With tenant organizing on the rise across the United States, more and more tenants are exercising their collective power to demand lower rents, security of tenure, and better conditions—victories that substantially improve their lives. However, according to Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, tenant unions can aim for something much more revolutionary: a world without landlords or rent.
Although neither a legal treatise nor a work of legal theory, their recent manifesto—Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis—offers insights into both how law and political economy scholars might conceptualize the tenant movement’s relationship with the state, and the concrete ways that we as legal scholars, tenant attorneys, or tenants ourselves, can join the struggle.
The Los Angeles Tenants Union‘s Struggle
In Abolish Rent, Rosenthal and Vilchis chronicle their history—packed with collective strategies employed by organized tenants and critical lessons for housing movements—working with the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), an organization which they cofounded in 2015. Rosenthal and Vilchis’ vision is grounded in their definition of the tenants who make up the movement. Contrary to the legalistic definition of a lessee, they define a tenant as anyone who does not control their own housing. Based on that formulation, the category of tenants includes renters, homeowners months from foreclosure, unhoused community members sleeping on the streets, residents in long-term care facilities, and incarcerated people, the last living in the most expensive publicly funded housing in the country. If tenants’ absence of control of their housing defines them, then Rosenthal and Vilchis’ liberatory horizon involves taking actual control of the buildings where the tenants live and winning state power to further develop “permanent, unsurveilled, well-resourced public housing.” Abolish rent, then, is not just a slogan. For Rosenthal and Vilchis, in a world where tenants control housing, there would be no landlords, nor rent.
LATU organizes on a federated model: its members organize tenant associations within individual buildings, affiliate with neighborhood-based local chapters that decide on their own strategies, and unite as a citywide tenant union. Rosenthal and Vilchis bring their readers inside those tenant association meetings to experience vicariously how Mariachi Plaza tenants organized their successful rent strike in the Latinx neighborhood of Boyle Heights, how unhoused tenants fought to maintain the community they created in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood’s park, and how a multilingual Chinatown tenant association is still fighting their eviction from supposedly affordable housing. In each case, tenants used rent strikes or the occupation of land—each a temporary act of rent abolition—to realize material change in their own lives. Moreover, such contestation with their common landlords allowed tenants to build solidarity where there was none before, reflecting the observation that contestation and disruption is a potent basis for developing an activated mass of tenants ready to organize.
Rosenthal and Vilchis also use rent abolition as a criterion in deciding which fights to take on. Protecting and expanding rent control, developing public housing to compete with the private market, and new legal mechanisms to remove buildings from private ownership are all on Rosenthal and Vilchis’ agenda, while subsidies that alienate tenants from one another while propping up private landlords are out.
However, Rosenthal and Vilchis are clear that the citywide tenant union’s strategy is not just to tweak housing policy. They intend to build countervailing power to the real estate interests they oppose. The book describes how countervailing power requires building independent political structures that are responsive to a membership and not reliant on the government or foundations that may compromise the union’s political goals. In pursuit of this independence, LATU has foregone non-profit incorporation or the hiring of permanent staff in favor of dues-paying members and disciplined, volunteer organizers. Rosenthal and Vilchis contrast their approach of building autonomous countervailing power with the non-profits that they say, “negotiate the terms of communities’ defeat.” However, even countervailing power is not their end goal. Rosenthal and Vilchis also recognize that “[o]ur rent checks fund the real estate lobby that organizes against us.” Thus, tenant control requires the defeat of real estate rather than a détente.
In Abolish Rent, the state plays a necessary but ultimately ambivalent role. In Rosenthal and Vilchis’ words, it is the state who organizes land for the purpose of wealth accumulation and guarantees landlords their rent, “a tribute we pay at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun.” However, with full acknowledgment of the state’s coercive power, Abolish Rent still takes an instrumental approach to the law. As the authors frame it, legal rights are not the limits of what tenants can demand. Rather, the rights are instruments to turn “what you have into what you need to get what you want.” Readers of this blog might recognize this approach as broadly in line with the notion of non-reformist reforms, serving to “undermine the prevailing political, economic, [and] social order, construct an essentially different one, and build democratic power toward emancipatory horizons.” Rosenthal and Vilchis accordingly view the state, and the law, as a terrain of struggle, one that provides more resources to real estate than to tenant unions, but one that is necessary to engage with, constrain, and utilize where possible.
LPE Frameworks for Tenant Control
Abolish Rent is explicitly offered as both a polemic and a guide. While Rosenthal and Vilchis do not claim to speak for the entirety of the tenant movement either in Los Angeles or beyond, both their critique of the state and their vision for tenant control point to one role that law and political economy scholars could play – creating some of the capacity and ideas that will bridge the gap between critique and reaching the desired emancipatory horizon.
Legal scholars have engaged in crucial work diagnosing the injustices in and proposing solutions for eviction courts; situating our housing system within the infrastructure of racial capitalism; and uncovering the disparate power and preferential treatment of homeowners over tenants. Abolish Rent points to areas where we, without being prescriptive about the movement’s ends or strategies, can build out new and necessary legal instruments to win.
For example, which laws could fortify tactics employed by tenant unions and create pathways to housing decommodification? How can the courtrooms where tenants face eviction become sites of organizing, and how can the right to counsel in eviction cases be shaped to support collective representation? What are the opportunities to partner with debtors and workers’ movements? What legal mechanisms would better enable tenant unions to build countervailing power without cutting off the route for eventual tenant control? And if financialization is at the core of the housing market, how does the law move from a localized view of battles in a single building to an internationalist one that engages financial capital across borders?
Likewise, how could law order the world that Abolish Rent envisions? Rosenthal and Vilchis are clear that their goal for tenant control will depress property values. That is a necessary part of housing decommodification. Legal scholars can help answer questions that will accompany this challenge, such as, how do we escape the current trap of property tax-funded governance? Abolish Rent does not directly address how the new housing system would be structured or funded. This is another open area for inquiry. Scholars affiliated with law and political economy are already exploring these questions, but we have further to go to help build a bridge to a liberatory housing future.
The Lawyer’s Role in the Tenant Union Movement
Beyond illuminating potentially fruitful areas for scholarly work, Abolish Rent also provides important lessons about how lawyers and law students can directly represent organized tenants. Unlike many other movements, attorneys are already integrated into tenant organizing because building-based campaigns depend on tenants maintaining possession – a question landlords often seek to resolve in court. At the same time, for Rosenthal and Vilchis, the courtroom is ancillary – victory depends on the meetings, community building, and out-of-court strategies LATU’s members develop together. Abolish Rent should be required reading for those interested in representing organized tenants, who must understand the context in which tenant organizing actually flourishes in order to best serve their clients in and out of court.
If it is the case that our involvement as lawyers or law students is both inevitable and auxiliary, we must know our role, and perform it well, with full appreciation that we have a separate function from the organizer. Rosenthal and Vilchis describe how, during the Mariachi rent strike in Boyle Heights, attorneys from the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action “understood that the rent strike was an organizing strategy, and the legal strategy was to give that organizing strategy more time.” Consequently, the attorneys raised every single procedural and substantive defense available to their clients in their eviction proceedings, creating space for them to organize. These legal tasks are the same performed by any zealous eviction defense attorney. The key is to embrace when tenants see themselves collectively, and to not participate in the atomization of their experiences.
Attorneys and law students excited to work with organized tenants rarely intend to demobilize tenants. However, Abolish Rent shows how a lack of intentionality results in that very outcome: how our failure to bring decisions back to the collective undermines opportunities for community building, and how a risk aversion pervasive to the legal profession leads us to individualize tenants’ struggles or convey their legal rights as the limit of what they can achieve. So often, tenant associations organize as hot shops reacting to a crisis like a rent increase or a dangerous conditions issue. Neighbors who have reintroduced themselves to each other enough times that they are now embarrassed to ask one another’s names suddenly need to make decisions together. It is ethically and logistically complicated to represent a group in the process of seeing itself as a collective. The dynamic nature of tenant organizing necessitates that lawyers and law students learn to facilitate group conversations and decision making, leave space for community building, and find a path to abide by our ethical obligations rather than throwing up our hands.
Lawyers and law students have a role outside the courtroom as well. When tenant lawyers are invited to contribute to legal strategy beyond eviction representation, they can engage in lawyering as political enabling. In Abolish Rent, we see one example of how lawyers could provide research to protect protest activities. When the police confronted protesting Mariachi rent strikers camped on the sidewalk outside their landlord’s home, tenants relied on a settlement in an unrelated case allowing unhoused tenants to set up tents overnight in order to stop the police from disbursing their protest encampment. Rosenthal and Vilchis also reference Stop LAPD Spying’s Automating Banishment report, which relied on public information requests to expose how specific landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods directly contacted prosecutors seeking more police enforcement at their properties. Lawyers likewise could use open records requests and litigation to expose collusion between real estate interests and government actors. These are just two of a host of ways that lawyers and law students as political enablers can access their full range of skills and knowledge to think creatively about how to support the tenant movement.
Finally, Rosenthal and Vilchis have a lesson for law students and lawyers that we are prone to overlook: our education and bar license are not the only way to show up. Many of us are tenants too. If your paycheck or student loans are helping your landlord build equity and enjoy tax credits for an asset you depend on but will never own, then Abolish Rent is clear that there is a place for you in the tenant union too.
