Abolish Rent
How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis
Book Edition Details
Summary
Rent: a silent siphon of wealth from the many to the few. In "Abolish Rent," Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis expose the grim mechanics of this system, thrusting readers into the heart of a revolution. Here, tenants aren't just passive victims; they're formidable agents of change. From fervent eviction defenses to vibrant multilingual strategy sessions, the authors spotlight the raw energy of those fighting to reclaim their homes and cities. This narrative doesn’t just critique a broken system; it ignites a vision of hope, where the collective power of the underrepresented can dismantle inequality and reforge a housing reality that serves all. Housing isn't just a commodity—it's a right waiting to be won.
Introduction
The contemporary housing crisis represents far more than a simple market failure or policy oversight—it reveals the fundamental contradictions of treating shelter as a commodity rather than a human right. Through meticulous analysis of tenant organizing in Los Angeles and beyond, this work challenges the dominant narrative that frames housing problems as technical issues requiring market-based solutions. Instead, it exposes rent as a relationship of exploitation that systematically transfers wealth from the poor to the wealthy while maintaining racial and class hierarchies through spatial control. The authors employ a dual methodology that combines grassroots organizing experience with structural analysis, demonstrating how individual tenant struggles connect to broader patterns of capitalist accumulation and state violence. Their approach moves beyond policy critique to examine the actual practices of tenant resistance, revealing how collective action can prefigure alternative social relations. This perspective offers crucial insights for understanding how seemingly local housing battles connect to larger questions of power, democracy, and social transformation in an era of deepening inequality and climate crisis.
Rent as Exploitation: The Housing Crisis as Tenant Crisis
Rent functions as a mechanism of class exploitation that operates through the artificial scarcity of housing and the threat of homelessness. Unlike other market transactions, the rental relationship involves a basic human need, creating a captive market where landlords can extract maximum value regardless of the quality of service provided. This dynamic transforms housing from a use-value into an exchange-value, prioritizing landlord profits over tenant wellbeing and community stability. The current housing system actively produces homelessness as a disciplinary mechanism, ensuring that the threat of living outdoors compels tenants to accept degrading conditions and exploitative terms. Rent extraction operates as a form of tribute paid to property owners simply for their monopoly control over space, requiring no productive activity or social contribution. This relationship systematically impoverishes working people while concentrating wealth among landlord classes who leverage their accumulated capital to acquire more properties. The framing of housing issues as a "housing crisis" obscures the reality that the system functions exactly as intended from the perspective of real estate capital. High rents, evictions, and homelessness are not market failures but necessary features of a system designed to maximize profit from human shelter needs. Understanding rent as exploitation rather than exchange reveals why market-based solutions consistently fail to address the fundamental power imbalance between those who own housing and those who need it. Policy interventions that accept the legitimacy of rent as a social relation inevitably reproduce the conditions they claim to address. Only by recognizing rent as an exploitative extraction can we begin to envision alternatives based on collective control and democratic management of housing resources.
Tenant Organizing and Direct Action: Building Power Through Collective Struggle
Tenant associations represent the fundamental unit of working-class power in housing struggles, transforming individual vulnerability into collective leverage through coordinated action. These organizations develop through the patient work of building relationships among neighbors, identifying common grievances, and creating democratic structures for decision-making and strategic planning. The process of forming tenant associations itself begins to alter the power dynamics within buildings by establishing tenants as political subjects rather than passive consumers of housing services. Rent strikes emerge as the most powerful weapon in the tenant arsenal, directly challenging landlord control by withholding the economic foundation of their power. These actions require extraordinary solidarity and risk-taking, as participants must overcome individual fears of eviction while maintaining collective discipline over extended periods. Successful rent strikes demonstrate that landlords depend entirely on tenant compliance for their wealth, revealing the hidden dependency relationships that property ownership obscures. The practice of direct action in tenant organizing extends beyond individual buildings to encompass neighborhood-wide campaigns against displacement and gentrification. These struggles necessarily confront local government officials who serve real estate interests while claiming to represent tenant constituents. Through militant organizing tactics, tenants can force concessions that seemed impossible through electoral or legal channels alone. Building tenant power requires developing alternative institutions and practices that prefigure post-capitalist social relations. Tenant unions create spaces for democratic participation, mutual aid, and collective problem-solving that challenge both the isolation of individual apartment living and the hierarchical structures of conventional political organizations. These experiments in self-governance provide essential training for the broader social transformations necessary to achieve housing justice.
From Individual Housing to Land Struggle: Prefiguring Abolition Through Occupation
Housing struggles ultimately reveal themselves as contests over land use and spatial control, challenging the fundamental logic of private property relations. When tenants collectively resist eviction or reclaim abandoned buildings, they assert alternative principles for organizing social space based on human need rather than profit maximization. These actions demonstrate the possibility of housing abundance through different institutional arrangements and property relations. Occupations of both private housing and public space create temporary autonomous zones where participants can experiment with collective governance and resource distribution. These experiences provide concrete examples of life without landlords, revealing the unnecessary nature of rent extraction and property speculation. Through occupation, participants develop practical skills in democratic decision-making while creating alternative economies based on mutual aid and shared resources. The distinction between housed and unhoused tenants breaks down through occupation practices that recognize the common interest in challenging property relations. Housed tenants face constant threats of displacement, while unhoused people experience direct state violence for existing in public space. Both groups benefit from expanding collective control over land and challenging the artificial scarcity that maintains high rents and homelessness simultaneously. These struggles necessarily confront state power, as police serve as the ultimate enforcers of property relations and spatial exclusion. Successful occupations must therefore develop strategies for collective defense while building broader community support. The experience of holding space against state repression provides essential preparation for the larger confrontations necessary to transform property relations at scale.
Movement Strategy and Revolutionary Horizon: Toward a World Without Landlords
The tenant movement's strategic orientation centers on building independent working-class organizations capable of challenging both individual landlords and the broader real estate regime. This requires developing infrastructure that can support sustained organizing campaigns while maintaining democratic accountability to affected communities. Tenant unions serve as vehicles for accumulating power across individual building struggles, creating the scale necessary for citywide and regional impact. Movement success depends on connecting immediate tenant needs with broader visions of social transformation, refusing the false choice between reform and revolution. Each rent strike or eviction defense creates opportunities for political education about the nature of capitalist property relations while building the organizational capacity needed for larger challenges to state power. These struggles prefigure the mass mobilizations that would be necessary to expropriate landlord property and establish democratic control over housing resources. The abolition of rent requires dismantling the legal and military apparatus that enforces private property claims, making it fundamentally a revolutionary rather than reformist project. This horizon provides strategic clarity for evaluating potential reforms and building alliances with other movements challenging capitalist social relations. Only through understanding housing struggles as part of broader class conflict can tenant organizing avoid co-optation by real estate interests seeking to manage rather than resolve housing contradictions. Revolutionary tenant organizing must maintain its independence from both electoral politics and nonprofit organizations that channel resistance into harmless forms. The movement's power comes from its ability to disrupt landlord profits and real estate speculation through direct action, not from lobbying for policy changes that preserve fundamental property relations while making marginal improvements to tenant conditions.
Summary
The systematic analysis of rent as a relationship of exploitation rather than market exchange reveals the necessity of revolutionary transformation to achieve genuine housing justice. Through detailed examination of tenant organizing practices, the work demonstrates how collective action can prefigure alternative social relations while building the power necessary to challenge capitalist property relations at their foundation. The strategic vision presented offers both immediate tactics for tenant resistance and a long-term horizon for abolishing the artificial scarcity and spatial control that maintain class domination through housing. This analysis proves essential for anyone seeking to understand how local housing struggles connect to broader questions of social transformation and revolutionary strategy in contemporary capitalism.
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By Tracy Rosenthal
