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

On Rosenthal and Vilchis’s Abolish Rent

Ben Teresa

March 21, 2025

Version 1.0.0
Abolish Rent
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 Zara Cadoux’s “Tenant Organizing is Producing and Defending Territory.”

In Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can Solve the Housing Crisis, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis describe tenant organizing in Los Angeles, California and raise critical questions about the nature of the housing problem and the purpose and role of public policy. In their account, “rent is the crisis” because in order to secure rent “the entire real estate industry relies on privatizing a common resource (land), hoarding a human need (housing), blocking public intervention or competition, and maintaining a captive market of tenants to exploit.”1Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can Solve the Housing Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), 12. Rosenthal and Vilchis’s theory of change is rooted in tenants’ struggle to control their housing, while the “power to effect policy change has been hoarded among professional experts and elites.”2Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 83. When policymakers and experts view the role of state power vis-à-vis the market, then policy’s purpose is for underwriting landlords’ power in the provision of housing. Rosenthal and Vilchis demonstrate that policymaking runs into the problem of “the market as prison,” where any policy that curtails the real estate industry’s power and prerogative will be effectively vetoed by the industry’s threat to tenants (tenant screening, increased rents, eviction) and/or market exit (hoarding).3C. E. Lindblom, “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no.2 (1982): 324–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/2130588. While Abolish Rent’s principal audience is not policymakers, the book nonetheless offers a perspective on the housing crisis and the role of the state that can be used to problematize and reconstruct how policymakers and experts address housing problems.

As founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), Rosenthal and Vilchis are a part of one of the most significant developments in housing social movements in the United States in one hundred years. With three thousand households organized into twelve local chapters across more than a hundred tenants associations, LATU traces “the city’s sprawl with our own.”4Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 5. Organized into these “units of power,” the chapters in Abolish Rent describe how LATU tenants associations have campaigned against public housing demolition, organized for building repairs, created safe walking routes to school for children, and fought against aggressive policing of undocumented workers across jurisdictions in the LA region. These organizing efforts drove policy change, emphasizing Rosenthal and Vilchis’s view of the state as a site of political struggle. Indeed, Abolish Rent makes a case for policy beyond market reform and instead for “policy outcomes as way stations of tenant power.”5Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 31. What might it look like for policy to be reoriented around the abolition of rent in this sense? Rosenthal and Vilchis describe four key organizing strategies for winning tenant victories that are relevant for policymaking and expertise, including building community, organizing units of power, (re)claiming space, and allowing for experimentation and learning.

What might it look like for policy to be reoriented around the abolition of rent?

Rosenthal and Vilchis discuss the key organizing property of building community within a political economy that actively works against forming collective capacity that powers action like LATU. Abolish Rent’s analysis roots the causes of the housing crisis in inequality and, specifically, in the despotic control of housing outside of the hands of those who make it their home. This analysis helps produce public formation—that is, this analysis and organizing strategy “creates a public” by constructing a foundation for a shared understanding about a collective problem. Specifically, when LATU builds community, tenants come to see their shared fate in controlling their housing in opposition to the landlord power they are subjected to. Constructing publics can provide a constituency for policy change. This perspective stands in contrast to an expert policy consensus that sees the housing system as a “fixer upper,” which, to extend the metaphor, suggests that the housing system has fundamentally “good bones” and is just in need of a little “TLC” via market reforms. This consensus view takes the relationships underlying housing as unproblematic, or holds that any such problems will be tempered by appropriate market conditions supplied by technocratic expertise.6Jenny Schuetz, Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2022). While Rosenthal and Vilchis point out that of course “it’s true that there is a shortage” of housing and “blocking new private housing” will not “overcome the misery and injustice” of the current housing system, they contend that the housing question is at root a problem of inequality in and beyond housing: “the immiseration of tenants is a feature of a housing system built on this unequal power dynamic, not a bug we can tinker away.”7Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 12, 27–28.

Abolish Rent provides a clear agenda for community building in the service of forming a public that recognizes the shared problem by reframing the housing crisis away from assumptions about abstract market efficiencies and towards material impacts and collective capacities of tenants (who they define as “anyone who doesn’t control their own housing”).8Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 29. In an important historical narrative they title “One Hundred Years of Real Estate Rule,” Rosenthal and Vilchis read the history of housing in the United States as an ongoing project to create conditions for captive tenancies, meaning that the housing market is based on the control of tenants:

Theirs is a view of tenant power as a by-product of market forces: like a low unemployment rate, which gives workers more leverage, incentivizing bosses to improve conditions and raise pay, a higher vacancy rate would give tenants more choice, motivating landlords to make repairs and ease rent increases. But just as a tight labor market has never eliminated deadly jobs or poverty wages, a slack housing market will not eradicate slum housing or rent gouging. Indeed, it was organized labor unions that won wage floors, weekends, and safety regulations; no basic worker protection or benefit has been handed over as a gift from “job creators.”9Rosenthal and Vilchis, Abolish Rent, 28.

The view that workers and/or tenants will be democratically empowered by “running the economy hot” (that is, conditions of low unemployment and an appropriately slack housing vacancy rate) runs counter to Keynesian observations over the past century. Michal Kalecki argued that preserving power over labor is the fundamental priority of business owners, writing, “‘discipline in the factories’ and ‘political stability’ are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the ‘normal’ capitalist system.”10Michal Kalecki, “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” Political Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1943): 326, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-923X.1943.tb01016.x. As Rosenthal and Vilchis suggest, landlords seek a similar form of control, with eviction serving the same role as a disciplining mechanism: the threat of eviction allows landlords to control tenants and set the terms for access to shelter in a similar manner to the employer’s threat of termination. In both cases, private property—whether the ownership of the means of production in the case of labor or the means of reproduction in the case of housing —facilitates the extraction of surplus.11Danielle Kerrigan (2024), “Rethinking the landlord: From ‘folk devil’ to a social relation,” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2024), https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/2z10wx030. Throughout the book, Rosenthal and Vilchis refer to landlord power as “despotic”, which is accurate. For example, in the United States tenants have fewer rights to withhold rent when faced with inadequate and unsafe housing than a consumer does in stopping payment on a defective toaster oven they bought with credit.12Mary B. Spector, “Tenants’ Rights, Procedural Wrongs: The Summary Eviction and the Need for Reform,” Wayne Law Review 46, no. 1 (2000):135–210.

Abolish Rent provides a clear agenda for community building in the service of public formation.

By centering the power dynamics of housing tenure, Rosenthal and Vilchis reveal the relevance of their strategy of developing “units of power” that engage in the struggle to control housing at the various scales through which those power dynamics unfold. Because the power to control tenants is bolstered from many directions in society, the tenant struggle then must also engage with the structural selectivity of the state. In other words, if the landlord power depends on the state facilitating despotic power over property, people, and surplus, all domains of policymaking (for example, labor, policing, education, and so on) impact housing.

Building community and organizing units of power makes (re)claiming space possible. Abolish Rent demonstrates how, once tenants have a shared understanding of a shared problem, they can mobilize to claim space for a public purpose—whether in their buildings or the alleys behind them, or other neighborhood spaces. A tension at the core of how the housing question is addressed is whether housing is private property or a universal human need (and therefore a public good). For policymaking, claiming space means reconsidering state power in the furtherance of housing as a kind of public infrastructure rather than private property that facilitates private accumulation. It also means literally claiming state apparatuses for the public purpose. In such a reconstruction of the role and purpose of policy, tenants’ role and their relationship to the state would transform. Instead of tenants categorically excluded from the possibility of holding expertise or exerting policymaking control, tenants-as-policy-makers would collaboratively make decisions about their housing, and to what extent state power may be wielded in their endeavor.

Finally, LATU embraces experimentation and learning, which allows them to continuously reflect on their work, adjust, and grow. Such a philosophically pragmatic approach to policymaking would welcome experimentation and eschew the idea that the housing market is an institution that once technocratically fine-tuned can be left on its own to meet housing needs. Instead, the struggles to control housing within a capitalist political economy are ongoing. Policy would then be one “way station of tenant power” on the path to housing justice.

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