Getting Renters Organized

In Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, two cofounders of the LA Tenants Union offer an account of housing, tenancy, the connections between labor and renters’ organizing, and what the authors call the “centuries-long war on tenants.”

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Signs are hung on the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles building during a march with the LA Tenants Union on Monday, June 29, 2020, in Los Angeles, California. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Workers have been in crisis for decades. Stagnant wages have meant a declining standard of living, leading to social catastrophe. Declining life expectancy, rising alienation and estrangement, astronomical rates of violence — none of this is the direct result of jobs getting worse, but they aren’t entirely unrelated either. The recent upsurge in energy in the labor movement offers reason for hope — unions are the one proven method to win higher wages and benefits and safer working conditions — but it remains a movement in its infancy.

There is a parallel crisis for renters. Rent is rising faster than wages, leaving some tens of millions of households rent-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities. Dystopian algorithms from the likes of RealPage are intensifying the crisis, jacking up rents to their utmost limits, throwing entire communities into chaos. In turn, evictions keep rising, now up 50 percent over the pre-pandemic averages in many cities.

In Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two cofounders of the largest tenants’ union in the country, offer an account of housing, tenancy, gentrification, and what the authors call the “centuries-long war on tenants.” This is an issue that has moved from the margins of politics — the sideshows of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party — to one of the most animated and central parts of the presidential election system: one where the Democrats call for greater subsidies for developers and where Republicans call for a campaign of mass deportation to slacken the demand on housing supply.

At a time when people are coming to narrate their own immiseration and exploitation in the language of the housing crisis, the book offers a historically grounded analysis, informed by a critique of US political economy — while putting tenants and their struggles at the heart of how we think about the ruling blocs that govern US politics at a municipal and national level.

Abolish Rent’s editor, Ben Mabie, is a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union and a labor organizer with the NewsGuild of New York and International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 98. To mark the book’s release, he moderated a conversation between Rosenthal and Jacobin’s Alex N. Press, drawing connections between the labor movement and tenants’ movement, the tools workers and tenants share, and whether going on strike against your landlord is any different than going on strike against your boss.

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Ben Mabie

Recent years have seen an explosion in tenant organizing in response to a cost of living crisis in cities. That tenant organizing increasingly runs through tenant unions, which is somewhat unique in the history of working-class organizing in this country. Tracy, why organize tenants into tenant unions in particular, and how do you see tenant organizing fitting into a broader strategy to organize the working class, both in relation to labor organizing and beyond?

Tracy Rosenthal

Talking about organizing tenants requires we talk about the context we’re in, which is a time when capital is reorganizing itself around speculation and the reordering of places. Property value is taking on a greater role in our economy. While labor produces value, our homes are increasingly the place where that value is stored.

Sixty-five percent of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 75 percent of that is in housing. That statistic makes me understand the revolutionary potential of tenants as political subjects who can break down and redistribute that hoard of wealth stored in our homes. Tenants have a key role to play in challenging relationships of private property and ensuring that our human needs are met.

When we’re thinking about our cities’ vast expenditures on policing and criminalization, stealing our resources to make us all less safe, tenant organizing can produce the kinds of everyday safety that people need.

Tenant unions have a history in this country, but we’re living through a revival. In the early 1920s and ’30s, tenant organizing and militant tenant unions built the laws that we rely on to organize now. Even something as basic as the requirements that you live in habitable conditions, that you have the right to an eviction process — all of these were won with the blood and sweat of tenant-union organizing of the past.

We’re also living in worse housing that is less affordable. More of us are giving up basic needs like food and medicine just to be able to pay rent, and more of us are getting ejected into the streets. With the return of Gilded Age inequality, it makes sense that strategies from that time are being recuperated for our era.

Alex N. Press

Tracy, can you spell out what exactly a tenant union is? Obviously, when most people hear “union,” they think “labor union,” an organization of people based around a job site or an industry.

Tracy Rosenthal

It’s in many ways similar to a labor union. Alone, you suffer the whims of your boss or your landlord, and together, you can use the only tool that you have, solidarity, to balance the scales of power. In tenant unions, we often see people starting in their own buildings to address their own problems — leaky faucets, busted appliances — but then also the everyday exploitation of too-high rents and the everyday violence of harassment. The practice is similar to labor unions: people getting together, recognizing that they’re not alone in their struggles, and strategizing to use various collective tools to escalate and intervene in that power relationship.

When we form a tenant union, we often start very small with sending the landlord a demand letter and then move from there all the way up to a rent strike. There is obviously an analogy there to what happens in labor. Along the way, we engage in direct action and forms of protest. We often show up at the landlord’s door, because our housing is personal for us; it should be personal for them too.

When we form a tenant union, we often start very small with sending the landlord a demand letter and then move from there all the way up to a rent strike. There is obviously an analogy to what happens in labor.

People are starting at their buildings and then moving from there to thinking about their blocks and their neighborhoods. Especially in the Los Angeles Tenants Union, we think about not just organizing to solve the problems in your housing, but also how to deal with problems on your street. How do you deal with the fact that you don’t have a crosswalk, or that the police are harassing your kids?

Alex N. Press

Parallel conversations certainly exist in the labor world. There’s an elephant in the room in labor organizing in America today, in that it doesn’t matter how large of a raise you’re getting at the bargaining table if your wages are outstripped by the cost of housing.

As we speak, tens of thousands of Boeing workers on the West Coast are on strike. Most of them live in the Seattle area. The union has said the company’s offer of some 40 percent isn’t enough, because they haven’t had a raise in a long time, and the cost of housing renders it moot.

There are parallel conversations with health care too. It doesn’t matter how much of a raise workers get if health care costs outstrip that. Labor often, much to its detriment, focuses exclusively on wages and benefits, and doesn’t know how to address these broader social and political questions.

In LA, UNITE HERE hotel workers were also on strike last summer at the same time as the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. The conglomerate organization of hotels that the union bargained with was furious that the union brought up the Responsible Hotel Ordinance, which would have taxed guests staying at unionized hotels to fund affordable housing by using vacant hotel rooms to temporarily house the homeless, at the bargaining table. Teachers’ unions have also been engaged in thinking about how to put the cost of housing on the bargaining table, to varying degrees of success.

Tracy Rosenthal

There are a lot of places where we’re seeing a convergence with unions taking the cost of rent seriously. I wrote about and talked to people in the University of California academic worker strike and was surprised to learn that the organizers who led the wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz did that after an unsuccessful rent control campaign, because they were unable to win the controls on their rent that would have allowed their wages to be sufficient to afford a place. Their wildcat was completely focused on the concept of rent burden. Academic workers are paid for nine months, but the rent is due in all twelve, and the wages that they received were nowhere near matching California’s cost of living.

The UC itself is a landlord and a real estate speculator. There is this sense in which those workers, by originally demanding a cost-of-living adjustment, were pushing the university against its own business model. University workers can have an outsize impact on entire communities because of how universities function to speculate on land in the places where they exist.

Ben Mabie

It’s funny that you mentioned the UC strike, because while they were unsuccessful at realizing that part of their demand, other graduate students have picked up the torch. Dartmouth researchers, graduate instructors, and higher ed labor in general have found success in indexing their wages to the consumer price index, which is another step in the direction of trying to arrest the incentives for employers who are also rapacious landlords to continue jacking up the price of housing.

Where else is labor organizing their members around housing?

Alex N. Press

Jane McAlevey, who recently passed away, referred to “whole worker organizing” to talk about this concept: your life doesn’t stop when you clock out, and your ties in the community strengthen your leverage at work. She pushed that approach in Stamford, Connecticut, as part of the Stamford Organizing Project from 1999 to 2001, involving a huge range of workers: cab drivers, city clerks, janitors, and nursing home aides, and especially through Stamford’s churches.

As part of that project, the workers pushed for concrete wins on housing, not just first contracts for some 4,500 workers who won contracts that raised wages, benefits, and working conditions. The housing component included saving public housing projects slated for demolition, securing $15 million in new state funds to help pay for improvements in that same public housing complexes, the passage of an inclusionary zoning policy by the city, and the passage of a replacement ordinance by the city council, which protected thousands of units of affordable housing. Tracy, I’m curious which of those reforms stands out to you from a tenant’s perspective.

Jane McAlevey referred to ‘whole worker organizing’ to talk about this concept: your life doesn’t stop when you clock out, and your ties in the community strengthen your leverage at work.

Tracy Rosenthal

We have two forms of intervention in the private housing market. One is public housing: providing people with a place to live. The other is rent control.

We’ve seen a lot of union support in California in particular for rent control, which is wonderful, but efforts to preserve and fund public housing are really key too. A lot of even progressive people are desperate to distance themselves from public housing — not because of what public housing is, but because of what has been done to it. It’s been defunded and stigmatized. So in the tenant movement, when we think about what kind of reforms give us power and take power away from our landlords, those are the two state interventions that we know work for that purpose.

Ben Mabie

There are two experiences I want to call attention to. One is a little bit more historical, which is the St Louis Teamsters, a relatively left-wing Teamsters local that had a long-standing practice of not just having shop stewards on the shop floor, but also community stewards where their workers were living. Those community stewards engaged in a range of initiatives around neighborhood integration, public safety, and in some instances, even helping start tenant organizing and bringing the skills and tactics and know-how how they learned on the job into the places where people lived.

SEIU 1199 New England in Connecticut surveyed their members and discovered that one of their number-one concerns was around housing: dilapidated conditions and disinvestment, but also its runaway price. They decided to fund the Connecticut Tenant Union. It remains to be seen whether that will develop into an independent instrument of tenants across the state to take on their landlords at the same time they push a broader social vision. But it’s those sorts of ambitious initiatives that we should hope to see more unions invest in, beyond just advocating or lobbying for what are nonstarter solutions to the housing crisis.

Alex N. Press

When we think about strikes in the labor context, we’re talking about workers’ leverage. A strike is powerful because the boss needs you to continue producing value. Do tenants have the kind of leverage that workers have?

Ben Mabie

The strike tool is similar in that it forces workers to socialize risk, to take concerted action together, to hit the boss where it hurts. We know different kinds of workers have vastly different forms of power over their boss, depending on the structure of the business, the range of workers who are going out, the different streams of revenue, or the seasonal nature of the work. The same is also true for tenants.

Tenants who, for instance, have a small landlord who lives inside their home and a relatively modest mortgage payment, perhaps they’ve already paid off their home — they tend to not have that much structural leverage over their landlord. Whereas three or four tenants in rent strike against a corporate landlord with vast holdings that may involve other forms of equity and property ownership, perhaps other kinds of businesses, also alone aren’t able to accomplish much with their rent strike. But there is a middle ground.

The same is also true for a lot of workplaces. There’s often reputational disruption, efforts to leverage the possibility of legal sanction alongside economic disruption.

Tenants are often using a similar toolkit. But what is strategically important about the rent strike is that, in the same way we talk about the importance of reviving the strike to rebuild a labor movement with workers in the driver’s seat, seizing control of how they work and taking on their employer relatively directly in a way that socializes risks and requires them to be involved — that’s also strategically significant about a rent strike. It’s about the new kinds of relationships within your building. It can create a new relationship to your home, which can be a launchpad for many other kinds of political initiatives.

Tracy Rosenthal

One of the fundamental differences is that your occupying your housing stands in the way of your landlord’s plans for how that housing will be used. Oftentimes you have two tools in a rent strike: the withholding of money, and simply staying put, accessing those rights that have been granted through the historic tenant movement, relying on the rights that we have through the legal system to actually stay in your home.

That is a new form of relationship to your housing, and also something that’s available to you on rent strike. I know this because I’ve been on rent strike for two years. You get to keep the resources that have been stolen from you by a landlord every month, and you as a building, together with your neighbors, get to decide how those resources should be used. Can you address the problems in your building yourselves? The management of the physical spaces of your building gives you access to what my coauthor Leonardo would call “practice at running the state,” practice at managing a new kind of society.

We know different kinds of workers have vastly different forms of power over their boss. The same is also true for tenants.

To go out on strike is to produce a new kind of militancy in your organizations, and we’ve seen the power of the economic sanction of a strike, paired with those tools like damaging management’s reputation and raising the social cost of evicting long-term tenants from their building. We’ve seen those together work to bring landlords to the negotiating table and win what is in effect a collective bargaining agreement.

One of the reasons that I’ve managed to live on rent strike for two years is that my landlord is US Bank. The economic sanction on the bank is miniscule. The amount of money might be irrelevant to a bank, but to everyone who lives in my building, it is a massive transformation of all of our lives.

Ben Mabie

What are the limits of this analogy between a labor union and a tenant union?

Alex N. Press

There is a different relation to capital as a tenant than there is as a worker. This country is so based around home ownership, and so much housing policy is focused on home ownership, that I wonder if tenants are a marginal force when we think about state intervention in housing or the broader terms of debate on the transformation of the housing system.

Tracy Rosenthal

We are seeing homeownership rates decline as the financial system has inflated property values such that they have become more out of reach for average people and more in reach for corporations to turn them into sites of extraction. Even though, nationally, we are a homeowner-majority society, that hasn’t always been the case, and it may not be soon.

We should think locally about our leverage. Tenants are the majority in so many cities; that is power that we’re not using, because we’re not necessarily politicized by our housing for various reasons, one of which is the ideological project of homeownership.

Ben Mabie

The counterrevolution in American life that we’re living under was ushered in, in no small part, by working-class homeowners being conscripted into a right-wing coalition that later also wrecked unions. If working-class homeowners are also being squeezed and homeownership is going down, it has everything to do with the kind of cycle that these homeowners’ revolts kind of kicked off in the late 1970s. This is a serious political problem for tenants, who are a minority in this country.

Alex N. Press

To add to that, when we think about current reactionary political projects, the extreme stigmatization and criminalization of homeless people, there is a serious attempt to conscript working-class people into seeing homeless people as their enemy.

Tracy Rosenthal

They are successfully using homelessness as a vector to recruit for the fascist project. One of the reasons why we organize around “tenants” as subjects rather than “renters” is because we want to make very clear that unhoused people are included in that effort.

Part of our project is organizing around the needs of the most vulnerable, and that gives us an orientation for what our entire politics should be. We’ll often talk about the homeless tenants in Los Angeles as the vanguard of our movement, because they are claiming public space and figuring out ways to manage what few resources they have to keep each other safe. Engaging people through our union in long-term reeducation around what it means to be unhoused is part of the project.

In Hollywood, one of the things that brought this one tenant association into the Los Angeles Tenant Union was that there were people living in their laundry room, and they wanted to call the cops all the time. The union engaged in a long project to build solidarity to make it possible to see yourself, as a tenant in a precarious situation, in the people who live outside (or in the laundry room). Rebuilding community across those dehumanizing divisions is an important part of our work at this time when the Right is criminalizing people who live outdoors.

One of the reasons why we organize around ‘tenants’ as subjects rather than ‘renters’ is because we want to make very clear that unhoused people are included in that effort.

Ben Mabie

This point doesn’t just offer a glimpse into how important having a robust working-class tenant movement is to helping pull working-class homeowners out of more revanchist coalitions and into emancipatory ones, but it also gets at another analogy between labor and tenant struggle. There’s the “troublemaking wing” or reform wing of the labor movement, which is trying to not just rebuild labor density but transform what it means to be in a union and what the social vision of unions are in this country. The same is also true of the tenant movement. Tenant unions go through ebbs and flows, but especially in a large city like New York, it’s part of the DNA of a lot of large, rent-stabilized buildings.

If you talk to residents who have been living in those buildings for decades, they will tell you of three, four, five different experiences with tenant associations that might be dormant, maybe are relatively active and still get together around the holidays, but people have that living memory of organizing to address living conditions in the same way that they might on a job site.

What’s striking, though, is if you talk to people about what their experience in their tenant association has been, you’ll hear a range of different kinds of tactics and priorities. It’s not uncommon for a tenant association, even in a working-class area, to primarily be concerned about organizing around NYPD walkthroughs, about helping create hostile architecture inside their own lobbies, and about collaborating with the landlord, having mediations with the landlord on a quarterly basis, with a nonprofit sitting in between.

A big part of what tenant unionism is trying to do, especially in a city like New York, is to reactivate and rearticulate what a tenant union is, one that has a more antagonistic relationship with the landlord, one that has a more universal social vision, and one that’s willing to do politics differently.

Tracy Rosenthal

Palestine solidarity organizing has really pushed divestment as a weapon of the Left, and we should think seriously about divestment as a labor strategy that can remove resources from pension funds that end up fueling the displacement of their own workers [through their investments]. It’s not only thinking about wage growth that’s eroded through rising housing costs, but workers’ own pension funds participating in the erosion of their wage growth, because they’re invested in corporations that are contributing to rising rents. They’re also contributing to displacement that makes people’s commutes worse and ejects them from their long-term communities. Divestment is a demand to think of collaboratively as we look to the future, as tenant unions take on larger corporate landlords that are publicly traded or that have investments from unions.

Thinking historically, some of the models that we have for public housing come from labor unions, who built cooperative housing for their members. Looking to the future around unions demanding nonmarket housing is so important.

I put May Day 2028 on my calendar when United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said so. We talk in the book about how one way of looking at rent abolition or housing as a human right is a permanent and general rent strike, so I want to also be thinking about how we in the tenant movement can think at that scale.

One of the paradoxical strengths we have as a nascent movement is that we’re making institutions that can change and be changed by their members rapidly. In LA, we’ve constituted and reconstituted different citywide bodies; we’ve invented local chapters. We can be really responsive to the needs of our members.

If we want to be democratic, it means that we have to be able to change. But what doesn’t change is our commitment to rebuilding the communities that are broken by gentrification, to building forms of solidarity with our neighbors, to the project of remaking the damn world.

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