A Safe and Welcoming Home

It's not a housing crisis. It's a landlord crisis.

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The rent is too damn high. We all know it, or at least those of us who pay rent do. The so-called housing crisis has left some twenty-two million households—nearly half of the tenant households in the country—paying more than a third of their income in rent, while a quarter shell out more than half their income to the landlord. As Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis note in their recent book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, “In Los Angeles alone, 600,000 people spend fully 90 percent of what they earn keeping a roof over their heads.”

This is absolutely a crisis that we should be talking about every single day. But as Rosenthal and Vilchis point out, it’s not a “housing” crisis. It’s a landlord crisis.

The problem isn’t simply about supply. The situation we now face, in which so many of us struggle each month to pay the bill, is the logical result of a system by which private owners exploit the needs of tenants for a roof over our heads and are backed up with the full force of the state. “[T]his is not just a shortage; it’s deliberate, strategic, even permanent scarcity—engineered famine,” Rosenthal and Vilchis write, quoting Frank Rolfe of the mobile home parks company RV Horizons, comparing his business to “a Waffle House where the customers are chained to the booths.”

The “housing” crisis is yet another facet of the constant class war in the United States, and around the world, and as is necessary on those other fronts, this one will have to be solved through collective organization. A growing number of tenant organizations are doing just that: finding ways to build power for a different way of living.

“The question is not whether tenants will revolt,” Tara Raghuveer of Kansas City Tenants tells me. “The question is whether it’s from a place of desperation or a place of power, and our project is to figure out the second thing.”

Groups like KC Tenants and the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which Rosenthal and Vilchis helped to found and from which they drew the lessons in their book, have been winning incremental victories at the building, city, and state levels and connecting with one another to share strategies to gain even more. The situation is dire, as renters are pushed out of city centers and further into suburbs and exurbs, where the prices are still untenable. Raghuveer sees tenants living in lousy conditions in places like Independence, Missouri—a city of fewer than 125,000 people outside of Kansas City—and paying $1,200 a month. “If there’s a core feeling I’ve had in the last year, it’s that something has got to give,” she says.

Like many other organizers, Rosenthal and Vilchis use the word “tenant” rather than renter as a broader term for all of us who do not own housing. They call us into a class of those who are vulnerable to losing our homes. Such a class overlaps with the classic “proletariat,” which as Joshua Clover, the late poet and political theorist, never tired of reminding me, does not mean “industrial worker” but rather those “without reserves,” who own nothing but their own laboring hands and bodies.

In Riot. Strike. Riot., Clover noted, “Consumer and worker are not two opposed, much less successive, classes, it should go without saying. Rather, they are two momentary roles within the collective activity required to reproduce a single class.” Tenant and worker and consumer: all parts of our lives, as we struggle to pay the rent and the rising cost of groceries on stagnant or shrinking wages. The owners of capital—of factory and apartment block, warehouse and robotaxi—profit from our misunderstanding of these basic truths.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, United Renters For Justice/Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (IX) has been organizing tenants for ten years, challenging corporate landlords by bringing together the tenants that those landlords often work hard to keep separate. Campaigns against landlords like HavenBrook Homes, a subsidiary of private equity-backed Progress Residential, brought together tenants from 250 properties across the city to challenge their conditions—they reported holes in their roofs, flooding, electrical issues, and rats—and won restitution and rent cancellation. Their model is built on relational organizing, door-to-door and building-to-building, creating connections between people who might otherwise never have met. In one case, their fight against a landlord resulted in the creation of the Sky Without Limits cooperative, which collectively runs five buildings purchased from a landlord who lost his license.

Like labor unions, tenant unions organize the people that capital has chosen: the people a landlord has agreed to rent to, the people a company has decided to employ. Rather than an affinity or community organization, which people join on the basis of shared belief or culture, organizing a building means knocking on your neighbor’s door the morning after their music has kept you up all night. It requires talking to the person who might have wildly different politics than yours, who might speak a different language. It means reclaiming common spaces, sometimes for uncomfortable conversations. When it works, it can break down the barriers of racism, sexism, and xenophobia that landlords and bosses rely on to be stronger than solidarity.

In Los Angeles, California, Rosenthal and Vilchis write, the LA Tenants Union began in 2015 and grew to “over 3,000 households of dues-paying members and twelve local chapters.” Renters in more than a hundred tenants associations—organized at the building level—have won repairs, rent rollbacks, and more. They rely on five strategies: “We build community, we organize units of power, we reclaim space, we experiment and learn, and we keep the faith. We build relationships of trust and solidarity among neighbors.”

Sometimes even just sharing information is powerful: Landlords will divide tenants, offering one a deal while ripping off another, or using repairs in one unit to bully another into submission. But the most powerful tactic, hands down, is the rent strike. Strikers realize, Rosenthal and Vilchis write, that they have the power—that the landlord depends on them to pay the bills, not the other way around. They build leverage by trusting one another.

KC Tenants got started in 2019, and Raghuveer divided her time back then between local tenant organizing and running a national Homes Guarantee campaign. “At a certain point, we got really clear that the campaigning model in national organizing spaces was broken and set up to lose,” she says. “We just didn’t have the power that we needed.”

After the COVID-19 crisis resulted not in rent cancellation for tenants but rental payments to landlords—which she calls a “no strings bailout”—she returned to Kansas City, Missouri, determined to find a new way to build tenant power at scale. KC Tenants now has some 10,000 members.

Speaking from her office in Kansas City, surrounded by signs reading “EVICTION KILLS” and “We Are Stronger Together,” Raghuveer details the decision to root any citywide policy campaign on the demands of their base at the building level. Rather than asking politicians to throw them a bone, tenants realize their power when they collectively take it back from their landlords. KC Tenants has launched an organizing fellowship, the participants all recruited from tenant campaigns at their homes. “The transformation is . . . I’m trying to find the right words because it’s actually remarkable,” she says. “These are brand-new people with little to no political orientation that would never have self-selected into something like this at all.”

One of those tenants, she says, had been part of the organization for a year before joining the organizing team in her building—which they run much like a labor union, getting signatures on cards, building to supermajority, and then organizing for a strike. “They launched their strike on October 1. By October 1, she was a different person, and she would say the same to you,” Raghuveer says. They won a signed agreement with a landlord, saved $300,000 in rent that occupants of about forty units had withheld, won a new lease and eviction protections, and more. “Something that one of our leaders once said to me is, ‘Once you feel that kind of power in your body, you cannot unfeel it. That’s now part of you.’ ”

The transformation even happens to people who lose, Raghuveer adds. After a campaign that did not succeed, in which some of the tenants had to move, she says organizers “asked every one of those people, whether or not they regretted what they did, [and] every single one of them said no. There’s actually a lesson here that as organizers, I think we hold a lot more fear that gets in the way of strategy than the members.” She calls it “intuitive militancy,” which she sees over and over again because people know what they’re living through is not acceptable. The question is whether they think they can do anything about it.

The transformation happens at the building level, the community level, and the city level. Rosenthal and Vilchis write of one LA tenant: “Ramirez didn’t remember signing the strike agreement; she remembered feeling comfortable enough to ask to borrow an onion from her neighbor.” The organizing built the kind of community that makes the neighborhood greater than the sum of its apartments; neighbors watch each others’ children, garden in shared spaces, show up when there’s a crisis, or just sit outside and chat.

This all sounds idyllic, but Raghuveer notes that it’s not normal in today’s cities. “It feels a lot easier to a lot of people, myself included, to go somewhere else to attend a meeting or go to a rally or a protest. It can feel really exposing to go next door and ask your neighbor who you might see every day to join you in something or to enter into a different kind of relationship, and risk that you might disagree, or you might get into it about something.”

Kelly Hayes of the Movement Memos podcast pointed out recently that “we have been socially de-skilled under capitalism, and the pandemic has amplified the problem for a lot of us.” We interact more through apps than we do face-to-face; only a quarter of U.S. adults in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they know all or most of their neighbors. This personal isolation is political; breaking down the barriers between neighbors helps challenge our preconceived notions of “that kind” of person.

Years ago, in my tenant organization in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, young hipsters on the edge of gentrification joined forces with people who’d been in the neighborhood for five decades. All of us were susceptible to landlords who turned off the heat and left repairs undone for months, hoping we’d leave so they could raise the rent yet again. We bracketed our shame and resentment in order to build power, and in doing so, built friendships, too. We made the community feel more like home.

As I write this, Zohran Mamdani has shocked the Democratic Party establishment by winning the primary to become New York City mayor. The thirty-three-year-old son of immigrants, comfortable at a rally for transgender youth or for a free Palestine, was laser-focused on the affordability crisis in New York, and won over people who might have been afraid of his Muslim heritage or his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. The crisis pushes us apart, but it can also pull us together, across intraparty and interparty lines. It makes possible a kind of organizing that is otherwise all but impossible in a deeply polarized nation.

And now those tenant unions are connecting across state lines, bringing tenants in Missouri into conversation with tenants in Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, and Montana. The Tenant Union Federation launched in August 2024 with five founding locals and is expanding further. (IX is one of the groups working in alignment with the others.) They span the reddest of red states and the bluest of blue cities.

“Our theory is we need local density that looks like a bunch of these buildings coming together,” Raghuveer says. “We also need a national strategy where the explicit goal is economic disruption.” To build that power, they’re training organizers from around the country in a “union school.”

Raghuveer is excited by the interest, again, from new people who haven’t been career leftists. “I keep saying to people there’s not a hunger or clarity gap. There’s a skills gap,” she says. The theory they’re testing is that given the desire for a change, given the understanding that the landlords are the problem, the skills that these different unions have built are things that can be shared widely. And that because some of these big landlords own homes across states—in RV parks in one place and high-rise buildings in another—the connections tenants make are more than just emotional: They literally share an opponent.

The reality in the United States right now is that the President is a bad landlord. Rosenthal and Vilchis call Donald Trump the “developer-in-chief,” both “a new low and the same-old in real estate rule.” Trump serves as a good object lesson in how landlords get to be landlords: Successive generations of his family benefited from public development, subsidies, and tax abatements in order to build their fortune, while denying homes to Black tenants. (Woody Guthrie rented an apartment in one of his father Fred Trump’s buildings and wrote an angry song about it.)

With Trump in office, neighborhoods not only face the rent crisis, but also Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reign of terror. Minneapolis erupted in protest after ICE was involved in a raid on a restaurant just blocks from the Sky Without Limits cooperative. But the networks built in part through tenant organizing—in solidarity with labor and community work—can help protect neighbors from detention and deportation as well. It is, after all, an extension of the organizing they already do to make the community a safe and welcoming home.

It starts with getting to know your neighbors and deciding that they have as much right to stay as you do. As Rosenthal and Vilchis put it, “For our leaders, there is no separation between the social life of their building, block, and neighborhood and the struggle to stay put. The union is a way of life.”