Tenants Rise Up

Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis are the cofounders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), a multilingual formation organizing across the vast sprawl of the city. Situated in multiple organizing histories, LATU organizes to build tenant power and to prefigure a housing system not built on a foundation of extractive and carceral relationships with landlords or the state.

Rosenthal and Vilchis have written a radical treatise, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, that uses the authors’ organizing experiences with LATU—and one of its predecessors, Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights—to make an argument for a permanent rent strike; the abolition of rent. The book walks us through an alley in Boyle Heights transformed into a community-led space, an organized encampment by unhoused Angelenos in Echo Park, and takes us into the heart of a year-long rent strike by a building close to Mariachi Plaza.

Earlier this month, I spoke with the authors about LATU’s organizing lineage and tactical approaches, the carceral and neoliberal logics built into existing affordable housing programs, and how tenant organizing can function as an anti-fascist project. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Oksana Mironova

Oksana Mironova: Rent as a power relationship is a central theme in Abolish Rent. Why is this framing a useful approach for thinking about how housing is structured in the United States?

Tracy Rosenthal: We often hear that rent is a neutral outcome of supply and demand, a purely economic relation that sufficiently allocates the resource of housing. But what we know as tenants and through our analysis of the economic system and the political system is that rent is actually a lot more than that. It’s not neutral, and it doesn’t sufficiently allocate the resource that is a human need.

We wanted to start from tenants’ experience to address rent. So, when we say we pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun, that is a way for us to describe how rent is a product of exploitation and domination. It’s the product of an economic system that’s designed to extract wealth from tenants and enrich landlords and real estate speculators, and it’s a product of a political system that’s designed to enshrine the right to profit over the right to life. The average landlord spends four hours a month maintaining a property. How is it that landlords who work four hours a month get to extract this immense tribute that is the largest expense of the average household?

Leonardo Vilchis: The pandemic made things very self-evident. People had to choose between paying rent and feeding themselves and taking care of their children. That’s why we launched our campaign, Food Not Rent. Basically, we said that, right now, rent is not the main thing.

At the same time, the government started subsidizing the landlords: there were all these emergency payments. If you add to that what Tracy said about landlords working four hours a month and look at the quality of the housing that working and poor people—who we mostly organize with—live in, it’s pure extraction. None of that money ever comes back [into the building or house].

OM: In response to these ongoing conditions, you put the rent strike as the central way of breaking or augmenting that power relationship between tenants and landlords. Why that tactic as opposed to any other, and how do you situate it within the broader organizing context?

TR: In the book, we tell the story of the Mariachi rent strike in Boyle Heights, which was one of our first. This was a non-rent-stabilized building in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, which basically meant that the tenants had a target on their backs. When a new landlord bought their building, they received rent increases of up to $800 a month.

Over the course of a yearlong rent strike, the tenants won a collective bargaining agreement that was equivalent to rent stabilization, along with the right to renegotiate. Not only were the tenants able to stay in their homes and neighborhood, they were able to basically invent new laws for how their housing would be governed and the extent to which their landlord could extract rent from them.

The Los Angeles Tenant Union might have been the first tenant union in the country to go on strike during the pandemic, on April 1. We organized Food Not Rent because we recognized that people simply couldn’t pay the rent. We used this rent strike to create a crisis for the people who extract mass sums from us. We know that it works in the short term to defend our housing, to extract concessions from our landlords, to get rents canceled, to get repairs done, and to negotiate new contracts that exceed what’s on offer, according to the city and in the state.

So, our writing is grounded in that experience. This book is called Abolish Rent, and one way to think about rent abolition is as a permanent and general rent strike. For the time that you’re on rent strike, you experience housing as a human right: you have shelter without the need to pay for it.

LV: On the individual or family level, there’s a schizophrenic relationship with the rent strike. The first things that people say when they don’t get the services that they need is, “I’m not going to pay for this.” But the ability to follow through with this is difficult because of the law and unequal balance of power between landlord and the tenant. When we started doing the organizing with tenants around these issues and this tactic, we would go to the lawyers, who would discourage us. But by building a tenants union, an organization, and a movement, the tenants are ready to move forward with what we need to do. We are building the capacity and power in a whole building, and in a whole community, to do this.

Another important aspect of the rent strike is withholding rent for repairs. The amount of money that is accumulated by the tenants by withholding rent gives them control of the building and allows them to start doing repairs and improve their conditions. We have buildings where people have installed handicap ramps and redone plumbing. They are positioning themselves against the landlord and at the same time reclaiming or affirming that this really is their home.

I’m an immigrant from Mexico. Here in the United States, the relationship to renting an apartment is really, really interesting. In Mexico, renters are kind of like homeowners. They’re in charge of everything that has to do with their home, and they have control and access to make things happen. Here, the fear and the manipulation around this stuff is crazy.

The rent strike affirms the control of the tenant over their home, builds organization, and makes visible the complicity between the state and capital to keep conditions bad and to continue exploitation of tenants.

OM: This language of shared autonomy and responsibility brings up earlier movements for me, including the Young Lords’ New York chapter, whose organizing helped shape a political squatting campaign in the early 1970s, or even earlier leftist organizing at the turn of the century. Could you place your particular tenant organizing moment—in Los Angeles or the United States as a whole—in a broader radical history?

LV: Well, framing this around housing narrows the whole struggle. At the end of the day, the struggle is for land. If we go to United States’s history, to the abolition of slavery, there is a movement for land redistribution in the South, which is betrayed by racism and the people who are in power.

In Latin America, independence struggles by the colonized required an alliance between peasants, the landless, and indigenous communities. The struggle to build these nations required the inscription of land redistribution, land rights, land everything, in their post-colonial constitutions. Land is the place where we plan what’s built, what’s distributed, how production is organized.

In Los Angeles, we talk a lot about environmental justice. Housing for the city’s poorest is located by the freeways. If we don’t control territory, if we don’t control land, we don’t get to decide the kind of housing that we’re going to have and where it will be. As long as we are stuck with getting little chunks of affordable housing in small sectors, in small lots, or within buildings, we lose the whole perspective of how the poor have been displaced from our cities, from our neighborhoods, and how gentrification works. We lose perspective about how financialization works and the value of land is produced.

We need to take land out of that whole cycle. The radical demand is to go beyond the building, beyond the apartment, and look at land and planning, and who gets to make those decisions. And there is nothing in the United States Constitution that allows for that, whereas in some places in Latin America, you have mechanisms that grant people the power to decide what happens within their land.

TR: To go back to the black-led struggle for land redistribution, it was followed by a long period of white reconstruction. And we are living in this counterinsurgency to Black Reconstruction.

You named the Young Lords. I often think about their Garbage Offensive in relationship to our own movement. They cleaned up their neighborhood as a way to both take it over—control the territory—and to extract concessions in the form of resources from the state. The way they intervened in their own neighborhoods is very analogous to the things that our local chapters are engaged in, including reclaiming space.

In the book, we talk about the long-term process of tenants organizing in Boyle Heights to clean up and control their alleys. Tenants inhabited a place that had been the site of a violent attack and turned it into a place where we show movies, where we sell goods on a Saturday, and through that process, extract resources from the state, including streetlights and other forms of infrastructure. In the union, we often say that we make our community by defending it. We can reclaim the territories of our neighborhood through self-organization and through that process defend our communities, build up our own capacities, and also extract the concessions that we need. I think that is what the Young Lords were engaged in, a sort of perfect model to think about historically.

In the last chapter in our book, “From Housing Struggle to Land Struggle,” one of the foundations of our analysis has to do with organizing unhoused tenants. We use the word tenant and not renter because we want to include people who live outside. This organizing follows a similar pattern of claiming space—in this case, public space—as a means of survival. When we were organizing with Echo Park Rise Up, people were organizing showers, food distribution, a jobs program, harm reduction for people who use drugs—all through the process of claiming and defending that territory.

Leo often says—part of what we’re doing in our presentations is repeating the things that the other person said—that we should organize from the position of the most vulnerable person.

When we organize from the position of the most vulnerable person, we use strategies and the demands that transform the whole system and help everybody else on the way. And so it’s important to situate unhoused people as a part of our movement, and also as the vanguard of our movement.

LV: I want to build on an issue Tracy mentioned. Union de Vecinos started thirty years ago to fight against the demolition of public housing. Within public housing, the community made interventions in which they established relationships with gang members, which later on gave them the power to be able to deal with drug dealing, graffiti, and guns.

Tracy’s description of organizing around the alleyways was a community response to a space that was occupied by gangs. As the women in the community started occupying the alleys, cleaning the trash, erasing graffiti, and using the space for community entertainment, they developed both a relationship with the gang members and created a new space in the neighborhood to address their own needs. The alleys in Boyle Heights are the backyard of community. They live in these big buildings. There are streets all around them. There are no parks nearby. So we transformed that space and made it possible for the community to use it socially. Little by little, what you can see in this process is the community starts saying, “This is our neighborhood. We’re making it happen.”

Years later, the city started promoting gentrification, creating an Arts District, putting in bike lanes, planting trees. The community had developed such an acute understanding of what it means to build a city that functions for them that they started pushing back and asking, “How is this going to work?” We were going to other neighborhoods in LA and saw places with trees, but no people on the sidewalks. We asked for trees with benches around them. Suddenly, nobody wanted to put the trees in anymore. So, the actual goal was very evident. The same thing happened with the bike lanes.

TR: To situate one more thing, when Leo talks about the origin of Union de Vecinos, which is now LATU’s East Side Local chapter, the struggle was against the demolition of public housing and its replacement with privately owned, publicly subsidized affordable housing. This was during a Democratic administration, using the federal Hope VI program. It’s also important to situate our struggle in a moment of tenants fighting against liberal governances and liberal strategies of “solving the housing crisis.”

OM: The Union de Vecinos was founded in 1996, in response to a demolition plan for a public housing development in Boyle Heights. LATU emerged a little bit before the pandemic, and it is a city-wide tenant organizing formation. How did you get from a specific neighborhood project to a broad organizing structure?

LV: When we formed Union de Vecinos, we partnered with Dont Rhine, a member of an art collaborative called Ultrared. He accompanied us through the whole process of struggling against demolition. And we kept working together, developing art projects that reflected on the reality of communities in struggle, fighting against neoliberal economic policies, and trying to build bridges across different parts of the world. We were doing a lot of traveling, learning, establishing connections. But in terms of impact, we were reflecting: How is any of this changing our struggle in Los Angeles?

It became very clear that we needed to do something. We formed this thing called the School of Echoes, which was basically artists and activists, creating spaces for conversations. We were asking people: “What is happening in your community? What are you hearing? What are your issues?”

The idea of a Tenants Union came out of these conversations. There were people rooted in different neighborhoods trying to get involved. We were doing lots of reflection, going around, and Tracy said, “Well, how do we start a Tenants Union?” We start with members. And Tracy said, “Well, I’m member one.” And here we are.

Union de Vecinos was talking to nonprofits, and they were always doing the research, talking about funding, and doing analysis, but not moving forward on anything. We needed a group of people who would just take the initiative and go forward. The other part of it, if you go back to Union de Vecinos, is our victories here and there in the neighborhood were not enough to really change the balance of power in the city. And that’s part of what we’re trying to do, change the balance of power in the city and—long term—in the country.

OM: Tracy, you wrote a good piece about the Grants Pass v. Johnson case for The New Republic, before the Supreme Court decision came down in June. One of the things that you talk about in the piece is how the right has been using the moral panic around homelessness as a powerful organizing tool, sometimes with enthusiastic support from liberal city governments. Where do you see things going post-Grants Pass?

TR: Grants Pass made it constitutional for cities to enact total bans on living outside. Our analysis in the book is about how the criminalization of homelessness is the ground on which the domination of tenants continues. We’ll see the intensification of this criminalization, at a time when our housing system is simply ejecting more and more people into the streets.

Homelessness and migration have always been the key vectors for fascists to cling to. Now the invisible bureaucracies have been broken down to house migrants and those populations are becoming more and more the same. What we are seeing over and over is the right successfully leveraging these moral panics to grow their ranks. And at the same time, California is innovating new forms of liberal fascism. What we see in Los Angeles is care-washed rhetoric about not criminalizing homelessness but instead ordering unhoused people at gunpoint into the soft jails of shelters and tiny homes that have lock-in hours, restrictions on belongings, incredible amounts of surveillance, and separation from your pets and your loved ones. In the absence of an organized left response to this crisis, we see new forms of liberal innovation on what incarceration means.

LV: The goal is not to solve the problem; the goal is to “clean” the city.  Most of the people who are going through this process are the same people, over and over again. It is basically a recycling of people through the same system with a tiny, microscopic minority of people actually getting into permanent housing.

Most get pushed into nonpermanent programs, with increasing carceral elements. Every homeless person that is housed in these places is treated like a criminal. And while the number of arrests of homeless people have technically decreased, the number of violent encounters between homeless people and the police is going up.

OM: In the opening of your book, and of this interview, you described rent as a “a tribute . . . at the barrel of a gun.” This really comes into focus when talking about policies toward homeless people who are unable to afford the rent, because the violence is so front and center.

LV: The Echo Park situation points at this perfectly. When the homeless people came together and organized themselves the police response to that self-organizing was amazingly violent. This again points to the fact that the poor are telling us where the struggle is, but also telling us how aggressive and violent the response of the state is going to be.

TR: There are legal innovations that enact violence too. When you’re housed through one of these programs, you sign a contract as a “participant,” not as a tenant. You are denied the historic protections that have been won by the tenant movement, like the right to an eviction process. You are also separated from any economic leverage that you have, which you could use to make demands to get repairs done. This is very similar to Section 8, where you’re separated from your economic leverage because the state is paying for your housing directly to the landlord, no matter what.

These new programs targeting houseless people are a kind of backlash against the bare rights that we have as tenants.

OM: Where should the tenant movement go from here? 

LV: In a country where more than fifty to sixty million people are living in the gig economy, where industrial production is being reduced more and more, working class organizing should happen in homes and in neighborhoods. How can we catch up all the people who are not being organized, who are not in unions? How do we catch all these people up and start creating a space where all these different forms of organization are growing? This gives us a horizon of where to go.

At the same time, it’s important for us within the tenants movement to start having a more international picture, to think about how we connect to larger struggles, and the role the United States plays in them.

TR: One void that the right is really excellent at filling is people’s lack of control over their lives. Our work in the tenant movement is to build democratic institutions that people have control over, at the building, neighborhood, and city scale. This is an anti-fascist project, rebuilding the bonds that have been broken down by speculation, displacement, gentrification.

People get a political education from taking risks in their everyday lives. One of the things we talk about is how a tenant union is a school. It is a place where we experiment, try things, and grow because we invite more people into this process of learning. We don’t know how we’re going to overthrow the capitalist housing system and take control of our homes. We don’t know, but we have to try.

It’s a risk to allow our capitalist housing system to run rampage through our lives. When when we recognize that, it makes it easier to think about what it would mean to take a political risk in the company of our neighbors, and what it would mean to think strategically about the leverage that we have as tenants in our building and in the territories of our blocks and neighborhoods. This allows to reflect on what risks we’d be willing to take in in order to get one step further.

LV: In Los Angeles, we’re building a community that is learning how to run the city. And I think that’s where we have to go. We have to learn to run the city.