Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (2017) | Creative Commons
How do we remake our cities for the people who actually live in them? Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two cofounders of the largest tenants’ union in the country, propose an answer in their new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket, 2024). In November 2024, the authors and activists sat down with Parsons Housing Justice Lab director Gabriela Rendón to discuss rent strikes, door-to-door community organizing, coalitions, and the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Gabriela Rendón: In all the organizing work you have done, rent strikes are at the center. It is not just about stopping the rent and feeling that freedom; it is also about building relationships, knowing your neighbors, and having new skills because you’ve learned how to negotiate, how to bring together people, and how to strategize. Can you talk about those strategies? Why a rent strike?
Tracy Rosenthal: I’ll tell one story from a 2017 strike we call the “Mariachi rent strike.” This was a 26-unit building, two blocks from Mariachi Plaza [Boyle Heights, Los Angeles]. A third of the tenants were mariachi musicians, which means they rely on going to the park to pick up work.
A new landlord, a man named Frank BJ Turner, bought their building, and he started handing out rent increase notices. Even though the tenants had lived in this building for ten, twenty, in some cases thirty years, this was not a rent-stabilized building, so the landlord could raise the rents to market rate. That was a perfectly legal scenario that tenants face all the time, all across the city of Los Angeles, across the country, and the world. But these tenants decided that although the rent increase might’ve been legal, it wasn’t right. In some cases, rent was going up $800 a month. So these rent increases were, in many ways, eviction notices. And for some, to lose their housing would have meant to lose their jobs. It would’ve meant losing their neighborhood of Boyle Heights, in Los Angeles, which is a historic Chicano neighborhood and bastion of resistance in our city. This is in the context of accelerating gentrification, where there have been new transit stops, new zoning laws passed, and new police patrols. It’s really important to continue to underline the role of policing in raising property values in the neighborhood.
The fight, I think importantly, started in some ways small. All the tenants wanted was a meeting with the landlord. They wanted to meet the person who had the power to eject them from the building face to face. They just wanted to talk to him. Well, first they had to figure out who he was. And that was a process that took research on the part of the union—even going door to door, pretending to sell chocolates to try to locate this LLC. So many of the systems that we have for property ownership are actually about creating distance and anonymity to protect our landlords from us.
But they wanted a face-to-face meeting. That refusal instigated one escalation: a protest at the property manager’s office. And their refusal initiated another escalation, which was an effort to bring the community on board to get more pressure from the community in their struggle. When those large protests didn’t work, they moved to collectively withholding their rent in a rent strike.
In many ways, our most powerful weapons as tenants are the material relationships that we have with each other, which allow us to socialize and distribute risk. We can collectively wield our rent checks, the money that we pay every month, as an economic sanction on our landlords to make them come to the bargaining table, reverse the relationship of dependence, and demonstrate that it’s actually our landlord who is dependent on us.
Building trust in the building, the support of the larger union, and the support of the neighborhood of Boyle Heights—those things were what propelled their strategy. A lot of the tenants will reflect that the final straw to get the landlord to come to the bargaining table was a campout on his lawn, which raised the social cost of eviction for the landlord.
Through this strike, through the tenants’ solidarity, we were able to win a collective bargaining agreement—the first of its kind in recent LA history—which basically achieved rent control for their building. The tenants changed the conditions that govern their building, they changed the terms of their lease, and they won protections that are beyond the scope of the law.
Leonardo Vilchis: The whole idea of what we’re doing at the tenant union is to build power across the tenants. One of the things that we always have to do is overcome fear. There are a lot of laws within the city, and probably in New York, where the tenant is able to withhold rent until repairs are made. But the reality, at least in Los Angeles, is that most lawyers told us, “It’s too complicated,” “It’s too risky,” “Please don’t do that.” You go to social service agencies and the housing department agencies, and they’ll say, “No, no, it’s better if you talk to your landlord.” “We’re going to investigate.” And the reality is that none of that would work.
So the whole idea of bringing a lot of tenants together around the conditions of their building is that you have more power. We move incrementally from lots of different events in the community where people will resist withholding rent to finally getting the guts to begin to say, “You know what? We’re going to withhold rent.”
Rendón: Can you talk about coalitions? How do you organize at different levels?
Vilchis: In Boyle Heights, which is a mostly Latino immigrant community shaped by racism and segregation, we started fighting against the public transit system that displaced about 250 families. Everybody, even the churches, was saying, “Development is good for you, you can’t push back. You just have to accept that this is going to happen.”
If you’re the only people in your neighborhood fighting for this thing, everybody and their grandmother is going to say yes to it. The nonprofits get funding so they can support and endorse the policies, and the churches will get funding because they’re going to have social programs to deal with gangs and things like that. The politicians will come and tell you that the government is the savior of the people, especially if you live in a Democrat-run city, in a Democrat-run state, where supposedly the Democrats are the good guys. Everybody’s going to tell you that you cannot do this.
So we had no way to fight just by ourselves in our own community. We needed to develop a different kind of alliance in a different kind of space. The network that built the tenants union were not your typical organizers that work for nonprofits, or personal campaigns, or developers or planners that come from the city. These were concerned people who lived in their community—artists and activists who were not paid by large foundations to have a vision and follow up a specific strategic plan. These were people who live in the neighborhood and said, “I care about what’s happening in my neighborhood. I can see the gentrification and I want to develop solidarity with the people who are being pushed out.” They all came together and said, “We need a tenants union, and we’re struggling to figure out how to build this tenant union after we have asked foundations, nonprofits, the UCLA and the planning department.”
We decided to do it in the room. On a Saturday morning, we’re all freaking out saying, “We want to have a tenants union, but we don’t have the resources. What are we going to do?” And Tracy says, “Okay, I’m here, here’s five dollars. Now we have a tenants union. Now the union has members.”
Rosenthal: This has been our weapon for over a hundred years. It’s only in the suppression of movement history, particularly communist movements’ history, that we don’t recognize it as part of our arsenal that our relationship to our landlords has been shaped by the rent strikes of the past.
The first rent controls came from organized tenant rebellion in the form of mass rent strikes. Anytime we as tenants access our rights, even as individuals through this client-based court system, we have organized tenant rebellions to thank. But that is not part of the history that we learn. That’s not part of what we recognize in this political environment, where we are channeled to solve our problems as individuals, as clients of lawyers or social services, where we are addressed only in states of emergency or once every four years, when we can register an individual opinion through a vote. And so thinking seriously about rent strikes is also about reviving the history of class struggle that we ignore every time we participate in the legal process and don’t recognize the collective power that we have.
Rendón: I would like to point out something that Leo said about the nonprofit sector: They have funding, they have an agenda, and they have been serving communities that are at risk of displacement. What are the limits of the nonprofit sector?
Vilchis: When we were fighting against the demolition of the housing projects, we were part of a nonprofit. The residents of the public housing apartments went to the nonprofit and asked for a vote to decide whether the demolition was a good thing or a bad thing. Two-thirds of the board of directors of the nonprofit decided to vote in favor of the demolition. Those two-thirds were the people who didn’t live in the projects. That tells you immediately what is the relationship of the nonprofit to the people it is trying to serve.
A lot of my friends who are in nonprofits see their work as political work, but it’s compromised in Los Angeles. The politicians depend on the nonprofits to advance an agenda that is progressive, and the nonprofits depend on politicians to endorse that agenda. But who’s driving the agenda is the large foundation.
In Boyle Heights, the California endowment had a place-based initiative to change the indexes of health, economic development, education, and access to professional credentials. The fastest way to achieve that is by displacing the people.
When the new data signals decided that they weren’t going to fight against gentrification, the government told us not to work against gentrification. When we decided to keep going against gentrification, they decided not to fund us anymore. In the long run, a place-based initiative that is going to change the material conditions in the projects depends on a change in the population, not the change of the conditions that the population is living under. Here we are fifteen years later, and a big chunk of the community has been displaced. The limit is defined by the people in the struggle.
During the pandemic, we were the first ones to launch a mass rent strike—our Food-Not-Rent campaign—after our tenants came to us nervous and scared because they couldn’t pay the rent. We could have said, “Let’s go and ask for money and beg for money.” But we were really concerned that that was not going to happen. So we decided to go up front and say, “We’re not going to pay rent.” We are going to pay for food and support the community.
And guess what? In a few months, the federal government, the city government, and the state government started saying, “Oh my God, we better do something because these crazy tenants decided not to pay rent.” And what did they do? They started giving money to the landlords. They didn’t help the tenants, they helped the landlords.
As conditions have changed, a lot of nonprofits are fighting and pushing for us to have more rights. Since the pandemic, rights have expanded tremendously, but not at the pace that we need. The kinds of rights that we have now are the kinds of rights that we needed five years ago, fifteen years, ten years ago. But we hope that at some point nonprofits and foundations catch up; that people who are working for these organizations start breaking away and say, “You know what? We stay with the movement.”
Rendón: If we take control over the land or the buildings, maybe we can change the system. Can you talk a little bit about what is happening in LA in that direction?
Vilchis: One phrase that we use a lot within the tenants union is that we want to act our way into thinking, not think our way into acting. As we build the organization, we start rethinking what we thought we knew. Withholding money for repairs becomes a rent strike. Organizing across tenants’ associations builds a citywide local. Organizing across locals builds a tenants union.
In some of our places we have locals that are beginning to appropriate the street for their own purposes. Sometimes we close the street and have a block party and market. When the police come and they see all these old ladies taking over the street, they don’t know what to do with it. The local appropriates the city by doing the things that they need to do: holding community events, sharing resources.
In terms of the buildings themselves, we can buy new property and build it in collectivity trust, as a land trust. The contradiction that exists with that is that the housing market is moving faster than the policies and mechanisms that are created. So I think it’s a question of getting used to pushing those boundaries and then forcing policy changes. That’s the short term.
The long term is building an organization that presents the alternative. It’s not an organization that exists just in one city or just in one community. We need to have it nationwide. We need to get past this moment where we’re stuck with two parties and forced to make a choice. And I’m speaking from Los Angeles, which is mostly Democrat, and the state is mostly Democrat. California is one of the most powerful economies in the world, but it sucks. People are living on the streets. Farm workers have to live on the ground, in the fields. Homeless people are being jailed. The movements we’re creating need to start forcing a new alternative, a new way of doing things.
But in the meantime, yes, we need to act our way into thinking: take over our buildings, get used to controlling our buildings, and little by little learning what it is to be the manager of your neighborhood.
One example: We have a local in our neighborhood where people fought for five years to have a stoplight. While they didn’t have the stoplight, they created their own mechanism to slow down traffic, by having volunteers act as crossing guards. Later they painted lines [on the road] to slow down the trucks—all of this, without permission. We say we’d rather ask for forgiveness than for permission. The city wouldn’t notice these things. But the police started noticing this stuff and they started going to the council member and after a protracted battle, the council member gave us the stoplight.
A couple of doors down, we’re doing food distribution. One building serves it to all their neighbors, and the neighbors tell them all the problems that they have. And that’s how we then organize to address the problems that exist in the neighborhood. When there is leftover food, they cook it and bring it to the homeless, which has built a bridge for us to start working with the people who are homeless that live around the neighborhood. Imagine this being repeated all across the city. Imagine this repeated across the country, neighbors coming together to solve their own problems and taking their own initiative. What happens when people do that? The city gets concerned and says, “Oh wow, why are they doing this stuff? Why aren’t they talking to us?”
We use the informal mobilization of our resources to transform the city and push for the formal mobilization of institutions to create new policies, politics, and formations that provide us with what we need.
Rosenthal: The context we’re working in is a settler colonial state and an imperial state. When I think about a union’s role in relationship to the state now, I think about two things: One, I see how we can produce our own authority, which allows us to make demands about how we can manage our own neighborhoods, and extract the resources that we know that we need. Two, we can create crises for the state, as we did through “Food-Not-Rent” and “cancel rent,” and as the tenants of Hillside Villa are doing in demanding that they get to stay in the housing they’ve been in thirty years—so-called “affordable housing” with affordability covenants that expired. These are the dynamics we need to grow. As Leo was saying, right now it’s about developing the political commitments and the horizon of the movement to produce our own authority and create these larger crises.
Vilchis: In the United States, there is an unfinished project of Reconstruction, stopped by racism and greed: a project of land redistribution and a new form of government. We need to connect with that abandoned project, and the ones that are already developed in other parts of the world, because the project of liberation in the United States is way, way behind. This country was built on stolen land with slave labor and is maintained by immigrant labor. The process of liberation is unfinished and it’s time for us to come back to it.
Read an excerpt from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, courtesy of the authors and Haymarket Books.
