Cover image of Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis (Haymarket Books, 2024)
Every first of the month, we hand over a share of our wages to meet our human need for housing. Our rents rise faster than our incomes, and inequality grows. Every first of the month, more tenants go without food, medication, and basic necessities to pay this tribute. More people take up residence with family, in cars, and in tents outdoors. But every first of the month is another opportunity for organizing, collective action, and collective refusal. Every first of the month is an occasion to educate ourselves and our neighbors about the housing system that ensnares and degrades us. Every first of the month, we can bargain for better conditions, gain more control of how we live. Every first of the month is a chance to take a risk.
In the fairy tale of our capitalist housing system, the price of rent results in a balanced equation of wants and needs. Rental housing, the story goes, is a product that a landlord generously provides; tenants can make informed and unfettered decisions to select an appropriate place; the modest profits our landlords derive are deserved compensation for the crucial service they offer; our housing is well-appointed and our tenures respected; the money earned from our jobs more than covers the cost of our rents; over time, if we are responsible with our resources, we can save up enough to exit the rental market and buy ourselves a home.
For anyone who has ever paid rent, it’s obvious this isn’t how it goes. By now, the statistics feel so familiar they fail to produce any sense of shock: It would take four full-time minimum-wage jobs to afford to rent a typical two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. Twenty-two million tenant households—comprised of half of a total 100 million tenants in the country—spend more than a third of their income on rent. A quarter spend over half of that income. In Los Angeles alone, 600,000 people spend fully 90 percent of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads. More than 653,000 people across the country are homeless every night, the highest number recorded since the federal government began its count. And every minute of the day, landlords file seven evictions—totaling 3.6 million evictions a year.
The humiliating experiences of paying rent are familiar to us, too: the shame of our light fixtures swelled with rainwater, or our rice infested with roaches; the fury of watching a few rolls of paint cover that swelling black morass above our shower; the resolve to eat our child’s leftovers, rather than risk a late fee; the anxiety of condensing our lives into cardboard boxes, while the sheriff paces at our door; the depression that grips us as the places where we grew up lose their texture, become no longer ours, sites of childhood memories and current community ripped up like wildflowers from a field.
These dire statistics and degrading experiences are often collected under the banner of “the housing crisis.” But the capitalist housing system is working exactly as designed: to enrich landlords, developers, and real estate speculators. In the 2010s, landlords raked in over $4.5 trillion from tenants in rent payments. In 2019 alone, those rent payments totaled $512.4 billion. As landlording has become an irresistible way to make money, landlords have taken over more and more homes, enriching corporations and the already rich. In 2021, landlords bought nearly one in seven homes sold in the forty largest US cities—and nearly one in three homes sold in Black neighborhoods. Framing the consequences of our housing system as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine. The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most tenants. It’s designed to maximize profits and to extract the most rent.
Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement. We suffer trauma, loss, precarity, panic, poor health, and premature death. For poor and working-class people, particularly people of color, this crisis is permanent. The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes, and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments—both its compromised regulations and its deliberate deregulations—maintain crisis as the norm.
The frame of “housing crisis” trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, interchangeable “housing units” and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives.
Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent? Power, to paraphrase Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, comes from control over two things: the means of extracting wealth and the means of physical coercion. Landlords have both. They are empowered to take our money as rent and call on the sheriffs or cops to use force if we can’t pay. The entire real estate industry relies on privatizing a common resource (land), hoarding a human need (housing), blocking public intervention or competition, and maintaining a captive market of tenants to exploit and dominate. The immiseration of tenants is a feature of a housing system built on this unequal power dynamic, not a bug we can tinker away. Tenants are exploited and oppressed not just by corporate landlords, or by unscrupulous landlords, but by the fact of having a landlord at all.
Rather than renter, we use the expansive term tenant. The concept harkens back to landlords’ feudal title, which makes their power clear. It also refuses the dehumanizing division that ejects unhoused people from our analyses as soon as they are pushed from their homes. A tenant is more than a renter. A tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their housing, who inhabits but doesn’t own. Like the word tent, the origin of the word tenant is from the Latin tenere, which means “to hold” or “to have.” Tenants hold space but are vulnerable to having it taken away.
Rent isn’t the dispassionate outcome of supply meeting demand, it is the index of struggle between those who own or invest in housing and those who live in it. Rent is a power relation that produces inequality, traps us in poverty, and denies us the capacity to live as we choose. Rent is exploitation and domination. It separates us from our neighbors and alienates us from the places we live. It is the engine that turns a human need into a product to be exploited, bet on, and banked. Rent is the crisis. We pay the price of rent in money, but also in our dignity.
In our nine years building the LA Tenants Union, we’ve seen the consequences of this power relation in the spectacular and the mundane, from landlords large and small: a “mom and pop” breaking down a tenant’s front door with a pickaxe, a thousand-unit corporation issuing lies dressed up in legalese. The subject of our organizing in the union is not housing but tenants. In other words, it’s us. Tenants, unlike housing, have race, gender, family, and biography. And tenants can have power. A tenant can be incarcerated, living in their car, on a couch, or in a tent outside. A tenant can be in kindergarten, can be a teacher—even a teacher on strike. A tenant can be harassed, evicted, displaced, broke, undocumented, fed up—or organized. Tenants can’t afford to be passive objects of social intervention or beneficiaries of a quick “one-weird-wonky-policy” fix. It’s we who must organize to wrest control over where and how we live from those who exploit and dominate us, to protect our homes and to make home a guarantee for all.
Excerpted from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis (Haymarket Books, 2024). Used with permission.
Read Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s conversation with Gabriela Rendón about Abolish Rent, door-to-door community organizing, and revolutionary coalitions.
