I recently read Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. It’s a book by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) and early backers of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN), a collection of tenants unions around the country.
As I read, I quickly realized I wish I had the book 5 years ago. In those days, I was working with our local DSA chapter to organize a tenants union, and I joined the Iowa City Tenants Union (ICTU) as one of its founding board members. I also joined the city housing commission in the fall of that year.
This book could’ve prepared us for the struggles ahead. It would’ve been a great resource to share with early tenants union members. Instead, we learned many lessons the hard way.
So, let’s talk a bit about the book and what it might teach us.
Tenants Unions and Abolish Rent
Tenants unions are about class struggle, not rights. Rosenthal and Vilchis center their book on this point. And it’s one I struggled to get across with the ICTU.
In developing this message, Abolish Rent tells the story of LATU and ATUN. In practice, they have a federated structure. LATU is a city wide group of tenants who came together and began organizing on the local level. They built associations of single buildings and landlords that come together in neighborhood chapters. Those chapters then meet with one another under the LATU banner. And when tenants unions from across the country join, they do so under the ATUN banner.
That’s an effective structure. It’s one we never quite did with ICTU, though one of our early board members (a guy named Derick, who had a lot of union experience) advocated for it. Had we read this book in 2019, I think we would’ve began more effectively.
Rosenthal and Vilchis present landlordism as a one-sided war on tenants. Organizing tenants then becomes the primary solution.
In deploying this structure, LATU used the rent strike. Rent strikes worked because LATU had large numbers of tenants, putting together not just people already a part of leftist culture but also the broader group of all tenants who live in a building.
This contrasts to ‘tenants rights’ approaches, which focus only on legal rights under the law. By looking only to systems of laws and courts, tenants leave most of their power on the table.
The Problem with Affordable Housing
While Abolish Rent places most of its focus on tenant power, it touches on policy. Specifically, it criticizes the notion of ‘affordable housing,’ as currently practiced in the U.S.
At the federal level, we address housing primarily by subsidizing the rent of low-income tenants (e.g., Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, or HCV) and the building of new housing for lower income people (e.g., Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC).
These programs help lots of people, but they come nowhere near serving the actual need. They’re also built on a class collaboration approach. In other words, rather than specifically serve tenants, they serve the shared interests of tenants and businesses. This leads to serious problems.
Both of the programs I cited above are expensive and inefficient ways to house people. And the reason is that they shift billions of dollars from taxpayers to landlords and developers. They create a perverse class politics that divides tenants from one another and from regular homeowners.
In short, they’re welfare programs for landlords and developers. They also drive inflation for market-rate housing. Furthermore, these are the very features that allow them to bring landlords and developers into the class collaboration. They’re essential elements of the ‘affordable housing’ movement.
Rosenthal and Volchis want to use tenants unions to get us to a better choice. For them, this means working toward democratically owned and managed public housing. With public housing, we can serve the interests of tenants and regular homeowners, while working around landlords and developers.
Can’t Live with Affordable Housing, Can’t (Currently) Live Without It
As someone who not only built a tenants union, but also served on a city housing commission and had to learn the ins and outs of housing policy, I think Abolish Rent, in a broad sense, gets it right.
One key problem with existing housing policy - as seen even among non-profits and ‘affordable housing’ advocates - is that it’s so weighted in favor of landlords and developers that it fails to consider how things work from the perspective of other actors.
Here’s one example. Non-profits and affordable housing advocates typically support zoning changes that make it easier to build new housing. This includes moving from single-family to multi-family zoning and building add-ons, such as Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs).
In theory, these changes increase housing supply and thereby lower prices for tenants and potential homeowners. In practice, they often create the wrong kinds of supply (e.g., luxury units and short-term rentals). But even when they do create the right kinds of supply, advocates ignore half the equation.
In short, advocates rarely examine the effects of these policies on housing demand. They simply assume that demand will stay the same. But it probably won’t. Loosening regulations will make land and properties more attractive to investors, thereby increasing property values and demand. If demand increases enough - which is to say faster than the rate of supply - this will cancel out and even reverse any lower costs achieved by increasing supply.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t pursue the options provided by affordable housing advocates. Nor should we get rid of HCV or LIHTC without first replacing them with better options. But we should pursue ‘affordable housing’ policies only carefully and thoughtfully.
And the popular power that comes from tenants unions points the way to better options.
Why Pay Rent?
In reflecting on one’s status as a tenant, one comes to the question: why pay rent?
Landlords want to call themselves ‘housing providers,’ but they do no such thing. In fact, the relationship between landlord and tenant is something of a holdover from feudalism. Landlords privatize housing and make it scarce. They drive up the price and then profit from their ownership of scarce resources.
We could manage it far better with a public system.
Landlords aren’t ‘housing providers,’ just as bosses aren’t ‘job providers.’ In both cases, a capitalist profits by coercing people into a system where they have to give up the goods to people who haven’t worked to earn them. By organizing tenants unions and using the rent strike, tenants learn these lessons on the ground. They see that life without a landlord is just fine.
On ‘Abolish Rent’
Finally, I’d like to look at the title of the book and the theme of ‘abolition.’ Critics of modern abolitionism claim it’s grounded in a bad analogy to slavery. I’ve written on this topic before, so I won’t repeat all this ground. But I do think the criticism has merit. I also think some of what is called ‘modern abolitionism’ has probably succumbed to anarcho-liberal utopian tendencies.
However, Rosenthal and Vilchis break new ground here. They specify, at length, what they mean by ‘abolish rent.’ And it works well for them.
They want to use tenants unions as the first step in transforming our housing system from individual ownership to collective, democratic stewardship. Along the way, they see ‘abolish rent’ as a slogan for that vision. It’s a rallying cry for tenants who get a taste of collective decision making – and the feelings of solidarity that come along with it – when they’re joining in a rent strike.
That’s a kind of abolitionism worth supporting.
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