The Permanent Rent Strike

 “Abolish Rent – How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis” by T. Rosenthal & L. Vilchis, 2024

This short book by two Los Angeles rent activists who helped form the LA Tenants Union (LATU) has revolutionary undertones and lots of facts and examples to buttress its case.  LA is one of several places in the U.S. that are ‘ground zero’ for high housing costs, which especially affect minority communities, so their experience is valuable.  Every tenant’s rights advocate should read it. 

There is plenty of familiar rhetoric here, so I’m not going to belabor that.  Generally, the business of cities is real estate.  City councils are the caretakers of this private land casino, usually run by Democrats.  They work closely with developers and landlords, while laws are written to protect private real estate ownership.  The LATU says “the real estate state” is waging “a war on tenants” along with private industry.  As Mike Davis put it, LA was a “rent plantation.” 

Here are the facts and points they make about the exploitative and racist rental industry in the U.S., and how they organize against it: 

     1.   “Half of the 100 million tenants spend more than a third of their income on rent.”

     2.   “In LA alone, 600K people spend fully 90 % of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads.”

     3.   “Every minute of every day, landlords file 7 evictions – totaling 3.6 million evictions a year.”

     4.   “In 2019 alone, rent payments totaled $512.4 billion.” 

     5.   “This is a transfer of wealth from over 100 million tenants to just over 11 million landlords.”  They do not include a profit rate.

6.   Large corporate and private equity landlords are more likely to evict, raise rents and gouge with fees and fines.  They are increasingly buying homes, farms, trailer parks and apartment buildings.

7.   The state’s physical force - the police and sheriff - back up landlords.

8.   Developers and landlords do not want to build or own real ‘affordable housing,’ no matter what they say. Right now …“There are 33 homes for every 100 families living in poverty.”

9.   New housing development, the so-called savior according to the market clowns, slows down rent increases but it does not stop them.  Engels pointed out that there is always a ‘housing shortage’ in a capitalist society - on purpose. 

10.       “68% of the world’s wealth is held in real estate.”  Most is in personal housing.

11.       Empty apartments and buildings sit alongside homeless encampments. “A $100 increase in rent means a 9% rise in homelessness.”

12.       The LATU supports public housing.  A long line of U.S. anti-communists have denounced public housing as ‘socialism.’  The neo-liberal Clinton administration destroyed thousands of public housing units in the 1990s. 

13.       The authors advocate an eventual ‘permanent rent strike’ to squeeze out landlords.

14.       They retail a classic and excellent story of a year-long rent strike in Boyle Heights in 2017by Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos against the gentrification of their building.  Stories of other LA tenant struggles across the city are also told.

15.       The LATU helped the Boyle Heights struggle, and advocates tenants’ associations in buildings or neighborhoods.  The point is to build tenant power not by the rules of non-profits, certain council persons, state housing departments or establishment lawyers.  (They do use sympathetic lawyers.)

16.       A tenants union or association is a vehicle of class struggle. The key to building a union is “building community” and breaking out of isolation.

17.       Their union has “won collective bargaining agreements; reversed illegal lock-outs; canceled rent debt; secured building-wide repairs; lowered rents and built tenant dignity.” 

18.       Eviction is personal, so one unit of the LATU specializes in “naming landlords, publicizing their neglect, visiting their houses and disrupting their social lives.” 

19.       Organizing buildings reclaims local space and the commons.  They note that a rent strike is similar to an occupation.  This is all linked to the struggle for land.  One thing they advocate are tenant gardens, for instance.

20.       The capitalist state and its politicians answer tenant political and social demands with privatization schemes, gentrification and unaffordable public/private projects.

This book has the details that any tenant, tenant organizer, tenant lawyer or socialist needs to know.  One caveat:  The authors seem to think that everyone who owns a home is exempt from housing problems.  Rising mortgages, taxes, fees, repairs, utilities, insurance and weather play a negative role for ‘home owners.’  This is a link with the problems of tenants, which at some point could forge a united front between the two.  The LATU’s ultimate aim is “a world without landlords and a world without rents.”  That is a socialist goal I think. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “eviction,” “rent,” “gentrification,” “housing.”

And I bought it at May Day Books, which has a good selection of books on housing.

Red Frog / June 19, 2025  - Celebrate Juneteenth!