Revolution Starts at Home

Rent is a fine for existing. What if we abolished it?

"The people are tenants in their own land." —Frantz Fanon

Tracy Rosenthal smells like gun smoke. Not literally, I think, but in the way someone carries the weight of a fight. They’ve got an impish quality—around 5’3” in boots, their hair staging a full revolt against the idea of a part. We meet at Waverly Diner, where they order an egg cream and promptly begin dismantling my worldview. They helped organize the largest tenant union in the United States—over 3,000 households strong—and they look at me the way a cat looks at a Roomba. “Why do so many people follow you?” they ask. I laugh, but they don’t. I shrug. They squint harder.

Tracy and their egg cream.

Rent feels like one of those immutable facts of life, like the sun rising in the east or the subway making you late. You pay it, you grumble about it, and then you go on with your day, never really questioning why handing over 50% of your paycheck to the guy who won’t fix the heat is just… a thing we do. Tracy, co-author of Abolish Rent, [WHICH YOU CAN PURCHASE HERE - SUBTLE PLUG] is here to tell you in no uncertain terms that no, actually, this is not a thing we have to do. That rent is not just an annoying bill, but a finely-tuned instrument of wealth extraction, backed by a history of land grabs, racist policy, and, if necessary, state-sanctioned violence. But also, crucially: that something else is possible. Something better. Something that doesn’t involve leaving an offering at your landlord’s feet every month just to avoid being tossed into the street.

So, what does it mean to abolish rent? Where do we even start? And most importantly—what about the poor landlords?

ALEX: So you wrote this book, Abolish Rent. Great book. We love it. So, what is rent?

TRACY: It’s this thing that we take for granted, we take as natural, and we take as normal, but it's actually anything but. I think [in Abolish Rent] there are many different ways that we try to capture the experience of paying rent and the power relationships that produce rent. What is this thing that we're paying?

Well, if you need to have housing, because it's a human need to have housing, and you don't own property, then rent is a fine for that human need.

Another way that you could describe it is: if you have to pay to access housing, and the only reason why other people own housing is because at some point in the past, they or their parents had more money than you, then rent is a tribute. It’s a tribute that you pay to people who have hoarded the spaces where human beings can live. So, I think, you know, it's a fine, and it's a tribute, and it’s also a ransom that's extracted from us basically at the barrel of a gun, right? If you don't pay [rent], there are agents of state violence who will throw you out of your house, and if you end up on the street, you can be thrown in jail.

So, in this way, it's a crime not to pay rent, meaning it's a crime not to be exploited by a landlord.

ALEX: But the thing is, okay, Abolish Rent?

TRACY: Yeah, Abolish Rent.

ALEX: This is like, a lot. What about just, lower the rent?

TRACY: Okay, start there.

ALEX: Okay. But why abolish? Wouldn’t people say that? “Well, we can't abolish the rent, because then what about private— What about our precious private property? What? What about our summer homes and our place in Aspen?”

TRACY: Well, I think what you're describing, right, is that the system of private property that we have [just] exists to defend people who already have it. And so to demand a world where everyone has their human needs met is [also] to say that the system of allocating resources that we have devised under capitalism has failed, is a failure, and needs to be transformed and replaced.

ALEX: I think that it's probably true in housing policy, and it's true everywhere, that there's kind of this divide on the left between maybe “reformist” policy and then radical abolitionist demands, something like Abolish Rent. Where do you stand on incremental reforms? Are there any that you do support, that you would support?

TRACY: I think of rent abolition as a radical demand that tells us we want to live in a different kind of world, where resources are allocated differently, where everyone has what they need. It's also a criteria, and it helps us understand and measure what reforms are possible and what reforms help us displace the power of landlords and the power of real estate from the places where we make our lives.

I mean, the language that people often refer to when they try to describe the road to abolition is, you know, non-reformist reform. I like thinking about criteria. But I think that they mean sort of a similar thing.

So, something like rent control, sure, which is a literal intervention in the market that limits landlords' capacity to profit off of our desperation, something like public housing, a public option for housing which competes in the market and raises the floor for everyone. Both of these are reforms—they help reshape the power relationships between landlords and us.

ALEX: And there's precedent for this, right? In the United States, during World War II, and during that time, there was something that doesn't exist anymore, right, called the Office of Price Administration. What did the Office of Price Administration do?

TRACY: I think, you know, in the era of the Los Angeles fires, it's a really important thing to discuss, right? Like, what does a market do in times of crisis? It price gouges. And so under the constraints of World War II, which was a vast reorganization of the geography of the country, millions of people moving to participate in war industries in combination with shortages of materials, the Office of Price Administration was tasked with controlling housing prices and tasked with controlling rents.

And that intervention came out of this state of emergency. New York's rent control law also comes out of a state of emergency, and technically has a sundown provision that when the emergency is over, it would disappear. However, in its more than 40-year history, we've never left that state of emergency. And I think that, you know, it challenges us to ask when the emergency is over?

For poor and working class people the system has always been a state of emergency, because our housing system isn’t designed to house people, it’s designed to extract rent.

ALEX: Hold up, hold on.

TRACY: So sorry.

ALEX: No worries.

TRACY: Now I'm upset.

ALEX: Shit—

[My recorder breaks]

ALEX: I think we caught most of that. But okay, okay, but here's the thing: I want to have the American dream.

TRACY: Good luck.

ALEX: I want to have a house, yeah, that has a white picket fence, and I want it to accrue in value every year—

TRACY: Totally.

ALEX: —for my whole life. And I don't want to talk to my kids anymore, but I want to have a house, because that's how I learned that I can have stability and have, like, a life in America, and that's what I want. So, what about that?

TRACY: Totally, I mean, well, you're absolutely right. Over the last 100 years, we've designed a system of security that is completely disorganizing. And it's disorganizing because it puts the burden on individuals to accrue wealth through private asset ownership, and at the same time there is a cost to that. And the cost is the ravaging of our social safety net.

And it’s true: owning a home makes more money than working the average job. People are desperate to buy houses. But, you could say, "How's that working out for you?" Do you have the savings?

ALEX: The median savings for a person under 35 years old in the United States is $5,000.

TRACY: Yeah, where are you gonna buy a house with that?

ALEX: I was hoping you could tell me.

TRACY: I can’t help you. You know, it’s like—

I can’t help you buy a house. I can help you have another dream.

I think, historically, we can look at how it impossible for people of our generation to buy houses, generalizing a crisis that has existed for longer than it’s been felt by us.

We can see homeownership rates are going down. More and more cities are flipping to tenant majorities, while more and more real estate is being consolidated in the hands of corporations. So much for the American dream.

The problem that you're describing is the long strategy by which working-class people were recruited into alignment with elite interests, right? And that is a project that begins in, like, White Reconstruction a kind of counterinsurgency Black Reconstruction, and continues through the GI Bill and the suburbanization of the country where white people were offered this suburban dream and the promise of an appreciating asset.

We’re living in the failure of that dream, and it’s starting to look less and less like a possibility for more and more people. And the answer to that is not more privatization, it’s not the so-called “democratization” of homeownership.

ALEX: Do you think that we have legal mechanisms now, like, how we tax land use, or— In Paris, I think they have a right of first refusal for the city to own buildings when they’re selling, so that they’re not selling to outside investors but to residents. Are those mechanisms that would move us towards this horizon that is the end of housing as a commodity?

TRACY: Yeah, sure, maybe, sure.

ALEX: Well, I guess my question is—

TRACY: I don’t fetishize the tools or the policies, right?

ALEX: My question is—Do you see a pathway to the abolition of rent? Is there a pathway that doesn’t require a revolution?

TRACY: Of course not. But revolution is a long process.

I think that the answer is no, but for me, I’m interested in the things that people have control over right now: their bodies, their rent checks, and their relationships to each other. And with those tools, you can actually transform your relationship to your landlord.

And if you take those relationships, and you put them in conversation and in solidarity with other people who are doing that, I think that you have the makings of a lot more power for tenants. So if I fetishize anything, it’s organizing.

And so sure, like, the abolition of rent names a horizon that neither of us will probably live to see. But I think it inspires us to think really clearly about what we have to work with right now and also it inspires us to think about how fucking pathetic and different our world is from the world that we want.

ALEX: Let’s go into that more. Let’s talk about tactics and movement building. I feel like COVID lockdown, COVID era and the eviction moratoriums was a very rare moment where it felt like the world that we’re talking about seemed actually possible.

TRACY: Totally.

ALEX: And, in terms of tenant organizing, what can we learn? What do you think we can learn from that moment to take into the future? And, what do you see that have been the most effective tactics in organizing people— for tenants to win, to win against their landlords?

TRACY: So, the Los Angeles Tenants Union was the first union in the country to call for and support people out on rent strike in that early moment of the pandemic. And one of the things that I recognized is that the networks of solidarity that we had built prior to then were capable of bringing people together, of reflecting on what was happening, and devising what could be a collective solution to people’s individual crises.

Having those infrastructures where people could talk to each other really made it possible to intervene at that moment. And the thing that we intervened with, right? Like, you know, we called it Food, Not Rent. This came out of an insight that—we describe in the book—that someone in their building was like, "Oh, it seems really risky to keep our rent. But we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We don’t know what’s gonna happen in a month. We don’t know if we’re gonna get our jobs back. We don’t know if we’re gonna need to take care of our family. We don’t know where our money’s coming from."

And it’s actually maybe riskier to hand it over to some guy who’s not even around and just gonna line his pockets with it when we’re, like, trapped in our homes and we need to take care of ourselves.

And so, I think that having those spaces of reflection to then understand what was happening, to then make a demand [to cancel rent], to invite people into a strategy of a rent strike, to help people break through the shame of what they were going through— I think, on the one hand, it really shows us that those local networks of organizing are the things that we can rely on in times of emergency. It shows us that taking a calculated risk with others is less risky than doing nothing at all.

On the other hand, the other lesson that I think is really important is about what happened after, right? To, like, watch the concessions that were made to us by the state, and how it turned into a strategy of disorganization.

One thing that we learned in that time was that the state isn’t really one thing, right? Like, if you think about the agency of the state that called an eviction moratorium, it was the CDC. Well, what does that tell us? It tells us that obviously, when you look at housing from the perspective of health, people should be allowed to stay home during a respiratory pandemic, whether or not they can pay rent, right?

ALEX: Yeah.

TRACY: But also, then another arm of the state—the courts, which have been subject to right-wing retrenchment—was leveraged to shut that down. And what the legislature came up with was, in classic form, subsidies to landlords, for which, you know, tenants had to apply, even though the landlords were the ones getting the fucking money.

ALEX: Right.

TRACY: And what did that do? It disorganized people. Because people couldn’t go on solidarity strike. It separated people from their economic power that they were developing in other ways—not just to save their pandemic rent, but also to question their living conditions and rent itself. To make their landlords feel that— "Why would I even pay you if this is how you’re making me live?"

And I think that response really shows us a lot about what we can prepare for from the state when we organize, even though, in many ways, it was just a speed run of the same things that we see over and over again.

ALEX: So even forgetting stuff that happened during COVID, in major cities—places like New York and LA—there’s been a push for good cause eviction and protections for tenants. Obviously, landlords have aggressively lobbied against any kind of benefits to tenants. How do you see tenant organizers overcoming entrenched real estate power?

TRACY: The things that we describe in the book are both local and beyond— like, units of power exist within buildings, they exist within neighborhoods, and they exist citywide.

And so, to beat back the power of real estate, it’s going to take all three of those things. You asked a question about tactics, but then I went on so long about COVID—

ALEX: No, you’re good.

TRACY: —but, like, in the way that, you know, like, tenants in an individual building, right? Alone, they’re really easy to pick off. And one person withholding, right, is not a strike. A strike takes collaboration and coordination—

ALEX: Right.

TRACY: I was saying, similarly, at the neighborhood level, right? Like, what are the tools that we have to deal with what’s going on, not just in our apartments with busted windows and broken appliances, but on our streets that lack trash pickup, that don’t have parks? What are we gonna do about those problems? Well, that takes building neighborhood power.

And I think that the same is true citywide. We need to think about what forms of leverage we actually have as tenants. And when we use them, they can be really, really powerful. But I think that as ownership changes we have to realize it changes our strategy. It takes a lot less economic leverage—it takes a lot fewer tenants on strike—to put a small landlord out of business, as I did in my building, with just the few people in my building, than it would to put an asset manager landlord out of business.

ALEX: What do you think is kind of the most noxious force that there is to overcome in the world of housing? I mean, hyper-individualism? Is that it? Or landlords? Is it the real estate industry? Is it the business itself?

TRACY: I mean, I’ll answer this question in terms of, like, targets and in terms of ideology, right? Because I think that that’s a way of saying we have to think about it two ways.

One is, what are the things that are preventing us from getting organized? And there, I think you can really say that the fantasy of the American dream, that kind of individualism, plus the entrenched sexism of organizing people in their homes— I think that those are really big barriers to us getting organized.

ALEX: Mm-hmm.

TRACY: And, of course, sitting underneath that is just the fact that we believe the way things are is the way that it will be, because it’s the way that it has been—yeah, I know, that was a very Kamala Harris way of saying that. But, you know, I think that the idea that these power relationships are natural is the base on which those other two things sit.

ALEX: Thinking about targets—who’s actually in the way of these changes?

TRACY: I mean, take your pick on a given day, right? Is it the cops? Is it the politicians? Or is it landlords and the real estate industry?

ALEX: Right.

TRACY: Because on any given day, you can experience one of those three as the primary enemy because they all work together all the time. The real estate industry has leveraged state policy to give itself more power and has worked closely with police and courts to maintain that power.

I mean, look at how real estate has used racism and the Red Scare to completely banish rent control and public housing from any kind of reasonable policy debate. That’s an immense barrier for us.

And then, on the more immediate level, real estate has collaborated with the police to criminalize homelessness, to turn tenants into potential criminals the moment they fall behind on rent. So, yeah, when you ask me what the biggest threat is? It’s a combination of things.

ALEX: Do you think housing is the issue of our time? Like, the defining struggle?

TRACY: It’s my issue.

ALEX: But in a broader sense?

TRACY: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s the issue in the sense that we are seeing wealth concentrated in housing like never before. We’re also seeing climate change manifest as a crisis of migration and displacement—people needing to move, needing a place to stay.

And this connects to everything. The struggle for housing is a struggle for stability, for land, for dignity. And, you know, we’re also seeing a global movement against settler colonialism, and the right to a home is deeply connected to the right to return, the right to exist. These aren’t abstract things; they’re materially connected.

I think that displacement is the issue of our time.

We see the consequences of displacement with people who are living outside. In the United States, in the richest country of the history of the world, there are people who don't have an indoor place to sleep. We see the consequences of displacement in the disaster of man-made climate change as it appears, as a crisis of migration. We see displacement in the most grotesque face of settler colonialism that we know, which is the Zionist entity's destruction of Palestine. What animates that struggle around the right to a homeland and a right to return connects to the struggle of needing a place here.

ALEX: How did you get here?

TRACY: Like, on the subway?

ALEX: [laugh] No, like, what radicalized you? What brought you to care about this?

TRACY: Being alive.

ALEX: [laugh] Yeah, but what was the moment?

TRACY: You want the rote answer or the fun answer?

ALEX: Whatever you want.

TRACY: I mean, the combination answer is that I was in the right place at the right time. I call that God. That place was meeting my mentor, [Leonardo Vilchis] the person I wrote this book with, and participating in the work in Los Angeles.

But if I had to pick one moment that really changed my life? It was the fight against the proposed gallery district in Boyle Heights. At the time, I was writing about art, involved in the art world, and then suddenly, this fight happened.

The community in Boyle Heights made it clear: they didn’t need a fucking gallery district. They needed laundromats. They needed grocery stores. They needed stability.

So, they organized a boycott of the new galleries and the Arts District. And holding that line—that was my radicalization process. Seeing people take collective action to protect their community, using every tool at their disposal, even hilarious and brilliant ones, like cooking chilies outside the galleries so the people inside would start coughing and have to leave with their eyes burning. That was a lightbulb moment for me.

And on the other side of it? Seeing how these supposedly liberal, progressive people—these artists—responded. Watching some of them call the cops. Watching some of them justify the displacement. Watching them deploy artists of color in bad faith as a shield for real estate speculation. That was when I knew which side I was on.

ALEX: So--

TRACY: Oh, hold on, I just got a text— Oh, this is Helen, who lives in Grants Pass, Oregon. Do you remember the Supreme Court case Grants Pass v. Johnson?

ALEX: Yeah, the case that basically made it legal for cities to criminalize homeless encampments?

TRACY: Yep. Anyway, I made a friend who lived outside in Grants Pass. She just texted me. That’s another thing I wanted to say earlier. The right is using homelessness to recruit for its increasingly fascist base. And Democrats are just falling all over themselves to criminalize and brutalize homeless people too, just with a slightly nicer face. That’s a huge problem.

ALEX: Right, because it’s part of the whole cycle— More people are being pushed into poverty, then criminalized, then incarcerated, then used as cheap labor—

TRACY: Okay, I know people love that argument.

ALEX: What do you mean?

TRACY: Like, I know it’s compelling to say, “They’re incarcerating people to use them as slave labor.” And, yeah, labor is one part of the value extracted from incarcerated people, but it’s not the only part.

ALEX: Go on.

TRACY: The state pours billions of dollars into prisons, not just for the cheap labor, but to fund prison staff, to keep certain communities controlled and surveilled, to extract resources in different ways. To clear cities of people and preserve real estate profits. The prison’s economic impact is much bigger than the work it extracts from those inside.

ALEX: Yeah, I mean, even in California, one of the biggest unions in the state is the prison guards union.

TRACY: Exactly. There’s huge money in keeping people inside, but not just because they’re working for cheap. It’s also about the entire industry of incarceration—contracts, construction, policing, surveillance. It’s entire industry of making cities safe for real estate speculation not for people who live in them. It’s all interlinked.

ALEX: Right. I mean, people talk about private prisons, but the real money is in public prisons.

TRACY: Yes! Exactly! People get so caught up on private prisons, but the vast majority of incarcerated people are in public institutions. And it’s the same logic with real estate. People think the problem is just Blackstone or whatever, but it’s the entire system of wealth hoarding through land ownership.

ALEX: Okay, but what about the poor landlords?

TRACY: Oh, my God, I love this question.

ALEX: The mom-and-pop landlords!

TRACY: I love it because you can literally go back and see when the real estate industry decided that “mom-and-pop landlords” would be their PR shield.

And it’s hilarious, right? We’re supposed to feel bad for people who work an average of four hours a month and extract more than 60% of someone’s wages just for owning a spare house? Not even the house they live in. Just an extra house.

ALEX: Yeah.

TRACY: Like, what kind of system are we defending when owning a home is more profitable than working?

ALEX: And we’ve seen this shift where more and more properties are owned by venture capital firms like Blackstone. Do you think capital wants to turn everyone into permanent renters?

TRACY: Absolutely. That’s the trend we’re seeing. Asset management firms got into housing after the 2008 crisis by stealing foreclosed homes. Now, they fix rents, jack up prices, and treat housing as a financial asset instead of a human need.

And unlike small-time landlords, these corporations have investors. They have a ten-year plan to extract every dollar they can before flipping the property to the next asset manager. They don’t give a fuck about repairs or livability.

So, yeah. Capital doesn’t “want” anything in an intentional, conscious way. But its logic is to keep extracting, and right now, housing is a key site of that extraction.

ALEX: So, what’s your advice to tenants reading this?

TRACY: Get to know your neighbors. Seriously. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to be best friends. But they’re who you have. Solidarity only works if you actually know the people around you.

ALEX: Right.

TRACY: The whole logic of tenant organizing is that there are more of us than there are of them. Landlords have more money and more power, but they only have that power because we’re isolated. We need to get our shit together to recognize the people around us as a source of power.

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By now, you may be thinking: okay, sure, this is all very compelling, but what am I supposed to do with this information? Should I refuse to Venmo my landlord? Should I throw a brick in the window at the offices of Blackstone? Should I move into an abandoned Sears and claim squatters’ rights? Tracy’s answer, in short: maybe. But also, get to know your neighbors. Because the thing about capitalism is that it isolates you—it makes your problems yours alone. Your rising rent, your impossible mortgage, your leaky ceiling, your existential dread at the idea of renting until you die—these are your problems to solve, individually, while your landlord sits back and makes money simply for existing.

But they don’t have to be. The power landlords have is in keeping tenants divided, in making you think you have no choice. And the first step toward breaking that power is as simple as knocking on a neighbor’s door, comparing notes, and realizing—oh, it’s not just me. It never was.

Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In Their Lane. Focused. Flourishing.

YOU CAN BUY YOUR COPY OF ABOLISH RENT HERE!