Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory

Zara Cadoux

March 28, 2025

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Haymarket

2024

Spectre is elated to present the following essay as part of a dossier on Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. This dossier brings together voices from the tenants movement and academia to discuss the book’s major themes—how tenants are organizing for better conditions and what can be done to address the root causes of the crisis. Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, founding members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, is available for purchase at Haymarket Books. We anticipate a response from the authors in the coming months.

For other entries in the dossier see Holden Taylor’s “Is Rent the Crisis: On the Tenant Union Movement, Old and New,” Julian Francis Park’s “Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?” and Ben Teresa’s “From Policy as Technocratic Exercise to ‘Way Station of Tenant Power.’”

“This is about territory,” Leonardo Vilchis emphasized to a packed room at the People’s Forum in New York City on October 2, 2024. Over two hundred people hungry for wisdom on tenant organizing came to celebrate the release of Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Vilchis and his coauthor, fellow cofounder of the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU) Tracy Rosenthal, offered an intervention into our thinking from their years building LATU. For Rosenthal and Vilchis, tenant organizing is a spatial struggle—the struggle for territory—tasked with building durable working-class organizations that support tenants in exercising control over the spaces in which we live. The conversation, which featured Ben Mabie (Abolish Rent’s editor and a Crown Heights Tenant Union member) and Khadija Haynes (tenant organizer and member of Brooklyn Eviction Defense) reflected the style of the book itself: part manifesto, part storytelling, and part organizing manual. Most of the questions from the audience were organizing questions, asking the panel for advice on how to build power in their buildings and across their neighborhoods. This book comes from inside the tenant movement, and the tenant unions and other working-class organizations across the country attending its book events have received it as such.

I read Abolish Rent with three hats on: as a tenant currently on a rent strike with my neighbors, as a tenant organizer in the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and as a geographer. This book is a work of public geographic thought, answering Mariame Kaba and Kelley Hayes’ call for organizers to “Think Like [Geographers],” a chapter from their recent book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care.¹ At its heart, what Abolish Rent offers is a framing of spatial struggle: how we reclaim, socially reproduce, and transform space for purposes other than capital accumulation. The authors’ diagnosis of the problems of dispossession are spatial; their definition of gentrification is the displacement and replacement of the poor for profit.² Tenants are displaced through harassment, lack of repairs, offering cash for keys, rezoning, condo conversions, demolition, court-ordered eviction, and through the threat of state violence. Since the threat of displacement is a violent, spatial threat of removal, Rosenthal and Vilchis articulate their solutions in spatial terms. Rather than fighting for our homes through legislation or policy enforcement, the thrust of this book conceptualizes tenant struggle through placemaking and the creation of zones of working class control—that is, through territory.

Throughout the book, the authors tell stories of tenants in the Los Angeles Tenant Union who engage in spatial processes. Conceptualizing territory has long been an object of inquiry in geography, and although the authors do not define their use of the term or its genealogy, their descriptions of territory evoke its use in Indigenous social movements in Latin American such as the autonomous zones of the Zapatistas and the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST). These movements conceive of territory not as sanctioned by the state or conferring colonial power, but as produced relationally through the appropriation of space for political struggle.³ In the case of the US tenant movement, Rosenthal and Vilchis argue that autonomous zones of self-governance are established through the occupation of land, public space, and buildings. They conceptualize the rent strike as an occupation to reclaim and remake the territory of our homes.⁴ They argue that the process of organizing changes tenants’ relationships to their homes from a passive acceptance of the home as a site of extraction and atomization into an active engagement that establishes and grows working-class control of our blocks and buildings. For Rosenthal and Vilchis, occupying homes, gardens, alleys, and other shared spaces is a transformative process through which territory is created. The authors describe working class territories as places where residents refuse extraction and state violence by both engaging in new ways of co-inhabiting space and practicing community defense to protect one another from threats ranging from criminalization to eviction to climate disasters. By situating class conflict in terms of territory, Abolish Rent offers openings to tenant organizers by framing the fight for working-class control over space as a struggle to create autonomous territories with collectivity, care, and militancy as organizing principles.

The book opens with the “manifesto” in the first chapter, “Rent Is The Crisis,” followed by a chapter of historical context entitled “The War on Tenants,” where the authors lay out their analysis of the so-called housing crisis. In fact, despite using this terminology in the title of the book, they waste no time debunking the popular framing of a “housing crisis.” They define the real estate industry as relying, “on privatizing a common resource (land), hoarding a common need (housing), blocking public interventions or competition, and maintaining a captive market of tenants to exploit and dominate.”⁵ The housing system, then, isn’t actually designed to provide quality housing to tenants, it’s designed to “maximize profits and to extract the most rent.”⁶ So, from the point of view of landlords, developers, and real estate speculators, the system is working just fine and it’s not housing that is in crisis—it’s tenants. The authors explain that this is why tenants (and not housing) are the subject of their organizing in the Los Angeles Tenant Union. They advocate for an expansive use of the word tenant beyond only renters to anyone currently housed or unhoused who doesn’t control their shelter, who inhabits but doesn’t own.⁷ Tenant organizing then, is changing the terms of our inhabitation by reclaiming control of the space in which we live.

The shift proposed by Rosenthal and Vilchis from an analysis of the housing market to a people-centered analysis is a thread throughout the book, as the authors consistently bridge their understanding of the capitalist housing system to the lived experience of poor and working class tenants. The authors offer various conceptualizations of rent, including “a fine for having a human need,” “the gap between tenants’ needs and landlords’ demands,” and a “monthly tribute” for shelter, all of which are centered in the experiences of the poor and working class.⁸ They argue, “rent is a power relation that produces inequality, traps us in poverty, and denies us the capacity to live as we choose. Rent is exploitation and domination. It separates us from our neighbors and alienates us from the places we live. It is the engine that turns a human need into a product to be exploited, bet on, banked. Rent is the crisis. We pay the price of rent in money, but also in our dignity.”⁹

While the first of every month when the rent is due is a humiliating and stressful time for tenants who “pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun,” it is also an opportunity for organizing, collective action, and collective refusal.¹⁰ Whereas organizing for “housing solutions” allows for continued atomization and extraction through individualized fixes, collective action and collective refusal necessitates a tenant-centered analysis grounded in changing the ways that tenants inhabit, produce, and reclaim the space of their homes. This collectivity does not happen automatically, as the authors remind us, “the shared proximity and vulnerability of tenancy – the exploitation and domination of rent – does not necessarily impel us to organize. We have to make an active effort.”¹¹ According to Rosenthal and Vilchis, that effort lies in the collective transformation of tenants’ relationships to the space of their homes from acquiescing to extraction into resisting through occupation. After asserting why a tenant-centered analysis is required for tenant organizing during the “manifesto” chapters and situating tenancy within a historical context of “One Hundred Years of Real Estate Rule,” they illustrate the necessity of this claim with stories of territory creation in the book’s latter chapters.

It is only through sharing stories of disrepair, landlord harassment, or inability to pay rent that tenants break through their atomization and…change their relationship to their homes and each other. Using popular education as an organizing methodology enables the Los Angeles Tenant Union to organize spatially…in order to create working-class territory and units of community defense.

While the “manifesto” chapters provide critical framing needed in the tenant movement, it is in the “storytelling” and “organizing manual” chapters that this book really shines. Chapters three through five (“The Return of the Rent Strike,” “La Lucha Educa,” and “From Housing Struggle to Land Struggle”) illustrate the tenant-centered praxis for, and spatial stakes of, capturing territory through organizing a rent strike, strategizing to build a tenant union, and collectively stewarding land. These praxis chapters draw from the collective experiences and experimentation by tenants in the Los Angeles Tenant Union, which organizes using popular education methodology. Rosenthal and Vilchis describe popular education as, “an orientation towards organizing that facilitates self-conscious activity of poor and working-class tenants and puts poor and working-class tenants in control of the process of liberation.”¹² As a process of collective learning, popular education (often associated with Paolo Freire) is grounded in poor and working class tenants naming their concrete conditions in order to act to change them. The authors describe how building collectively—by, for example, withholding rent or creating public space for community—changes tenants’ relationships to place as they feel more ownership, stability, and commitment to collective stewardship. As described above, the process of occupation is the transformation from a passive atomized relationship into an active collective relationship to place. Following in a lineage of feminist-Marxist geographers, who conceptualize space as produced by relationships, Rosenthal and Vilchis’s praxis chapters illustrate how the relational mode of collectivization is spatially expressed. As individual housing problems become collectivized, this transformation of atomized struggles into a project of occupation produces new understandings of territory and place. Abolish Rent illustrates many examples of tenants coming together to collectivize by reflecting on their conditions in order to act to change them. It is only through sharing stories of disrepair, landlord harassment, or inability to pay rent that tenants break through their atomization and (over time) change their relationship to their homes and each other. Using popular education as an organizing methodology enables the Los Angeles Tenant Union to organize spatially, rather than symbolically through the legislative or policy arena, in order to create working-class territory and units of community defense.

I read “Return of the Rent Strike” while simultaneously in discussions with my neighbors about sustaining and expanding our rent strike (in its tenth month at the time of writing). Initially, I was prepared to dislike this chapter due to what I perceive to be a fetishization of the rent strike as a tactic in the tenant movement. For many tenant organizers the rent strike is the apex of organizing, a sexy display of militancy that they imagine to be the horizon of organizing a building association. This engagement with tenants does not reckon with the intimacy of organizing within spheres of social reproduction, or the differences between tenancy and labor. As a result, I’ve seen organizers push tenants to withhold rent without building the bonds of trust that will sustain the building association after the rent strike is over and foster the collectivity required to establish and defend the building as a working-class territory. This type of focus on the rent strike centers fighting the landlord as the sole purpose of the building association, rather than simultaneously cultivating collective care and building community defense networks—a trend we also see in business unionism’s narrow focus on contract fights in the labor movement. Many building associations whose sole purpose is fighting the landlord fall apart after the campaign is over. Critically, it is through both collective refusal and collective care networks that the working-class territory described by the authors is created and community defense of the territory is possible. For example, in this chapter we not only learn about the fight against the landlord and how “putting a face and a name on the landlord turned the struggle against an impersonal process of gentrification into a struggle against a would-be evictor,” but also about how tenants occupied space to build community by turning “a vacant apartment into a common space, used for meetings, art making, shared meals, and parties.”¹³ While I am left with lingering questions about the impact of centering the book on the rent strike as a tactic, the resonance I felt reading this chapter as someone who is both committed to spatial organizing and currently engaged in a rent strike overrode my knee-jerk skepticism.

In “Return of the Rent Strike,” Rosenthal and Vilchis pay considerable attention to relationality as both part of the process of organizing a rent strike and a dimension of territory-building. I enthusiastically underlined the real stories of moving through fear, experimenting with new tactics, and showing solidarity (even texting them to some of my neighbors). Moving through fear has been a big theme in my building, as tenants confront their fear of losing their housing. The authors open this chapter with the familiar exhale experienced by tenants on their first night of withholding: “what they’re shocked by most of all is that nothing, really, occurs…Their home, though they have not paid for it, persists.”¹⁴ What becomes clear is the absurdity of the rent. Living in such terrible conditions, tenants begin to realize, “what are we paying for, anyway?”¹⁵ I’ve experienced these reactions in my building, as our association discussed the fallacy of this extractive practice and began to exert more collective ownership over our spaces. Not only has everyone on strike remained housed, but the pressure of our occupation is working: we are getting repairs in our apartments and, following the initiation of the strike and a rally, management finally fixed our elevator after two months without service. This process of moving through fear and collective refusal of extraction is part of the transformation of tenants’ relationship to home.

Tenants learning that they are not alone in their housing conditions and practicing collective refusal are revelations that bolster their collective consciousness as political subjects. The authors convey the emotional journey that tenants on rent strike experience through the story of the Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights. Los Mariachis went on an almost year-long strike supported by the Los Angeles Tenant Union, which resulted in a collective bargaining agreement, guaranteed repairs, and the right to negotiate.¹⁶ One tenant, Isabel Ramirez, observed that the “strength of her association was manifest not only in its ability to assert demands, but in its power to create relationships of trust, mutual aid, care, and support.”¹⁷ Reading about the experience of these tenants was moving, as their relationships clearly created the container for these wins, exemplifying the duality of collective refusal and collective care. By changing their relationships to each other as neighbors, they changed their relationships to the space of their homes. Breaking through the alienation—at the first meeting, tenants did not even know each other’s names—and getting to know each other was a big factor in the success of the Los Mariachis strike, reconfiguring the social and economic relations of their building and establishing their building as a working-class territory.¹⁸ These relationships extended outside the building as well, as they included the neighborhood in their struggle through musical marches in the streets and were supported in their strike by members of the Los Angeles Tenant Union from across the city. The territory of the building radiated out into the neighborhood and connected to other self-governing, working-class territories throughout the union. That is, the fruit of Abolish Rent’s organizing strategy is a shift in the urban geography of the city.

The following chapter, “La Lucha Educa,” illustrates how the story of one building connects to buildings throughout the city in the Los Angeles Tenant Union. It reads like an engaging organizing manual, where the authors distill collective wisdom from LATU on building a union from a single tenants meeting in Hollywood to the largest dues-funded tenants union in the country, with three thousand predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrant households.¹⁹ Arguing that the tenant union is a vehicle for class struggle, the authors conceptualize three scales of organizing working-class territory: tenant associations within buildings, local chapters within neighborhoods, and the union that spans the city.²⁰ They ask the reader to visualize organizing territory vertically and horizontally, “as tenants associations within our buildings (bargaining units [and a way to ground social life]) and as local chapters across the space of our blocks and neighborhoods (units of community defense).”²¹ Neighborhood-level community defense in the form of rapid response and mutual aid networks to protect each other against the police, ICE, landlords, climate disasters, and other threats is a critical part of creating and sustaining areas of working-class independence. By organizing both horizontally and vertically, larger swaths of territory can be created and defended.

They argue that the tenant movement is a concrete project to bring about another way of life, to practice and prefigure the world we want to step into. This is done through forging and transforming our relationships….Transforming these social relationships is, ultimately, a transformation of space…

To organize spatially, they offer five strategies to build the union that are “both antagonistic and prefigurative: they challenge rent, and they help us build an alternative to it, growing the infrastructures for collective self-defense and self-determination” (87): (1) we build community, (2) we organize units of power, (3) we reclaim space, (4) we experiment and learn, (5) we keep the faith.²² With each strategy, the authors share stories of LATU tenants in practice. The section entitled “we experiment and learn” is particularly powerful as the authors tell the story of the K3 tenant council, a group of building associations who share the same landlord. K3, like many landlords, has a business model based on acquiring rent stabilized buildings and targeting long-term residents for displacement and replacement with cash for keys offers, harassment, refusal to do repairs, and renovations that both illegally flip vacated apartments to market rate and torment the tenants who remain. To match the scale of K3 and account for their pattern of behavior, the tenant council brings buildings from across the city together. Rosenthal and Vilchis describe this fight as a demonstration of popular education methodology. In the K3 statement of demands and origins, they describe the process: “Tenants associations ‘reflected back their power to one another – informing each other of victories, encouraging each other not to back down, asking each other for support – and this process of mutual reflection created a sort of amplification, building the [association’s] confidence, opening up possibilities for even bolder actions and demands.”²³ What anchors all the strategies is, again, the relationships formed between working-class tenants, which enables them to transform groups of people into offensive and defensive communities to reclaim the space of their homes and defend their autonomy.”²⁴ In addition to being a tool that will be used in my union and across the country, this chapter is one of the strongest in the book, weaving the storytelling, organizing manual, and manifesto elements together with clarity and balance.

Finally, chapter five “From Housing Struggle to Land Struggle” makes connections between housed and unhoused tenants, between public subsidies for the private market and gentrification, and between collectively stewarding buildings and collectively stewarding land. While the chapter tells stories that are arguably the most explicitly about fighting for and defending territory, it is also the most uneven chapter in the book as it strays from the experiences within the Los Angeles Tenant Union. First, staying within the experiences of LATU, the authors use the example of Hillside Villa, a private housing development of 124 units subsidized with public funds, to tell the story of publicly funded privatization of the housing market that fuels displacement and replacement for profit. The end of the building’s rent stabilized covenant meant a sudden jump of the rents to market rate, threatening to immediately price out many tenants. Residents who have been there for decades had planted and nurtured both trees and a garden, building attachments to place. These attachments made the garden a target for the landlord, who destroyed it in order to get them to leave. However, the decades of placemaking also motivated residents to defend their shared space of the garden and all that this rooting in place means to them. In this way, their collective struggle to stay in place is not just a political campaign to compel the city to takeover their building and continue their rent stabilization. Instead, with the garden at the center of their fight, the residents of Hillside Villa changed the way they inhabit their homes to actively occupy and their apartments, shared space, and plant life.

Rosenthal and Vilchis build on the connections between public funds, stewarding land, and occupations as a territory-producing tactic by exploring the encampment erected during the pandemic at Echo Park. Echo Park Rise Up (a collective of unhoused tenants seeking stability from police violence and the shelter system) built an encampment with showers, a kitchen, their own security, and an internally run jobs program. Rosenthal and Vichilis describe how, “by claiming territory, building community, collectivizing resources, and organizing to change their conditions, Echo Park Rise Up posed their own solution to the crisis of homelessness: reappropriating space for collective survival.”²⁵ Over and over, the tenants of Echo Park defended their encampment from eviction. Fighting against the violence of the state in the form of “move along” orders, police sweeps, destruction of collectively stewarded space, and the policy paradigm of publicly funded private speculation, the tenants of Hillside Villa and Echo Park protected each other over and over again, growing in their militancy. Their fights underscore the threat of violence from the state behind every eviction order. They also demonstrated that collectivizing resources and land is a threat in and of itself to the capitalist order. By creating crises of legitimacy for the “real estate state,” tenants open up space to fight for full public housing, sharing of resources, and guaranteeing the right to remain.

The authors argue that these real experiments into taking and making territory offer glimpses of the liberatory horizon of the tenant movement as a land struggle. While I felt moved by this description of a liberatory horizon, the section on Echo Park Rise Up gets away from the authors’ reflective methodology. There is no clear concrete connection between the organizing at Echo Park and the Los Angeles Tenant Union to reflect on, which creates a curious distance in the chapter between the only story shared from outside LATU and the residents at Hillside Villa. Rosenthal has written elsewhere extensively on homelessness in Los Angeles, the homeless industrial complex, and Rise Up Echo Park specifically, and does the description of the project justice in Abolish Rent. While I certainly appreciate the authors’ attempt to connect the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants—an urgent need within the tenant movement—this section departs from the concrete examples of popular education methods used throughout the book to a more theoretical connection. This section left me wondering what meaningful solidarity between housed and unhoused tenants have and can look like. Still, the chapter, which also functions as the book’s conclusion, ends with a strong articulation of the liberatory horizon of the tenant movement: a wholesale transformation of social relations where we practice collective sovereignty and stewardship of resources, housing, and public space.²⁶ They argue that the tenant movement is a concrete project to bring about another way of life, to practice and prefigure the world we want to step into. This is done through forging and transforming our relationships, which means that the “means and ends of the tenants movement are one and the same: we get together, live together, hang out, spend time, get along, and get close to each other.”²⁷ Transforming these social relationships is, ultimately, a transformation of space, as it is through transforming our relationships that we can create and defend working-class territories and autonomous zones.

Abolish Rent is a work of public geography, offering a grounded understanding of the tenant movement through a lens of spatial justice. Throughout the book, the authors illustrate how new everyday relationships can be formed and transformed through the shared project of contesting capitalist power relations by making and taking territory. This book can serve as a tool for tenants gathering to reflect on their organizing, just as the K3 tenant council and so many others have done. Each chapter can be read as a standalone piece, facilitating the use of this book as an organizing tool. I plan to use lessons from “The Return of the Rent Strike” in my tenant association organizing. “La Lucha Educa” will be useful in the Palestine Solidarity working group of the Crown Heights Tenant Union as we continue to coordinate organizing across several buildings in a Zionist landlord’s portfolio. “From Housing Struggle to Land Struggle” will provide generative content for a popular education session at a general membership meeting on collective stewardship of our outdoor spaces. This book should also be placed on geography syllabi to illustrate how spatial frameworks can transform into concrete organizing. As Rosenthal and Vilchis remind us, our unions benefit from every experiment with place-based, hyperlocal methods of everyday organizing. Abolish Rent is an invitation to commit to long-term relationship building with your neighbors, to experiment together, and to transform the world building-by-building, block-by-block.

Abolish Rent, Education, Geography, Organizing, Tenants Unions

Zara Cadoux

Zara Cadoux is a popular educator and doctoral student at New York University. She researches Amazon worker organizing, language justice praxis in autonomous tenant unions, and the role of the nonprofit industrial complex in shaping working-class control of space. She organizes in her building’s tenant association, as a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and as the chair of the Amazon Labor Union solidarity committee.

Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory

Zara Cadoux

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Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?

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Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory

Zara Cadoux

SHARE

From Policy as Technocratic Exercise to “Way Station of Tenant Power”

Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?

We Keep Each Other Safe and Housed

HELLO, COMRADE

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More