Abolish rent. Yes, for real.

This article Abolish rent. Yes, for real. was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The largest tenant union in the country is responding quickly and passionately to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. The LA Tenants Union is demanding not just enforcement of existing California protections against price gouging of rental homes, but a moratorium on evictions and a rent freeze, all while tenants are coming together with heroic levels of mutual aid.

But these steps will only mitigate a perpetual struggle, as union co-founders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their new book “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.” “Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent?” they ask.

“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,” Rosenthal and Vilchis argue. “Tenants are exploited and oppressed not just by corporate landlords, or by unscrupulous landlords, but by the fact of having a landlord at all.”

By daring to challenge an entrenched, often deadly societal obligation and demand the burden be lifted, “Abolish Rent” provides a historic contribution to the human rights movement in the U.S. I am among those who needed to hear this book’s message.

I teach and write about housing as a human right. But the daily reality of our law school clinic work representing low-income renters sometimes narrows my vision. Can our client get an extra week before an eviction date that forces them to move out of their home and into their car? Can the infestation of roaches and mold in our clients’ apartment lead to a discount in the rent they are struggling to pay?   

If housing is truly a human right, our clients should never have to ask those questions.

“Rent is a fine for having a human need,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “Everyone deserves a safe and stable home, simply by virtue of being alive. This is what we mean when we say housing is a human right, no different from the right to breathe the air on this earth: You are born with this right; you should not have to earn it.”

They are correct, both as a matter of international law and overwhelming moral consensus. That means it is not just a shame that our clients and millions of others skip meals and leave prescriptions unfilled in order to pay the rent. It is not just sad that they are among the nearly seven million households who live in rental housing plagued by unsafe wiring, water leaks, rodents and mold. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.

Same goes for generations of government-sanctioned housing racism leaving Black households far more likely to be evicted and to be unhoused. Or the overall 3.6 million eviction filings each year that are the inevitable result of unrestrained rent hikes far exceeding wage increases.

This is all illegal. As the LA Tenants Union members chant outside their landlords’ palatial front doors, “Housing is a human right, not just for the rich and white.”   

Government largesse for landlords, government violence for tenants

Governments bear the primary responsibility for protecting human rights, yet our U.S. government is the chief architect of our wretched housing system. Housing in this country is anything but a free market system: Governments heap largesse on landlords and wealthy homeowners, while tenants feel the blunt end of police power and rigged legal systems.

Landlords are presented with an overflowing cornucopia of government subsidies and tax benefits, including write offs for depreciation of their properties (a particular favorite for landlord Donald Trump), lower capital gains tax rates and deferred payments, abatements from state and local governments, and estate tax exemptions. If you want to be rich but have the IRS treat you like you are poor, owning real estate is the ticket.

As for wealthy homeowners, they benefit from tens of billions per year in mortgage interest and property tax deductions. Even our low-income housing programs in the U.S. largely operate by directing government dollars to for-profit landlords through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and HUD voucher and project-based programs.

These are just the direct subsidies. Indirectly, governments prop up the value of privately-held properties by providing infrastructure like water, sewage systems and roads, along with legal frameworks. All housing is public housing, Rosenthal and Vilchis point out, quoting housing scholars David Madden and Peter Marcuse. When landlord lobbyists like the National Multifamily Housing Council claim that its members are “housing providers,” they spew nonsense. We are the housing providers; they just extract profit from it.

Extracting those dollars from tenants is facilitated by governments acting as the muscle for landlords. “Behind each rent check is the threat of state violence,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “If we can’t pay the rent or if we defy any terms our landlords set, they can call the deputies of the state to throw us out of our homes.” As legal scholars have pointed out, our courts provide landlords with fast-track deployment of that police force at a speed and ease that is unmatched across the rest of our civil justice system.

With government running interference for them, landlords and wealthy homeowners are raking in wealth at a breathtaking rate. Two-thirds of the world’s total wealth is in real estate. U.S. landlords collect a half-trillion dollars in rent each year, a monthly transfer from the poorest to the wealthiest that further widens our massive income and wealth gaps.

“The supposed cure for renting is owning your own home,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “But rent is a trap. … Paying rent is keeping us from reaching the first rung of that imagined ‘property ladder.’ And our lost ground is our landlords’ gain. Our rents pay off our landlords’ mortgages, so they can claim their second (or fourth, or 100th) house.”

Indeed, corporate landlords in recent years have ramped up their purchases of single-family homes, particularly in Black neighborhoods. This sets them up not just for more rent collection, but also for reaping the benefits of the homes’ increasing value. In 2021, the average U.S. home value increased at an amount that exceeded the average salary. Those home value gains are often never taxed, while renters’ salaries obviously are. Which means renters’ sweat-earned income continues to fall further behind the passive income their landlords collect as reward for already being wealthy.

Rent strikes claim housing as a human right

It is a bleak picture. But Rosenthal and Vilchis promise “Abolish Rent”will provide “both polemic and guide.” They deliver the latter largely in the form of inspiring examples of tenant power from the hundred-plus tenant associations organized by the LA Tenants Union, including a dramatic rent strike that won Mariachi Plaza tenants lowered rents and guaranteed repairs.

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Louisville’s multiracial tenant union is at the forefront of a growing national movement

People of color and immigrants long marginalized by the U.S. housing system find themselves joined by millennials elbowed away from that first rung of homeownership. It is a dynamic that is contributing to the resurgence of tenant unions well beyond LA. In places like Louisville, Kansas City and Connecticut, local tenant campaigns are building power and coalescing as the national Tenant Union Federation. Tenants form the majority in many U.S. cities.

With those numbers can come real power. But that power lays dormant without solidarity, often elusive in a U.S. housing system and overall culture that emphasize the individual. “Every first of the month, we wonder what it would take to never pay rent again,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “Often, our fantasies are individual: We’ll get a windfall, make it big or play our cards right, earn our way up. … If we want to end the misery of rent for everyone, we’ll need to trade our individualistic fantasies for universal abundance. And we’ll need to work together.”  

The ultimate collective tenant action is the rent strike. “Rent strikes stop the flow of cash to our landlords and reveal their dependence on us,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “Rent strikes suggest that the right to housing already exists; all we need to do is claim it.”  

There is no sugarcoating the substantial risks involved. Although strikes by past generations were the chief instigators for the limited tenant rights that exist today, they inevitably lead to pushbacks up to and including evictions and arrests.

Yet, like labor strikes, rent strikes return power from the fortunate few to the previously marginalized. Rent strikes inherently combine the power of depriving the landlord of revenue while physically occupying the housing in dispute. In this way, every rent strike emulates the legendary sit-down labor strikes that seized the means of production.

But scattered rent strikes won’t achieve the “abolish rent” end game, Rosenthal and Vilchis caution. For that, we will need a coordinated rent strike across a full city or even the country. “This is the kind of power we would need to begin to transform property relations, as well as the state that guarantees them,” they write.

Evicting the landlords

It can be hard to envision the transformation of the state that “Abolish Rent” calls for. Most of us in the U.S. have known nothing but the state operating as an agent actively helping to extract profit from property, but it turns out there is plenty of precedent for a state that actually treats housing as a right.

When Rosenthal and Vilchis talk about “evicting our landlords,” they invoke in part the Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase Acts. TOPA and COPA laws provide first rights of purchase — and sometimes government funding to support that purchase and subsequent renovations — to entities that will convert the property into permanently affordable housing. They can even impose a right of first refusal for tenants or the community, meaning the landowners must accept the bid if it matches the best offer.

Even landlords who are not willing to sell can be evicted through eminent domain, long used by governments at all levels to seize privately-held property to protect the environment and build or expand roads, railways and government buildings. During the mid-20th century, the federal government under President Dwight Eisenhower combined with state and local governments to exercise eminent domain in more than a half-million instances in order to build the interstate highway system. In 2021, Berlin residents passed a referendum to seize the property of large corporate landlords and convert the apartments to social housing. Since 2016, the Catalonia region of Spain has allowed the seizure of vacant corporate-owned apartments, which are then provided to low-income tenants.

As an interim step, Rosenthal and Vilchis support rent control, which not only pumps the brakes on housing profiteering, it builds the state’s role as a protector of tenant rights. But the end game is plentiful, high-quality public housing, which has been a spectacular success in places like Vienna and Singapore. Public housing has also worked well many times in the U.S. despite endless sabotage by real estate-funded politicians.

So, evicting landlords and removing the profiteering from housing is not only possible, it has been done. Same goes for the abolition of rent. In our clinic, we have represented plenty of public housing or voucher tenants whose rent, set by law at 30 percent of their income, is exactly zero dollars. Abolishing rent for the rest of us will not be easy, as real estate capital’s long legacy of attacking rent control and public housing shows. But the fact that 44 million U.S. households rent their homes means the movement has massive potential, and can be ignited at any time. “High rents, displacement and homelessness are not inevitable,” Rosenthal and Vilchis insist. “Every first of the month is another opportunity for organizing, collective action and collective refusal.”

This article Abolish rent. Yes, for real. was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/01/abolish-rent-yes-la-tenants-union-book/