When once-perennial candidate Jimmy McMillan III first ran for elected office in 1993, he campaigned with one consistent message: The Rent is Too Damn High. His efforts garnered little support. Nonetheless, the phrase stuck and became a rallying cry for tenants, housing justice activists, and progressive politicians throughout the country.
Three decades later, the facts still support McMillan’s assertion. CBS News reports that rents rose by 30.4 percent nationwide between 2019 and 2023. This increase has caused a crisis for renters, with 25 percent paying at least half of their income for shelter. Moreover, rent hikes are tied to both an increase in evictions and a spike in homelessness. A 2020 study by the Government Accountability Office found that a $100 increase in housing costs corresponded to a 9 percent uptick in homelessness. Small wonder that more than 650,000 people are currently unhoused in the United States.
Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, co-authors of Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, want to change these realities and alter the way the housing market operates. As longtime organizers with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, they understand the economic consequences of housing speculation and do not shy away from the class conflict that pits landlords against tenants.
The book makes clear that the goal of the housing justice movement should be to build a resurgent tenant movement to fight landlord exploitation and unregulated price gouging. And while it is short of specifics, this aspirational goal is offered alongside several concrete short-term demands that are simultaneously winnable and practical.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the book sidesteps several important questions: For one, if there were no landlords, would the government be responsible for maintaining existing units and creating new social or public housing? Would tenant-run coops be established, with each unit paying a percentage of the building’s operating costs? And perhaps, most importantly, how would owners be convinced—or maybe forced—to give up their holdings?
Despite these deficits, the authors’ fighting words are hopeful, upbeat, and inspiring.
“While we struggle for public provision and common ownership, we have to win regulation of the private market,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write. “We need controls on rent increases and even rollbacks of rent. We need limits on landlord’s despotic power—bans on evictions—with real enforcement mechanisms.” Maintaining a standard of habitability in every building is similarly essential, they argue.
Indeed, giving tenants the tools they need to fight poor conditions and oppose unconscionable rent increases is at the heart of Abolish Rent. Towards that end, the book profiles several successful rent strikes in the greater Los Angeles area. “Rent strikes lay claim to housing as a human right,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write.
And they work.
Take a twenty-four-unit building in the Boyle Heights neighborhood for example. When the tenants received notices that their rents would be raised—in some cases by as much as 80 percent—following the sale of their building, they contacted the Los Angeles Tenants Union and began to strategize about fighting back. Many of the residents were undocumented and worked as mariachi musicians; most had tolerated violations in their apartments including mold, leaks, vermin, and filthy vents for years. They were fed up.
“The new landlord wanted to raise rents to cover his purchase price, his speculative investment,” Rosenthal and Vilchis report.
Hiding under an LLC, no one even knew his real name, yet he had the power to determine who could and could not continue to live in homes they’d lived in for decades.
it’s official: my entire building has been on rent strike for two years today https://t.co/vBWaaLW30y
— tracy rosenthal (@tracyrosenthal_) September 15, 2024
The tenants began by researching the owner’s identity. They demanded an in-person meeting with him and with their elected city council representative. When these efforts failed, they went on rent strike, organized press conferences to publicize their complaints, and picketed in front of the landlord’s lavish suburban home. “Do you know your neighbor is a slumlord?” their signs asked.
The effort was triumphant. After a more than year-long rent strike, the tenants and the building owner signed a collective bargaining agreement, the first in Los Angeles history. According to Abolish Rent, the stipulation canceled six months of back rent and limited annual rent increases to 5 percent. They also got the landlord to make needed repairs in their apartments.
“Gentrification is not inevitable,” the L.A. Tenants Union spokeswoman said at the building’s victory celebration.
By being organized, by working together, you can get some power.
Abolish Rent underscores this message and is refreshingly radical. It will embolden tenants and activists working to improve housing conditions, forestall further gentrification, and end homelessness. Its bold vision goes further, taking jabs at some conventionally accepted solutions to housing insecurity, including Section 8 subsidies that guarantee market-rate rents to private housing developers and building owners.
“Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are,” Rosenthal and Vilchis conclude.
The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments maintain crisis as the norm.
Abolish Rent stresses that shelter should not be a commodity available only to those with the resources to pay for it. “High rents, displacement, and homelessness are not inevitable,” they write.
Rent as a social, political, and economic relationship is not inevitable.
In inviting us to imagine something better, Abolish Rent reminds us that we can win real housing security, an end to profiteering, and shelter for all if we organize and demand it.
Eleanor J. Bader is an award-winning New York City-based freelance writer who covers domestic social issues including education, hunger and homelessness, anti-poverty organizing, and movements for gender and reproductive justice.