Tenants in Kansas City have been on strike since the start of October. The strike, which is larger in scale and scope than any seen since peaks in tenant action in the 1920s–30s and 1960s, comes on the heels of years of organizing against their landlords’ neglect. After dealing with broken plumbing, faulty HVAC, pests, mold, and general disrepair, residents of two buildings formed unions with the housing justice organization KC Tenants, and for the past three months, have withheld rent to demand substantial repairs, new ownership, collectively bargained leases, and a cap on rent increases. They are also targeting Fannie Mae and its regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to demand much broader tenant protections in buildings covered by federally backed mortgages.
On its face, such a rent strike may seem difficult to justify. According to a statement from Sentinel Real Estate Corp.—the company that owns one of the buildings at issue—striking tenants “have failed to meet their obligations per their lease agreements,” and legal action like eviction is “the normal course response in cases where rent is not paid.” On this view, which plays on some capitalist commonsense, striking tenants are simply purchasers of a product who have failed to hold up their side of the contract. However, as I will argue in this brief post, such an analysis fails to properly understand the tenant-landlord relationship. Landlords wield significant, unaccountable power over tenants—an asymmetry that undermines the idea that rent strikes should be seen as a simple contractual violation. Instead, I argue, they represent one form of justified resistance against such power.
Landlords as Petty Tyrants
The landlord-tenant relationship, as I argue in a recent article, is best understood as one of domination. By domination, I mean a relationship of rule where rulers have the capacity for arbitrary power over the ruled—that is, the power to set the terms by which the ruled live without the ruled’s input or participation. Classic paradigms include the slave master, the husband who keeps his wife under his thumb, and as Elizabeth Anderson has recently argued, the situation in many American workplaces. Most American workers, she argues, are subject to tyrannical rule (domination) in their workplaces: employers have power to issue orders on the threat of sanction across a wide swath of workers’ on- and off-the-clock lives. Landlords, I suggest, have similar, though not identical, powers over tenants.
Critically, landlords’ power is both structural and interpersonal. At the structural level, landlords have substantial powers to set prices and shape the physical development of the built environment. In effect, the American state delegates nearly all housing provision to private markets. This means that people are essentially forced to participate in commodified housing markets; our options are to buy a home (assuming we have money and credit access), rent from a private landlord, or go without shelter. Partially for this reason, landlords have significant cultural and political powers to set the terms of debate. When faced with practically any proposal for new tenant protections, real estate groups argue/threaten that such changes will drive landlords out of business and tank the housing supply. State preemption of local housing policy, meanwhile, often bars tenants’ capacities to make change.
Moreover, legal institutions and processes offer little to tenants in terms of power, protection, or means of redress when their rights are violated. For instance, when tenants face eviction, they rarely have legal counsel. They are likely to get pushed into settlement agreements rather than pursue their cases in court. And if they do make it to court, they are subject to a summary eviction process, which is designed to churn through cases as quickly as possible to return landlords’ property to their position, rather than to give tenants justice when they face removal from their homes.
At the personal level, landlord power often starts at eviction (or eviction threat), but it doesn’t end there. Landlords also have the paternalistic power to interfere in the lives of tenants. By virtue of their proximity to (and control over) tenants’ intimate domestic space, landlords can claim prerogative to shape tenants as subjects—especially as good, rent-paying subjects. Landlords sometimes take on a kind of didactic power to insert themselves in tenant’s personal lives and instruct tenants on “proper” priorities and preferences. This access can bleed into surveillance, where landlords—who already possess sensitive personal data on tenants from the application stage—track tenants’ daily activities, their social connections, and their utility usage. Unsurprisingly, such privileged access frequently facilitates harassment of tenants. This problem is particularly pernicious in subsidized housing, where breaking guest rules or being the subject of a nuisance call to the police can seriously jeopardize tenants’ residential stability.
Beyond these intrusions into tenants’ personal lives, landlords’ duty to maintain and repair the units in which tenants live, which is often seen as a benefit of renting, generally creates conditions of dependence. The duty for maintenance is chronically ill-enforced. Consequently, tenants are often stuck dealing with conditions of neglect and disrepair with little means for redress. Tenants end up with little control over the conditions of their living space, subject to hazardous conditions at home, and at the mercy of delinquent owners.
Looking at the landlord-tenant relationship in terms of domination not only helps us see the vulnerable position in which tenants exist in the United States; it can also help us see the importance of building countervailing power. In addition to helping tenants negotiate rents and wages, tenant organizing can create leverage so that tenants can start to rule themselves collectively. It puts power first in our thinking and pushes us towards freedom as an evaluative principle for approaches to solving our housing challenges.
Resisting Domination
So, then, what justifies tenants withholding rents in response to perceived mistreatment from landlords? If I’m right about domination as a definitive characteristic of the landlord-tenant relationship, then a rent strike is not (or not solely) an economic tactic in a conflict between market actors, but rather a political tactic in a power conflict characterized by unaccountable rule.
Alex Gourevitch has already outlined such an argument connecting domination to workers’ right to strike against their employers. He argues, much like Anderson, that employer domination is produced by the structural condition of property inequality in labor markets, and by the personal dynamics of exploitation within the workplace. The labor strike, then, is a way that workers can assert their voice in a power conflict by leveraging their most valuable resource—their labor power.
This logic extends effectively to domination between landlords and tenants. As Los Angeles Tenants Union organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis explain, “rent strikes stop the flow of cash to our landlords and reveal their dependence on us. Rent strikes suggest that the right to housing already exists; all we need to do is claim it.” The rent strike, then, is a political claim against domination. It mobilizes tenants’ most significant power resource (their rent) and uses it to avow a right to self-determination in their homes. It is a way of fighting for the political freedom to set the terms of one’s own life within a context of domination where that freedom is generally unavailable.
Starting from domination, we can also rethink how we approach law and policy in housing. Currently, the focus of basically all American housing policy—weak as it is—is to reduce some of the cost burdens of housing. Its track record is mixed. Certainly we should be thinking about ways to drastically cut back the burden that staying sheltered puts on households. That might look like rental assistance, public housing, or rent control.
But cost-oriented policies don’t get to the problem of domination. Empirical research on landlord-tenant relationships in subsidized housing strongly suggests that, by itself, lowering a tenants’ rent doesn’t resolve many of the problems of domination discussed above. Indeed, in some cases, such policies can even exacerbate the degree of control that landlords can exercise over tenants, who are dependent on access to their current (below-market) unit.
Furthermore, even if we imagine a hypothetical housing market environment where there is far more housing supply and perhaps greater affordability, we probably wouldn’t find resolution for the problem of domination. For one, the idea that a supply glut would give renters greater leverage depends on the assumption that renters can vote with their feet and exit easily. As anyone who’s moved houses knows, it’s extremely financially costly, emotionally burdensome, and time consuming—plus it risks taking people away from the social networks and institutions on which they depend. But additionally, hypothetical housing supply that better matches demand would not resolve the legal, policy, and political disadvantages that renters face. Regardless of the internal conditions of rental markets, renters still receive practically no support from the state, are subject to grossly unfair procedures in eviction court, and depend on relations with landlords characterized by property inequality.
To tackle domination, we need countervailing power. In the context of the Kansas City rent strikes, our task is to think about how law can empower these mass-membership organizations to counter their landlord’s dominative power. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is likely the best model we have within American institutions for this kind of legal framework, and something like an NLRA-for-housing may be the most promising path. The NLRA is not perfect and I don’t claim that the organizing needs in housing are identical to those in labor, but an institutional framework legitimizing tenant unions, protecting organizing activity, and ensuring a right to bargain and strike offers a model for how policy can work against domination. Whatever the precise form, law and political institutions should be utilized to foster solidarity and build power, bolstering organized tenants’ quest to realize conditions of freedom beyond domination.
