Those of us on this side of the Atlantic have often heard, and even rallied around, the calls to ‘cancel the rent’. But rarely have we entered into the discursive terrain of abolishing rent altogether. Well, the latter is the nucleus around which Tracy Rosenthal’s and Leo Vilchis’ book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis is built. The title — part polemic, part documentation, part tenant handbook — recently launched in the UK; earlier this year, I attended the Glasgow book launch event, which comprised a panel discussion involving an array of tenant unionists in the Scottish housing space.
Rosenthal and Vilchis are both founders of the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU), and the book is dedicated to documenting the impressive endeavours of the union since its establishment in 2015. They note in the introduction: ‘The two of us might look like an odd pair, a middle-aged immigrant and a thirty-something LGBT. But there is a long history of Mexicans and Jews organizing together in California. More than that, we reflect two sides of a growing constituency: tenants in the United States.’
This is a growing constituency on both sides of the Atlantic, a potential site of new class formations. As relentless austerity has taken the place of the British welfare state, millions have been forced into housing insecurity. Dovetailing this, there has been rapid growth of the private rented sector (PRS) across the UK, whereby it is now deemed standard to pay around one-third to one-half of your wages to a private landlord every month. Landlords’ pockets are further lined by the government, which pays around £70 billion annually through housing support despite refusals to commit to a genuine programme of public housing. From this, an organised tenants’ movement has (re)emerged.
LATU is organised into local chapters with an overarching national structure. The subdivisions operate with a large degree of autonomy, perhaps more so than we are accustomed to here, given the size and scale of LA with 3.8 million inhabitants. This localised approach to mobilising — ‘block organising’ — sees the union chapters focusing on the specific needs of their neighbourhood: eviction resistance, rent strikes, demanding repairs, or sometimes all three. This myriad groundwork contributes to the overarching tenant struggle to reclaim housing and the city, to stop the theft of our wages, ‘to bring the world of our imaginings into the one that exists now’, and ultimately to abolish rent.
Abolish Rent
The specific call to abolish rent requires more detail. Fortunately, the book’s first chapter dissects this radical call to action. The key to our understanding is that rent is itself a social relation, one that locks us into a bind which at its heart holds a deep-set power imbalance. As Rosenthal and Vilchis note, ‘rent is a fine for having a human need’, it is ‘the gap between tenants’ needs and landlords’ demands’. Behind rent sits a violent process of extraction, depriving most of agency and many of a place to call home.
Yet the power dynamics so inherent to the landlord-tenant relationship are rarely acknowledged. This is not accidental; rather, it is a key ingredient of the political, economic and ideological warfare waged against tenants over the past century. And this brings us to another key argument of the book: the authors’ refusal to fall into the semantic trap of the ‘housing crisis’. The word ‘crisis’ is suggestive of something fortuitous, unintentional, a ‘problem to be managed’. Really, it is a distraction technique to deter people from engaging in mass resistance, and strong-arm people into seeking a more ‘reformist’ resolution. Ostensibly, the story goes, these crises are temporary, a hiccup in the teleological progress of history.
In understanding how this extractive process has become so customary, we must not obscure the role of the state, since, really, ‘rent is the private capture of public investment’. Despite the (now outdated) notion of a non-interventionist state in an age of neoliberalism, the state has been at the driver’s seat of change in Britain. Whether it be through Right to Buy, Buy to Let mortgages, or state-led planning departments selling off once publicly owned land to developers, the privatisation and commodification of housing has ultimately been a state-led project.
The Rent Strike
Chapter three, ‘The Return of the Rent Strike’, discusses the Mariachi Plaza rent strike in Boyle Heights, LA. The apartments are inhabited by a mix of domestic workers, food servers and, significantly, Mariachi musicians (who the Plaza is named after). The rent increases — which reached nearly $700 — were legal, since none of the apartments in this block were ‘stabilised’ (rent controlled). The increases provoked a series of conversations amongst the block’s residents, who formed an association with the support of LATU.
The landlords and their lawyers attempted to sabotage the tenants, at times inviting them to individual meetings. The tenants refused to capitulate to this routine attempt at divide et impera, which brings me to my favourite anecdote of the whole book. In July 2017, two ‘solidarity strikers’ were offered a steeply subsidised apartment of $400 per month, rare in a city saturated by high rents. Karen, one of the residents who was offered the subsidised apartment, had health needs that could be partially met by cheaper rent. In response to the offer: ‘[They] called an emergency meeting in their apartment and the group made a collective decision. Rather than hand the keys over to their landlord and weaken the strike, they would give them to the association… .’ Karen’s apartment was turned into a common space for meetings, meals and parties. What could have been an individual decision that disrupted the strike was turned into a collective action, which gave the strike renewed momentum, alongside new space to occupy.
This chapter brings us to the question of the rent strike. Twentieth-century history is awash with such protests, from Glasgow in 1915 to Ireland in 1970. The withholding of rent was borne of very specific conditions; in 1915, ‘around 90 percent of the UK population at this time were private tenants and subject to overcrowding, unpayable rents, intimidation and eviction’. The Glasgow rent strikers — Mary Barbour’s Army — had the support of trade unions and left-wing parties who together comprised the political ecosystem of Red Clydeside. Moreover, during this Fordist epoch, there was an ‘organic class and geographical fusion of workplace and homeplace struggles’ underpinning the rent strike itself, rendering it a more feasible and logical tactic.
The Irish rent strikes of the 1970s began as a series of local protests in Ballyphehane and Ballymun and morphed into a national rent strike called for by the National Association of Tenants Organisations. The strike was led by social housing tenants who had been negatively impacted by the 1966 Housing Act. At the peak point, 350,000 socially housed tenants participated in the strike. As the academic Fiadh Tubridy (2023) notes, the 1973 victory was described by The Irish Times as ‘undoubtedly the most dramatic and bloodless victory ever achieved in this century by tenants versus landlords’.
Rent strikes, then, hold a strong place in the imagination of Scotland and Ireland, alongside the rest of the UK. Yet, despite this, nowadays mass rent strikes are rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic. Tenure fragmentation likely plays the biggest role in this decline. After decades of rent controls and mass public housing, the latter part of the twentieth century witnessed an ideological shift in housing. Property ownership — alongside the rise of the post-Fordist gig economy — defined the neoliberal assault on class solidarities. Communities that once organised together, whether at home or in the workplace, were divided along the lines of tenure and employment. Asset ownership has become constitutive of upward social mobility and has given rise to class fragmentation within housing.
One might expect the recent (re)emergence of the PRS to generate a new wave of rent strikes here. However, the PRS itself is a fragmented sector. Unlike the US, where institutional private landlords like Blackstone are more commonplace, the UK’s private rental market is largely comprised of ‘mom and pop’ landlords who own two or three extra properties, often with a geographical distance between them. Representing a break with the past, which saw slum landlords with larger holdings such as whole tenements or streets, housing blocks in Glasgow are now owned by multiple landlords of different units. This renders it far harder to organise as tenants, and particularly to initiate a rent strike.
The social housing sector has also been subject to fragmentation. The late 1990s witnessed a mass stock transfer of publicly owned housing into the hands of housing associations, triggering several changes in the social housing sector. In Scotland, ‘social housing’ now includes (unaffordable) ‘mid-market’ rents, and in England, we see housing associations offering shared ownership, paving the way to eventual homeownership. This intentional fragmentation dilutes the rent strike as a feasible tactic, skewing tenants’ interests in favour of both private and social landlords. Consequently, tenant unions have oriented their efforts elsewhere to eviction resistance, legislative change, fighting individual rent hikes and confronting landlords overseeing disrepair.
Conditions, however, might once again be swaying in favour of rent strikes. We can expect to see a rise in institutional landlords across the UK’s Build to Rent sector. This situation has already begun to emerge in Ireland, with more than one-fifth of PRS properties being owned by landlords with over a hundred properties in their portfolio. Whilst this may be a huge cause for concern in terms of even more private equity being injected into the UK housing market, it may open up a new terrain for organising. As Abolish Rent demonstrates, it can be easier to polarise whole blocks of tenants against one institutional landlord. We can learn from our US comrades, who have been organising in this context for several years. The expansion and financialisaton of housing associations may reflect another opportunity for rent strikes inspired by the Irish militancy of the 1970s. Thus, we may move beyond a nostalgic position and, as discussed in Neil Gray’s work, begin to ‘relate rent strikes to the contemporary housing question’.
Tenants United
Abolish Rent reminds many of us that whilst we might be operating under different conditions, the tenant movement is growing on a global scale. Housing is the defining feature of the rentier economy, which sees landlords across the globe making a passive income and profiting from our basic needs. The book demonstrates that when organised, tenants and unhoused communities can win substantial material gains and reclaim the common good. As a global movement, we must continue to share resources, knowledge and experience to displace the rentier class that rules our neighbourhoods and our lives.