It's free real estate

Small book review

In advanced capitalist societies, if you want to stay alive, you have two options. If you are lucky, you can live in a house that you own. In the United States, property owners benefit from a range of direct and indirect government subsidies virtually ensuring that, even if they do nothing, they can count on rising property values. In 2021 in that country, simply owning property was a better way to accumulate wealth than actually doing any work. Owners with more house than they need — or more likely these days, a profit-maximizing firm that bought property so that it can do precisely this — may charge tenants whatever the market will allow, and supplement long-term asset appreciation with cash income.

The other option is to pay rent, to a landlord, on pain of expulsion and ultimately, death. Walk around San Francisco or New York City, and you will be confronted with the terrible reality of what happens if you fail to do so. You will be assaulted by the elements, and by police. Your risk of incarceration will rise exponentially, as your life expectancy plummets.

The old story, the official narrative, is that you spend part of your life on one side of the equation (being exploited), work hard and save, and then graduate to the other side (exploiting). That did sorta work out, for approximately one generation (of white, college-educated citizens) in the United States. Now, renters find themselves shelling out monthly payments that rise faster than inflation or any normal person’s salary, only looking forward to the prospect that they will rise even higher. It does not take a radical to see that the state is far more responsive to the demands of homeowners, and major real estate concerns, than it is to everyone else. And, “it benefits landlords for housing to be cheaply produced, rarely maintained, scarce and expensive,” write Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis.

Abolish Rent (Haymarket, 2024) is a fantastic little book that does two things. First, it reveals these contradictions at the heart of the political economy of the contemporary United States. And second, it provides an exhilarating guide to real-life organizing over the last decade. The authors, co-founders of the LA Tenants Union, provide elegant resolutions to — or ways around — apparent contradictions that overlap with many reflections offered by interviewees in my second book. They have spent years fighting and learning in the age of atomization, neoliberal individualization, and social media; moreover, Vilchis comes from the tradition of liberation theology and also works with Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra, an organization I have gotten to know well over the years. They organize both “vertically and horizontally.” They quote Martin Luther King (also a tenant organizer) on the need to move beyond just “spectacular actions and legislative focus” to building “durable organizations” that can both impose costs on bad actors and “transform underlying property relations.” When there is no easy way around the contradictions, they say so, and tie the book together with lively stories from contemporary California.

Recommended reading before you watch “The Curse,” or anything on HGTV. Visitors to the United States are often surprised we have an entire television channel (and so, so many social media influencers) dedicated to being on the “property ladder.” But of course, that metaphor is flawed. You have to use your own strength to climb a ladder. In the US, if you can get on, you are pulled up — by income tax deductions, by public investments in the neighborhood (schools, parks, transportation infrastructure) and by increasingly desperate demand for housing. It is an elevator, powered by taxpayers and tenants.

Rosenthal and Vilchis do make the case for imagining a world without rent, and recount how withholding payment (a rent strike) reveals the true nature of the relationship. That house is already built; the landlord needs something from you, not the other way around, and has little to offer but the threat of state violence. But concretely, their immediate goal is summarized better on page 119 than it is in the title: “Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.” How can that be done? With concerted, truly collective action.