’s happening.
At LA Tenants Union, we have a definition of “tenant” that is basically anybody who has no control of their housing. From the early days, we made this chain of connection between the struggle of unhoused people and the struggle of tenants. We have to bring everybody together so we can really address the problem of housing.
Rosenthal: When we say a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, what we’re doing is creating a definition that is aligned with people who are outside of the system of asset-based wealth and property ownership that our state has designed. That is a really important political intervention for us, and one that we had to develop over time.
Originally we started with a renter’s rights workshop and it took our own growth and development to really understand that our political power lies in everyone who is made to be outside of that system.
I think your question is a really good one and one that I think that is, in some ways, an injunction to the tenant movement to think more seriously about forming those solidarities inside our buildings and out on the street. But we have this experience that comes from thinking through different forms of tenancy, like when you think about the thing that public housing tenants are dealing with and what unhoused tenants are dealing with, they are both dealing with the state as a slumlord. The state that deprives them of garbage pickup, of accessible or usable bathrooms. Tenants within public housing and outside face extreme levels of surveillance and surveillance by the police. So I think that there are these intersections that we are organized into as tenants, in many ways, by the relationships between landlords, real estate speculators and the state. And I think that it’s on us to see how we are organized through those processes and come together as a movement.
We wanted to draw a line that actually encompasses those strategies. Tenants wanted to figure out ways that we could see what our movements are doing, both indoors and outside. Through our practice of organizing unhoused tenants and housed tenants, what we learned was that people are often engaged in the very same process of taking control over the places where they live, whether that’s claiming Echo Park, and whether that’s in a tenant association that is displacing their landlord’s power by building their own and organizing themselves to do their own repairs, to go on rent strike and to experience for the length of time of that strike what it would be like to live in housing without having to pay for it. To begin from the practices of our movements, and then turn back to our process of reflection is to notice already that tenants are engaged in the same struggle.
Vilchis: When we look at the whole situation of housing, this is not new. From the 18th century, 19th century, the whole condition of housing is the same; landless people, people who are semi-landed, people who are like serfs, and then the landlords.
This kind of segmentation has been created to the detriment of the people who are mostly affected. It’s a continuous reality that we need to change. We have to change the whole system. From the beginning, the LA Tenants Union made a commitment to pay attention to the most affected by this situation, and the most affected are people who live on the streets and the most affected are people who don’t have control over their housing. So to solve the problem of the renters and ignore the problem of people who live on the street is just ridiculous. The question is to bring all these people together so they can make the correct demands. If you speak from a perspective of the most affected, the moment you solve the problem for the most affected, everybody else is going to get the solution. And that’s part of the main thing that we’re trying to talk about. We have to start at the bottomwhere the most affected are, and they have to be the ones who define for us and help us figure out what is the vision. And in the context of the unhoused, one of the first demands is the right to be in a place that you choose to be. And basically the whole struggle in the cities, to have the right to remain and the right to return. That’s really what’s happening in our communities right now, all our neighbors, residents that we’re working with are being displaced, have been pushed out because we don’t recognize the right of people to be where they choose to be to build community and to develop their own means to take care of each other as a community. We need to build community, and we need to help the unhoused to build community, have the right to stay, because once they stay in one place, they can organize to demand everything else. And that’s part of the stories in the Echo Park [chapter] in the book, is people coming together, shaping the neighborhood around themselves, building services for themselves and making the demand that is organized. And that really is the guide for everybody in the housing movement.
Lawmakers have less sympathy with unhoused people than they do with tenants. They don’t view them as people with demands to be negotiated with. I’m thinking for example of the recent clearing of Camp Resolution in Sacramento, which was an encampment run by unhoused women that had reached a deal with the city to stay until they were permanently housed. The city instead got rid of the encampment partially because they didn’t like having to negotiate through the National Homeless Union. How do you deal with that hurdle?
Rosenthal: City officials don’t want to treat unhoused people as people. The vast dehumanization of the homeless is one of the main vectors for fascism in this moment. We see that supposedly Democratic politicians are actually innovating the forms of surveillance and violence and control of unhoused people. It’s really crucial to name that. Because you certainly can’t recognize organized political actors if you can’t address their basic humanity. And that is really where our struggle is beginning in this moment of the incredible state and vigilante violence that is being stoked by supposedly Democratic politicians. I think that part of the threat that unhoused people pose as political subjects is, capital has reorganized itself such that so much of its reproduction is through speculative real estate and the redevelopment of urban space. The risk is not to humans but to investors, that a presence of homeless people poses to their bottom lines.
I think that the demands of unhoused people for permanent housing, for public housing, has been a threat to the entire housing system from before public housing ever existed. It has posed such a threat to that system that the organized forces of racism, the Red Scare that have been mobilized to squash that dream, all of that history is really part of what’s at play in that demand. That is really the desperation that we’re seeing now, to individualize the struggles of unhoused people as: we can blame individual mental health problems or we can blame individual substance abuse, when, of course, the data shows that the majority of people are made unhoused in the places where they lived because they were the victims of a very ordinary emergency, like the loss of income or a new disability.
The complete unwillingness to address the systemic harm that is our housing market, which ejects people into the street, to address the fact that it takes four full-time minimum wage jobs to afford the average two-bedroom apartment. I think what politicians are engaged in is a complete unwillingness to address that systemic process and instead foist it upon individuals.
I think part of what we’re fighting against and part of what we’re fighting for is the recognition that our housing system is an unhousing system, and that to solve the problem of homelessness it would be necessary to transform our housing system entirely.
The farthest away you are from owning property, the less human you are. We saw that in 2008 when the banks were the ones who were safe and people lost their homes. We saw during the pandemic, when the landlords were the ones who [got] the money and the tenants were left with the debt. And we’re seeing the present, when the homeless are being pushed out of the streets and the property owners are the ones who are left with their own sidewalks. This is very important to understand, and that’s why this connection is very essential.
The country is centered around your ability to own property. The crisis is that when accumulation of land grows, less and less people are going to be considered humans in this country. We’re seeing it in cities like San Francisco where you have these big corporate businesses and empty lots and empty apartments that are just increasing in price tremendously and are not housing anybody. We’re moving to a place where, basically, those who control the land, which are a minority, are going to be the ones who are running the city. Everybody else doesn’t matter, and that is essential. So the crisis of unhoused people not being recognized is a growing crisis for everybody who does not own property in this country.
The book ends with a chapter on the Echo Park encampment, which was raided by police in a very public way in 2021. I’m curious why you decided to include a chapter on Echo Park in a book about successes as tenants, since the raid and its aftermath were really negative in many ways.
Vilchis: Those moments of struggle point to the direction of hope, what people were able to build in Echo Park. It’s a very good sign of what unhoused people are capable of doing. We’re talking about the dehumanization of the homeless, and we’re talking about a whole community who picked up their stuff, moved to a park, built a garden, built showers, created a system of security for each other, were feeding each other, helping each other find jobs and support each other. They pointed to the capacity of people to organize themselves and to show signs of what’s possible. So from that perspective, that is the victory. You can look at that and say, this is possible. The problem is a question of scale. How many times can we do this, and for how long, and what kind of organization do we have to have to make this happen? That’s really the challenge of the tenants unions. The victory is that we can show what people can do, normal, regular people can do in their neighborhoods, in the community, in their parks. And the victory is to show that potential.
Now, where do we go from there? Well, it all depends on the people who read the book, the people who organize, the people who come together and start forming this stuff.
Do you have any other thoughts you want to share or things you want people to know about the book?
Rosenthal: So much of the book is grounded in the stories of tenants coming together to collectively determine a strategy over time that they could use to intervene between them and their landlords. Recording those experiments in what a tenants association makes possible was just one of the most important tasks of the book. Giving people a sense of how it is that building community in a building and in a neighborhood can be a means to not just fix your sink but also to claim the space of the city, such that some of our associations have painted crosswalks, pulled in resources from the city to get traffic stops, have figured out ways produce safety in their neighborhoods without the police.
If a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control our own housing, then the goal of that movement is collective control over where and how we live. I think that we can see in some of these local experiments how tenants are doing that in the present, like the tenants who are organizing a rent strike like a form of rent control, and also to experience what a future without having to pay for housing might be like
The meat and potatoes of the book is really in these beautiful experiments of tenants coming together and building – from the first step of learning your neighbor’s names to the escalation of withholding rent and camping out on your landlord’s door. We hope that our book might help people walk through that process and encourage more people to some of those experiments
Vilchis: The book offers a critique of an economic and political system that is not solving anything and is part of the crisis, and points to the hope of what happens when people take control of their lives and start responding to that system.