Abolish Rent

Abolish Rent Plot Summary

Introduction

Every first day of the month, a silent but profound ritual unfolds across America as millions of tenants hand over a significant portion of their wages for the basic human need of shelter. This routine transfer of wealth—from those who inhabit housing to those who own it—has become so normalized that we rarely question its underlying power dynamics. Yet this relationship between landlords and tenants represents one of the most fundamental axes of exploitation in contemporary capitalism, creating vast inequality while trapping many in cycles of poverty and instability. The housing question is fundamentally a question about power: who gets to decide how we organize our cities and our lives. While housing is framed as a commodity subject to market forces, it is simultaneously a human right essential for survival and dignity. By examining rent not just as a monthly payment but as a social relation that produces exploitation and domination, we can begin to imagine alternatives to a system that enriches landlords and real estate speculators at the expense of tenants' human needs. Through rigorous analysis of both the economic mechanisms and political structures that maintain the rent relation, we are invited to consider how tenant organizing and collective action can challenge these arrangements and move toward a world where housing serves human needs rather than capital accumulation.

Chapter 1: The Rent Relation: Exploitation and Domination of Tenants

Rent is not simply a passive economic transaction but an active power relation that extracts wealth from tenants while subjecting them to domination. This relation has two key dimensions: economic exploitation through the appropriation of tenants' wages, and social domination through control over their access to shelter. Unlike other commodity purchases, rent never results in ownership; it merely secures temporary permission to occupy space, creating a perpetual dependency that landlords leverage for profit. The statistics reveal the stark reality of this exploitation: in most American cities, it would take four full-time minimum-wage jobs to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment. Half of America's 100 million tenants spend more than a third of their income on rent, with a quarter spending over half. In Los Angeles alone, 600,000 people spend 90 percent of their earnings keeping a roof over their heads. Meanwhile, landlords extracted over $4.5 trillion from tenants in rent payments during the 2010s. This wealth transfer systematically impoverishes tenants while enriching property owners, functioning as an engine of inequality that perpetuates class divisions. Beyond financial extraction, the rent relation subjects tenants to various forms of domination. Landlords exercise control over tenants' living conditions, routinely neglecting maintenance while maximizing returns. This creates a perverse incentive structure where landlords profit most by investing least in habitable conditions. The threat of eviction—and ultimately homelessness—hangs over every tenant interaction with their landlord, creating an inherent power imbalance that shapes the relationship. This threat is not theoretical: 3.6 million evictions are filed annually in the United States, with devastating consequences for those displaced. The rent relation also shapes our cities and neighborhoods by determining who can live where. It sorts populations by class and race, containing some communities in disinvested areas while displacing others from gentrifying neighborhoods. The ability to pay increasingly astronomical rents determines access to quality schools, transportation, healthcare, and employment opportunities. This spatial organization of inequality is not accidental but a structural feature of how housing markets function under capitalism. For tenants of color, these dynamics are intensified by the legacy and ongoing reality of housing discrimination. Black households are twice as likely to rent as white households, reflecting historical policies like redlining and racially restrictive covenants that prevented homeownership. Today, discrimination continues through proxies like credit scores and income requirements. Housing markets don't just reflect existing inequalities—they actively produce and reproduce them along racial lines. Understanding rent as a relation rather than merely a price allows us to see that the "housing crisis" is actually working exactly as designed for those who profit from it. From this perspective, the solution cannot be limited to minor policy adjustments that leave the fundamental power relation intact. Rather, it requires building tenant power to challenge the very premises of a system that treats housing as a commodity rather than a human right.

Chapter 2: The War on Tenants: How State and Real Estate Collaborate

The power imbalance between landlords and tenants doesn't exist in a vacuum—it is actively constructed and maintained through state policy. Throughout the 20th century and continuing today, government at all levels has waged what amounts to a systematic war on tenants, consistently prioritizing property owners' interests over housing security. This war has been conducted through interlocking policies that inflate property values while abandoning tenants to predatory market forces. Federal housing policy has consistently privileged homeownership over rental housing through massive subsidies and tax advantages. The creation of the 30-year mortgage, mortgage interest deductions, and government loan guarantees channeled vast public resources toward building individual wealth through property ownership. However, these benefits were explicitly denied to communities of color through practices like redlining, which deemed certain neighborhoods—primarily Black and immigrant areas—too "risky" for investment. This segregation wasn't merely a side effect but a central feature of American housing policy, one that made housing more valuable by keeping people of color out. Urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century further devastated tenant communities. Between 1949 and 1974, these initiatives displaced over 300,000 households, predominantly Black and Brown renters, to make way for highways, stadiums, and other development projects that primarily benefited property owners and businesses. Rather than addressing the real housing needs of poor and working-class people, urban renewal became, in James Baldwin's words, "Negro removal"—a mechanism for clearing valuable land of its existing residents to enable profitable redevelopment. The systematic dismantling of public housing represents another front in this war. After a brief period of public housing construction during the New Deal, real estate interests mobilized to ensure these programs would never seriously challenge the private housing market. They succeeded in imposing restrictions that undermined public housing's viability: caps on construction costs ensured buildings would deteriorate; income limits confined public housing to the poorest residents; and one-for-one replacement requirements tied new construction to slum clearance. By the Reagan era, federal funding for public housing was slashed by 80%, and a ban on new construction was implemented. Instead of public provision, housing policy shifted toward privatized solutions that channel public resources to landlords and developers. Section 8 vouchers and Low Income Housing Tax Credits subsidize private profits while doing little to address the structural shortage of affordable housing. Meanwhile, laws preventing local governments from implementing rent control proliferated, with 32 states passing such preemption laws in the 1990s alone. The financialization of housing has intensified these trends. The deregulation of banking in the 1990s paved the way for the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent foreclosure wave, which disproportionately stripped wealth from communities of color. Wall Street firms then capitalized on the crisis they created, purchasing foreclosed homes and converting them to rentals. Large corporate landlords now dominate many housing markets, using sophisticated data analytics to maximize profits through higher rents, aggressive fee structures, and rapid evictions. This history reveals how the supposed "housing crisis" is actually the predictable outcome of policy choices that prioritize real estate profits over human needs. The true crisis is one of political will: the capture of the state by what Samuel Stein calls "the real estate state"—the fusion of government and property interests that continues to wage war on tenants to this day.

Chapter 3: Building Tenant Power Through Collective Action

Faced with the combined forces of landlords and the state, tenants are not powerless. Throughout history, tenants have organized to resist exploitation and domination, developing methods of collective action that can shift the balance of power. These efforts begin with a fundamental insight: while individual tenants may be vulnerable, organized tenants can exercise significant leverage against even the most powerful landlords and real estate interests. The building block of tenant power is the tenant association—a democratic organization of residents within a single building or complex who unite to address common concerns. Unlike individual complaints, which landlords can easily ignore, tenant associations create a collective bargaining unit capable of making demands and backing them with coordinated action. By presenting a unified front, tenants can win concrete improvements in living conditions, prevent unjust evictions, and even negotiate collectively on rents and leases. Successful tenant organizing requires overcoming the isolation that landlords rely on to maintain control. Many tenants suffer in silence, believing their housing problems are individual rather than systemic. Organizers work to break this isolation by connecting tenants to one another, helping them identify shared grievances, and developing relationships of trust and solidarity. This community-building aspect of tenant organizing serves both practical and political purposes—it creates the social bonds necessary for collective action while prefiguring more cooperative ways of living together. Direct action tactics form the core of tenant power. Rent strikes—the coordinated withholding of rent payments—provide tenants with powerful economic leverage by threatening landlords' income stream. Building-wide repairs campaigns force landlords to address neglected maintenance issues. Eviction defense mobilizations physically prevent sheriffs from removing tenants from their homes. Public pressure campaigns that target landlords' reputations, businesses, and social standing can be particularly effective against corporate landlords concerned about their image. These tactics do not rely on appealing to the moral conscience of landlords or the intervention of government agencies; instead, they directly assert tenant power. Tenant unions extend this organizing model beyond individual buildings to the neighborhood, city, or regional level. Like labor unions, tenant unions bring together multiple tenant associations to share resources, coordinate strategies, and build solidarity across different sites of struggle. This broader scale of organization enables tenants to address issues beyond single landlords—fighting for policy changes, supporting rent strikes with material aid, developing tenant leadership, and creating lasting infrastructure for tenant power. Crucially, tenant organizing challenges the ideological framework that treats housing primarily as a commodity and investment vehicle rather than a human right. By asserting collective control over housing, tenants contest the unlimited rights of property owners to extract profit from a basic human need. This ideological struggle is as important as the material demands, as it helps denaturalize arrangements that have long been presented as inevitable or necessary. Tenant organizing ultimately points toward a different vision of housing governance—one based on democratic participation, collective stewardship, and human needs rather than profit maximization. While immediate campaigns may focus on specific reforms or improvements, the longer-term horizon involves transforming the fundamental power relations that structure housing access and control. Building tenant power is thus both a means of securing immediate relief and a strategy for systemic change.

Chapter 4: Rent Strikes as Revolutionary Practice

The rent strike represents one of the most powerful weapons in tenants' arsenal—a direct confrontation with the economic and power relations that structure the housing system. When tenants collectively withhold rent payments, they not only create financial pressure on landlords but also enact, if temporarily, an alternative relationship to housing not mediated by the extraction of rent. This tactic has deep historical roots and continues to demonstrate its effectiveness in contemporary housing struggles. Rent strikes reverse the power dynamic between landlords and tenants. Rather than the tenant depending on the landlord for housing, the strike reveals that landlords depend on tenants for income. This revelation can be transformative for participants who have long internalized their subordinate position. As one tenant from a recent Los Angeles rent strike observed: "The first night of our strike, I was shocked that nothing happened. The building didn't crumble. My keys still worked. My home, though I had not paid for it, remained mine." This experience makes visible what is often hidden—that rent is not a natural law but a social relation that can be contested. Successful rent strikes require substantial preparation and organization. They typically begin with building a tenant association that unites a significant majority of residents. Through meetings, one-on-one conversations, and shared decision-making processes, tenants develop the trust and solidarity necessary to take collective risk. Organizers help tenants understand the legal terrain, connect with supporting organizations, and develop clear demands and strategy. The strike itself may be triggered by various circumstances—rent increases, neglected repairs, harassment, or eviction threats—but always requires a commitment to stand together despite intimidation. The demands of rent strikes vary according to circumstances. Some seek specific improvements in building conditions or services. Others target rent increases or fight for lease renewals. In some cases, particularly during economic crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, rent strikes have demanded the cancellation of rent debt. The most ambitious strikes may aim to force landlords to sell buildings to tenants or community land trusts, transforming ownership structures entirely. Whatever the specific demands, rent strikes challenge the fundamental right of landlords to extract wealth from tenants without accountability. Landlords typically respond to rent strikes with a combination of intimidation and divide-and-conquer tactics. They may file eviction proceedings against strike leaders, offer individual deals to break solidarity, hire security to monitor tenants, or cut off services. These responses reveal the coercive underpinnings of the rent relation that normally remain hidden. Legal support becomes crucial at this stage, not primarily to win court cases but to delay eviction proceedings long enough for the economic pressure of the strike to force negotiation. Beyond immediate material gains, rent strikes build tenant power through the experience of collective struggle. Participants develop organizing skills, political analysis, and relationships of mutual aid that extend beyond the strike itself. The shared experience of taking action together transforms passive "renters" into active political subjects capable of shaping their living conditions. Even unsuccessful strikes can lay groundwork for future organizing by demonstrating possibilities for resistance and identifying weaknesses in landlord power. Rent strikes connect housing struggles to broader movements for economic and social justice. By directly challenging property relations and capital accumulation through real estate, they make visible the connections between housing exploitation and other forms of oppression. They assert that housing should be organized around human needs rather than profit, pointing toward a vision of housing as a social good rather than a commodity. In this way, rent strikes function as both practical tactics for immediate gains and prefigurative politics that embody alternative social arrangements.

Chapter 5: From Housing Struggle to Land Struggle

Housing struggles inevitably lead to questions about land—who controls it, how it is used, and for whose benefit. While immediate tenant organizing often focuses on relations with landlords and conditions within buildings, the deeper power dynamics shaping housing access ultimately concern sovereignty over territory. Recognizing this connection transforms tenant organizing from a defensive struggle over individual buildings into an offensive movement challenging the very foundations of our property system. Land in the United States has a specific colonial history that continues to shape housing inequities today. The American regime of private property was established through the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. This original accumulation created a system where land became a commodity to be bought and sold, with access determined by wealth rather than need or historical connection. For Indigenous communities, this meant the conversion of their territories into parcels for settlement and speculation. For enslaved people and their descendants, it meant systematic exclusion from land ownership even after formal emancipation. Contemporary housing injustice cannot be separated from this history. The racial wealth gap—where the median white family has eight times the wealth of the median Black family—is largely a product of discriminatory housing and land policies. Redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal, and predatory lending all maintained white control over land and housing while extracting wealth from communities of color. Today's gentrification processes continue this pattern, as capital flows into historically disinvested neighborhoods, displacing long-term residents while erasing their cultural and social claims to place. Tenant movements increasingly recognize that fighting for individual buildings is necessary but insufficient. The commodification of land itself drives the crisis, as real estate speculation treats land as a financial asset rather than a social good. In major cities, the value of land underneath buildings has far outpaced construction costs, creating incentives for landlords to displace long-term tenants in favor of those who can pay more. The problem is not just bad landlords but a system that treats land as a vehicle for wealth accumulation rather than a foundation for community life. This recognition has led to innovative organizing strategies that explicitly contest control over land. Community land trusts remove land from the speculative market by placing it under democratic community ownership while allowing for various forms of housing tenure on that land. Land banking enables public acquisition of vacant or distressed properties for community-determined uses. Tenant opportunity to purchase laws give residents the right to buy their buildings when owners decide to sell. These approaches share a common principle: land should be governed democratically for social benefit rather than private gain. Indigenous land reclamation movements offer powerful models for tenant organizing. These movements assert that relationship to land derives not from legal title but from ongoing stewardship and cultural connection. They challenge the colonial legal framework that treats land as property to be owned rather than a relationship to be respected. From Standing Rock to Mauna Kea, Indigenous resistance demonstrates that alternative conceptions of land sovereignty can mobilize broad coalitions against extractive capitalism. The transformation from housing struggle to land struggle represents a strategic deepening of tenant organizing. Rather than simply demanding better terms within an exploitative system, it contests the fundamental assumptions underlying that system. It asks not just "how can tenants secure their homes?" but "how should land be governed, and by whom?" This shift opens possibilities for alliance with other movements fighting for economic, racial, and environmental justice, as it connects housing issues to broader questions about democracy, decolonization, and planetary survival. By reframing tenant organizing as a struggle for land sovereignty, the movement expands both its analytical scope and its transformative horizon. It recognizes that abolishing rent ultimately requires abolishing the property regime that makes rent possible—a regime built on colonial dispossession and maintained through state violence. In its place, tenant movements envision systems of land stewardship based on use value rather than exchange value, democratic governance rather than market dictates, and ecological sustainability rather than endless extraction.

Chapter 6: Organizing Democratic Tenant Communities

Creating democratic tenant communities involves more than bringing people together around shared grievances—it requires developing new forms of collective decision-making, mutual care, and political education that can sustain long-term organizing. These processes don't just support the immediate goals of tenant struggles; they embody the alternative social relations that tenant movements seek to create. Democratic tenant organizing begins with the recognition that tenants themselves must be the protagonists of their own liberation. Professional advocates, lawyers, and policy experts may provide valuable support, but their expertise cannot substitute for tenant leadership and collective action. This principle challenges the service model that dominates much of the nonprofit housing sector, where tenants are treated as clients to be helped rather than political agents with the capacity to transform their conditions. Instead, tenant organizers focus on developing the skills, analysis, and confidence of residents to take action themselves. Popular education forms the methodological backbone of democratic tenant organizing. Drawing on traditions developed by educators like Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, tenant organizers facilitate processes where participants analyze their conditions, identify common problems, and develop collective solutions. Rather than delivering pre-packaged campaigns or demands, this approach starts from tenants' lived experiences and builds toward shared understanding and strategy. Through practices like story circles, participatory research, and collective reflection, tenants develop what Freire called "critical consciousness"—the ability to read their reality in order to transform it. Building democratic structures within tenant organizations presents both challenges and opportunities. Most tenants have little experience with collective decision-making, having been socialized in hierarchical workplaces, schools, and families. Tenant associations experiment with various democratic forms—from simple majority voting to consensus processes—adapting them to their specific contexts and needs. They develop leadership structures that distribute power and responsibility while ensuring accountability to the broader membership. These processes are often messy and time-consuming, but they build the capacity for collective self-governance that sustains the organization. Mutual aid practices strengthen tenant communities while meeting immediate needs. Tenant associations organize childcare during meetings, share food and resources, support members facing eviction or harassment, and create networks of care during crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many tenant organizations established community pantries, coordinated medication deliveries for elderly members, and created phone trees to check on vulnerable neighbors. These practices demonstrate that tenants can meet their needs through solidarity rather than depending on landlords or the state. Cultural work and celebration form another vital dimension of democratic tenant communities. Shared meals, music, art-making, and storytelling build relationships that transcend purely transactional organizing. These activities create space for joy and connection amid difficult struggles, preventing burnout and sustaining long-term commitment. They also help tenants imagine beyond present conditions to envision the world they are fighting to create. Conflict is inevitable in any democratic community, and tenant organizers develop processes to address it productively. Class, race, gender, immigration status, and other differences can create tensions within tenant organizations. Rather than avoiding these differences, effective organizing acknowledges them directly while building solidarity across them. Tenant associations may establish agreements about communication, develop protocols for addressing harassment or discrimination, and create space to work through disagreements respectfully. Democratic tenant communities also engage in political education that connects housing struggles to broader systems of power. Through study groups, workshops, and discussions, tenants analyze how their housing conditions relate to capitalism, racism, colonialism, and other structures of oppression. This education isn't abstract or academic—it emerges from concrete organizing experiences and helps participants develop strategic clarity about who holds power, how it operates, and how it can be challenged. The creation of democratic tenant communities prefigures the world that tenant movements seek to build—one where housing serves human needs rather than profit, where decisions about land and resources are made democratically, and where mutual care replaces exploitation and domination. These communities don't just fight against landlords; they demonstrate that another way of living together is possible.

Chapter 7: Toward a World Without Landlords

Imagining a world without landlords requires more than critique of the existing system—it demands articulating concrete alternatives for how housing can be organized to serve human needs rather than capital accumulation. This vision is not utopian fantasy but emerges from existing practices and struggles that point toward different ways of organizing our relationship to housing and land. The abolition of rent would fundamentally transform social relations around housing. Without landlords extracting wealth from tenants, housing would shift from being primarily a vehicle for profit to being recognized as essential infrastructure for human flourishing. The massive resources currently captured by landlords and real estate speculators—estimated at over $500 billion annually in the United States alone—would instead remain with the people who live in and maintain housing. This economic transformation would particularly benefit the most marginalized communities who currently spend the highest proportion of their income on housing. Social housing offers one proven alternative to landlordism. Unlike public housing as implemented in the United States—chronically underfunded, stigmatized, and segregated—robust social housing programs in cities like Vienna, Austria demonstrate that non-market housing can provide high-quality, mixed-income communities. In Vienna, where 60% of residents live in housing owned by either the municipal government or limited-profit associations, rents remain affordable, buildings are well-maintained, and residents exercise significant democratic control over their housing. This model shows that removing housing from market pressures creates stability and security for residents across the income spectrum. Community ownership models provide another path beyond landlordism. Community land trusts separate ownership of land from buildings, placing land under community control while allowing various forms of tenure for the structures. Housing cooperatives enable residents to collectively own and govern their buildings, eliminating the extraction of profit while maintaining democratic management. These forms of common ownership aren't merely theoretical—they currently house millions of people worldwide and have proven particularly effective at maintaining affordability in gentrifying markets. Indigenous practices of land stewardship offer profound alternatives to the commodity logic of real estate. Many Indigenous communities maintain traditions where land cannot be owned but is instead held in trust for future generations. Access to land comes with responsibilities for its care and preservation rather than rights to its exploitation. These approaches—often dismissed or criminalized by colonial legal systems—provide crucial models for reconceptualizing our relationship to land as one of reciprocity rather than dominance. The transition to a post-landlord world would require significant policy changes and redistribution of resources. Expansive tenant protections would need to prevent displacement while alternative ownership structures develop. Public acquisition of housing—through purchases, eminent domain, or conversion of tax-delinquent properties—would build a substantial non-market housing sector. Progressive taxation of land values and real estate profits could fund this transition while discouraging speculation. Reparations for historical housing discrimination would address the racial wealth gap created through generations of predatory housing policies. This transformation would not eliminate all challenges related to housing. Questions of allocation, maintenance responsibilities, and governance would remain, though they would be addressed through democratic processes rather than market mechanisms. Different communities might develop varying approaches to these questions based on their specific needs and conditions. The goal is not a single housing model imposed from above but a diverse ecosystem of non-exploitative housing arrangements united by principles of human rights, democratic control, and ecological sustainability. Critics often claim that removing profit incentives would decrease housing supply and quality. However, evidence suggests the opposite—profit maximization routinely leads to artificial scarcity, poor maintenance, and misallocation of housing resources. Without the distorting effects of speculation, housing production and maintenance would be guided by actual needs rather than potential returns on investment. Construction and maintenance workers would continue their essential labor, but their efforts would serve community well-being rather than landlord profits. The movement toward a world without landlords is already underway in tenant unions, housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and Indigenous land reclamation efforts worldwide. Each rent strike, each community land acquisition, and each policy victory that constrains landlord power represents a step toward this transformed relationship to housing. By building power where we live, tenants are not just resisting exploitation but creating the foundation for a world where housing serves life rather than profit.

Summary

The struggle against rent is fundamentally a struggle for liberation—from exploitation, from domination, and from the artificial scarcity that condemns millions to housing insecurity or homelessness despite abundant resources. By recognizing rent not as a natural economic law but as a socially constructed power relation, we can begin to imagine and create alternatives that prioritize human needs over capital accumulation. The path toward housing justice requires more than incremental policy reforms; it demands building tenant power capable of challenging and ultimately transforming the property relations that structure our society. What emerges from this analysis is a vision of housing not as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit, but as a social good and human right. This transformation requires both defensive organizing to protect tenants from immediate threats and offensive strategies to build new forms of collective ownership and democratic governance. It connects housing struggles to broader movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice, recognizing that the exploitation of tenants is inseparable from other systems of oppression. Most importantly, it positions tenants themselves as the protagonists of change—not passive victims of market forces but political subjects capable of reimagining and reconstructing the world. Through tenant unions, rent strikes, community land trusts, and other forms of collective action, we can move toward a future where housing serves life rather than profit, and where the places we call home belong to the communities who create and sustain them.

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Tracy Rosenthal

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