Imagining a world without landlords

Last winter, during a polar vortex that swept in windchills of -30 degrees, the property manager for my apartment building directed the building maintenance worker to drill a hole into my window instead of fixing a leak from the ceiling. While I watched, metal shavings from the window frame rained onto the floor of the tiny, uninsulated room I use as an office. 

For years, a hole in the ceiling where a drain pipe used to be—at some point, this room had been a three-season porch—periodically poured brown fluid onto my desk. It soaked my rug, splashed onto the leaves of my plants, and left everything it touched—papers, notebooks, desk, chair—with a fine, sweetly rotten stink. Also for years, I’d requested the leak to be fixed, only to have requests ignored, or for management to throw up their hands and say the tenants above me were leaving their windows open and letting in rain that ran into an unplugged old drain hole in their floor: We can’t force them to shut their windows. But the leaks were just as likely to happen when it was sunny, and when I knocked on my upstairs neighbors’ doors, I learned that, far from leaving their windows open during rainstorms, they too were living with this wet. Now, management’s “fix,” instead of finding and stopping the source of the leak, was to let the brown water run out of my window. 

I’ve rented for almost two decades, and I’ve always known that every landlord I’ve had—whether a small “mom and pop” outfit or a nameless coastal void hiding behind numerous LLCs—didn’t see me as a full human person. But it wasn’t until I watched the maintenance worker put a PVC pipe through perfectly good metal and glass, letting in subarctic air and making it certain that these previously perfectly sound windows would need to be replaced sooner rather than later, that I realized they also don’t value the property they charge me so much to live in. They don’t treat me with dignity or safety, but they don’t treat the place that I make beautiful—that I make a home—with dignity either. Why should this landlord worry about buying new windows? With my inevitable yearly rent increase, they wouldn’t be paying for them—I would. 

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis
Haymarket Books, paperback, 224 pp., $10.77, haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent

“The housing market doesn’t produce homes, it produces opportunities for investment,” LA Tenant Union cofounders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Rent is the fine we pay for having a human need, they write, enforced on the behalf of landlords by the state via violent evictions and even more violent police: “We pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun.” Thanks, in part, to the racism built into real estate, the defunding and bulldozing of public housing by both Republicans and Democrats, and the whitewashing of landlords as “housing providers,” rent “steals the common labor of tenants, who create the communities where they live.” 

In Chicago, evidence of this theft abounds: Black and Brown, poor and working-class, and artists and queer tenants of Wicker and Humboldt Park, Pilsen, South Shore, and beyond create the art, community gardens, music scene, food culture, and more that draws outsiders to visit their neighborhoods. They create their neighborhood’s value, which landlords profit off by raising their rents until they can’t afford to live in their homes anymore—but those outsiders can. It’s bleak out here, but, as Rosenthal and Vilchis write, “Every first of the month is another opportunity for organizing, collective action, and collective refusal.” 

The first third of the book is a brisk history of U.S. tenant agitation and organizing. It functions as a call to the downtrodden tenant to rise from fear and acceptance of our circumstances and instead cultivate our own power. “Tenants . . . must be political agents, taking action in the context of our everyday lives.” By withholding rent in coordination with our neighbors, tenants can harness the power of collective action for lasting material change. “Underneath political agency is communal life,” they write. We can reclaim our strength by building relationships with and trusting each other: “Rent strikes stop the flow of cash to our landlords and reveal their dependence on us.” 

Rosenthal and Vilchis acknowledge that the battle is uphill, and, historically, has largely been one-sided. But by focusing on the successful, nearly yearlong strike by tenant members of los Mariachis de la Unión de Vecinos of Boyle Heights in LA, the authors provide a recent example of a rent strike that had some serious wins. The stakes were steep—possible eviction, contact with police, homelessness, and more, especially for undocumented strikers. But when steep rent increases will likely lead to your moving or homelessness anyway, what more is there to lose? 

In the case of Los Mariachis de la Unión de Vecinos, strikers won lowered rent, guaranteed repairs, and the right to renegotiate their leases. And, as Rosenthal and Vilchis stress, the benefits of rent strikes go beyond a single win. The organizing and relationship building required to maintain a successful strike creates structures for poor and working-class people to fight back against rent exploitation in the long-term. Rent strikes teach new skills, from “collective decision-making, to escalation tactics, to negotiation techniques.” And beautifully, getting to know and trust your neighbors leads to the creation of relationships built on the “experience of collective struggle.” Tenant organizing develops our political power, and each strike both “tests and builds our capacity.” Every relationship, every action, every communal decision is a step towards a world without landlords, a world without rent.

Earlier this year, Chicagoans voted on Mayor Brandon Johnson’s central campaign promise to “Bring Chicago Home.” By raising the one-time real estate transfer tax on properties sold for over $1 million in the city, Bring Chicago Home would have created the city’s first dedicated revenue stream for homelessness services and prevention—while lowering the same tax for the 95 percent of city properties that sell under that $1 million threshold. After local and national real estate and property owner associations spent millions of dollars in opposition campaigns, Bring Chicago Home failed at the ballot box. 

“Across the country, a $100 increase in median rent means a 9 percent increase in homelessness,” write Rosenthal and Vilchis. While decrying that failure and warning it would harm the poor and unhoused, the city—under Johnson’s leadership—began a campaign of tent encampment closures throughout the city, evicting dozens of unhoused Chicagoans from their tents and their communities. While some have been connected to apartments, others landed in the city’s temporary shelters (if a bed was open for them), on the couches of others, or simply somewhere else outside. Most recently, the city, along with the Department of Family and Support Services and Alderperson Jessie Fuentes, destroyed a large encampment in Humboldt Park on an 18-degree December day. “People keep saying we’re homeless, but I don’t understand what they mean. I have a home. I live here,” said Mike-Mike, one of the camp residents I spoke to that day. The inside of his tent was winterized for survival—a fire pit, blankets, electric lights, and heat. Music played in the background. “I’m just dancing to keep my spirits up,” he said. An hour later, I watched the claws of a crane crush his home and drop it into a dumpster. I didn’t see Mike-Mike again.

Once again, it’s winter in my apartment, and the property manager is dragging his heels on fixing a tub that hasn’t drained properly in weeks. Periodically over the last couple years, my neighbors and I have talked about starting a building association; last winter, when the heat in our apartments wouldn’t rise above 58 degrees, a few of us even coordinated to force management to fix it. They could ignore us individually, but they couldn’t ignore us all. While doing so, we cracked jokes and shared holiday desserts. A year later, we continue to check in and have each other’s backs. 

“Unburdened by the fear of making rent, what could we do with life’s most precious resource, our time on this earth?” Rosenthal and Vilchis ask. “What could our cities be like, not as monuments to capital and the lucky rich few, but as testaments to the many, and the many lives we could leave?” A tight 148 pages (excluding a careful list of cited sources), Abolish Rent is an accessible mix of tenant organizing history, instruction, agitation, and hope. It’s the perfect size to pass across the hall to your neighbor, along with a cup of sugar.