Is Rent the Crisis? On the Tenant Union Movement, Old and New

Holden Taylor

September 24, 2024

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Haymarket Books

2024

Eighty-five years ago, in the prewar year of 1939, Heinz Norden, a London-born tenant organizer living in the recently erected (1935) Knickerbocker Village in Lower Manhattan, wrote a seventy-six page essay on the history, activity, and composition of the City Wide Tenant Council (an organization that Norden helped found and for which he served as Chair for four years before taking up a position in Mayor Fiorella La Guardia’s also-new New York City Housing Authority). There’s no indication that this essay, which sits relatively undisturbed save for handling by the occasional academic or curious tenant organizer in New York University’s special archives, was ever published. The one reference to this essay I have found is in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984, an out-of-print sequential history edited by Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison, now digitized for posterity.¹ The Tenant Movement is regarded in certain New York City tenant organizing circles as a bible of sorts: studied in groups, referenced in tactical and strategic discussions; cursed for its inaccessibility (housed as it is on an archaic, eyesore platform); perhaps illicitly printed by self-motivated movement activists. More than anything else, however, The Tenant Movement is held in esteem as irreducible proof of a lineage, a history, a tradition; this thing that we do—organized class struggle at the site of home—is nothing new and has roots, though they might not always be so palpable. As our organizing so often occurs through the valence of storytelling, having access to this larger story gives the daily minutiae a necessary context and timescale—with these past movements before us, we can see future possibilities more clearly.²

There’s no indication whether Norden’s essay was intended for public consumption, as a piece of organizational propaganda, or to be an internal resource within the City Wide itself. A reading of the essay’s content suggests something in-between: the comprehensive, yet approachable text presents the formation and function of the City Wide in the favorable language of an involved and invested organizer. Norden at one point claims that the City Wide has “a direct membership of over 30,000 families and…very much broader influence,” and, otherwise, that “it has a new and vigorous approach” to the housing struggle.³ Interspersed alongside these confident descriptions are self-reflective critiques and acknowledgments of the organization’s ad hoc character.⁴ The essay, in a form that lends one to think it was meant for outsiders or even future historians, elaborates the City Wide’s historical precedents and its specific tripartite roots. Its organizational and energetic antecedents erupted because of and during the great rent strikes of 1918–1920, when a postwar coal shortage led to a heating crisis which proved to be the iron anvil that broke the already-brittle camel’s back of city slum dwellers. The subsequent Emergency Rent Laws, the first rent regulation laws in the country, stood in place until 1929. Lastly, the expiration of these inaugural rent regulations reopened the floodgates, ushering in (or perhaps raising) the harsh seawaters of speculation and depravity upon which the City Wide, as an organization, was an ark made to sail. The City Wide was formed in December of 1936, as an organization of higher abstraction on the backs of the neighborhood tenant organizations of Harlem’s Consolidated Tenant League (an eight thousand-strong, majority-black tenant union), Norden’s own Knickerbocker Village Tenant Association (with hundreds of members and origins in a 1935 rent strike of the building complex’s first inhabitants), and the Lower East Side Public Housing Conference (an advocacy group, which helped found the City Wide-affiliated East Side Tenants Union). In the essay, Norden situates at length the City Wide’s relationships with its varying organizational contemporaries in their pitched, popular-front political landscape—and does so in a sober, yet often cutting manner that might suggest the essay was meant for internal cohesion, allowing new members and new tenant organizers to understand the wider dynamic in order to prepare them for interorganizational dealings.

More than anything else, the essay and the organizational ephemera found alongside it in the archives—flyers for fundraising galas, pamphlets on how to beat back rent hikes, unfilled member survey forms, editions of the City Wide periodical and those of affiliated tenant leagues (complete with original, tenant-centric comic strips, recipes, homemaking, and beauty tips, along with updates of the militant tenant movement), Norden’s own membership card, adverts for the City Wide-sponsored production of “One-Third of the City”—tells the story of a formidable and adept mass organization of tenants rich in cultural and social reproduction.⁵ This sprawling organization contained both the self-organizational instincts of the oppressed and dispossessed and the professional attunements of a middle class feeling the long precarity of the Great Depression. This was a city-wide tenants union, run by and for tenants, and not (as Norden stresses repeatedly in the essay) a service organization or charity—forms of organization which proliferated in the early twentieth century. This organization—operating in a particular climate characterized by an orientation toward mass organization—understood that tenants were, and are, the true protagonists of the struggle over their housing. The cover page of Norden’s essay ends with the following summation: “The Council believes that decent shelter is the birthright of every family. It is dedicated to the proposition that the housing problem can be solved only by the militant and concerted action of those who need housing—the tenants.”⁶

Abolish Rent argues for the political—even revolutionary—potential of tenants (defined by Rosenthal and Vilchis as “anyone who doesn’t control their housing, who inhabits but doesn’t own”) through their self-organized activity as contained and reproduced in the form of the tenants union: “the unit of tenant power at the scale of a city.”

Writing in the accursed year of 2024, two cofounders of the now nine-year-old Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, have published a work of achingly similar content, though without the confusion of audience. Their book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket, 2024), takes up the mantle and the narrative prowess of Norden’s earlier essay, giving to contemporary tenants and tenant organizers a thoughtful and intimate story to learn from and to organize with. If Norden’s essay reminds us that organized class struggle at the site of our homes is nothing new, Rosenthal and Vilchis’s new book lets us know that we tenants—wherever we are—are part of something that is very much living, growing, learning, adapting. Abolish Rent is a manifesto in the classic model: a performative text (performative in the Austinian sense that it is meant to do something) aimed at spreading the good word of tenant unionism, of land struggle, and of the political agency of the collective tenant at the site of their home; it captures this tenant protagonism in its practices of social reproduction, its vibrant cultural specificity, and its organizational enmeshment. It is a text that celebrates the bonds of neighbors as containing more than good feelings but genuine political content—the authors remind us that the “word ‘comrade’ entered the English language as the word for ‘roommate,’ naming those who lacked resources for privacy and came to share space—with strangers, friends, and lovers, all bound by the intimacy of having to pay rent.”⁷

Abolish Rent argues for the political—even revolutionary—potential of tenants (defined by Rosenthal and Vilchis as “anyone who doesn’t control their housing, who inhabits but doesn’t own”) through their self-organized activity as contained and reproduced in the form of the tenants union: “the unit of tenant power at the scale of a city.”⁸ Rosenthal and Vilchis show the tenant—through screed, anecdote, and vivid portraiture—as an active agent in the multilayered history that becomes their conditions. That is, they show the tenants—so often conditioned into passivity through the disorganizing auspices of state bureaucracy (in NYC, we call it housing court) and violence, and whose mass organizational instincts have been gradually worn down by decades of neoliberal onslaught—as fighting against dispossession, disrespect, and exploitation with the familiar vehicle of collective action. As for Norden’s, Rosenthal’s and Vilchis’s exhibition is at once a horror story, a lovesong, and a call to arms. “Look what these tenants have done” (and “look at the conditions tenants face!”) becomes, seamlessly, resiliently, and, perhaps even desperately, “oh, what the tenants could do!”

LATU formed in 2015, but it percolated in years prior as the School of Echoes: a multigenerational and multiracial collective performing something, according to Vilchis and Rosenthal’s retelling, akin to worker’s (soon, tenant’s) inquiry in Los Angeles’s rapidly gentrifying Cypress Park and Echo Park—studying the practical fabric of the process of displacement with and amongst the people. Yet, LATU’s roots stretch further back: Vilchis founded the Union de Vecinos, a Boyle Heights union of neighbors, in 1996 to fight the mass demolition of their neighborhood. Union de Vecinos is now one of the more active, and vibrant, locals of LATU. Similar vibrations abounded across the country and in New York particularly: the Crown Heights Tenant Union formed in 2013, as a post-Occupy Wall Street collaboration between Occupy activists (whiter, younger, and ideologically-motivated tenants who recognized the need for a permanent, grounded vehicle of struggle) and long-term Caribbean tenants (who had seen their neighborhood change and intimately understood the intricacies and violence of gentrification). LATU now has three thousand dues-paying households across the city. It bears mentioning that the Consolidated Tenant League (the City Wide’s Harlem affiliate that emerged from the pioneering ashes of the Communist Party-led tenant union, the Harlem Tenant League) had eight thousand dues-paying members alone. As the resonances between these two historically twinned texts continue to be teased out, both this scale and this atmospheric orientation to mass organization prove a central theme.

Like Norden’s City Wide essay, Abolish Rent provocatively weaves stories of practical organizational maneuvers and successes—such as the K3 Tenant Council’s fight against predatory “cash for keys” schemes and the Hillside Villa tenants picket of their slumlord’s attempt to destroy their beloved garden amidst a protracted struggle—with grim depictions of systemic and conjunctural conditions.⁹ Norden writes: “The housing problem springs from deep-rooted maladjustments inherent to the economic system—a system in which the ‘housers’ have a direct or indirect stake.”¹⁰ Similarly, Rosenthal and Vilchis write: “The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most tenants. It’s designed to maximize profits and to extract the most rent”¹¹ or, elsewhere, “the war on tenants has rigged the American housing system to benefit homeowners, landlords, and real estate speculators at the expense of tenants’ human needs.”¹² And this similarity makes sense given that both these texts are designed to compel movement, to influence and to proselytize. Moreover, both these texts aim to delicately balance the highwire between the historically bad systemic conditions and the tenant’s singular and world-historical capability. Rosenthal and Vilchis acknowledge this plainly. As they write in the introduction, “this book is both a polemic and guide.”

Abolish Rent is, as its authors write, “the first book-length engagement with a resurgent tenant movement.”¹³ Of this resurgent movement, they write:

Thousands of tenants across the country have joined a nascent effort to turn our individualized vulnerability into shared power. Our tactics—tenants associations, rent strikes, and occupations—rhyme with the heyday of tenant militancy. In the Bay Area, DC, Kansas City, Louisville, Houston, New York, and more cities throughout the country, tenants are organizing not just to win better living conditions but to overturn the power relations that shape these conditions altogether.¹⁴

This scattered movement has federated in some capacity—that is, it has at least cast some federative ligature—in the form of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN). ATUN is a nationwide collaboration of about twenty-five tenant unions committed to the active and in-principle resistance against the tractor beam of nonprofitization in order to remain solely accountable to (and led by) tenants.¹⁵ Abolish Rent is either (or, more likely, both) an attempt to document or to concretize the movement’s legitimacy. This dialectical tension—between depiction and activation; between protecting a movement’s moment for posterity (which is itself a recognition of its fragility, of the daunting scale of the task) and pining for its liberatory horizons (early on, the authors write “the inspiration for this book came from both those moments when we thought reality had endorsed another way of living together, and when the brutality we call normal reasserted itself as the rule”)—ties this work to Norden’s essay quite neatly. ¹⁶This tension and their practical subject matter unites these texts across the eighty-five years and the particularities of local context that separate them.¹⁷

Understanding these two texts as constitutively kin reveals their particular historical circumstances and the variations that these contexts produce. One particular quirk in Norton’s description of the City Wide is its “jealously guarded constitutional nonpartisanship,” an orientation which prompted a class-avoidant politics—peculiar in hindsight for such a clearly class-oriented organization given the Popular Front milieu.¹⁸ Heinz Norden was, as historian Mark Naisson describes him, “a quintessential ‘Popular Front personality.’”¹⁹ A seeming desire to piss nobody off permeates Norden’s depiction of the City Wide—Norden was, after all, purged from a job as a German translator in the State Department a decade later after being accused of communist tendencies likely related to his experiences tenant organizing. As Norden writes, the City Wide forged alliances with the Democratic Party at the national level, with the Republican and Democratic Party at the state level, and with the Tammany Hall machine at the municipal level.²⁰ It understood itself as “bridging the gap between labor’s two houses”—the AFL and the CIO.²¹ Norden describes obstacle-ridden efforts by the City Wide “to have their actions and policies in harmony with the interests of the small home dweller,” as both tenants and small homeowners fit into the broader “consumer” movement, of which the City Wide was a component.²² It seemed that this class confusion was exacerbated, or perhaps inspired, by an exhaustingly delicate relationship to the Communist Party, whose post-1935 formal orientation toward a united front compelled extensive party member activity in mass organization, with the City Wide being no exception.²³ The City Wide’s desire to distinguish itself from the Communists and the Socialists was in constant tension with its concomitant project to differentiate itself from the charities and the philanthropies—that is, to be a mass organization, but not engaged in class struggle, or to engage in class struggle but to refuse to conceptualize it as such.

Abolish Rent is home to clearer and more forceful class analysis: “The housing crisis is not a problem to be solved; it is a class struggle to be fought and won.”²⁴ As Rosenthal and Vilchis go on to write, “we need to put class conflict at the center of the housing question, and the housing question at the center of class conflict. Workers have often been the focus of this fight, but tenants have a crucial role to play too.”²⁵ And later, of the wider movement that tenant unions need to become part of, they write, “that movement will require us to organize as tenants where we live and as workers where we work.”²⁶ In this, the authors of Abolish Rent tether the scene of expropriation to that of exploitation and poignantly conceptualize the class struggle that structures both; they recognize the tenant as worker and the worker as tenant (the tenant union I am a member of, the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union, employs the term worker-tenant here). In Rosenthal and Vilchis’s analysis, the collective-individual coheres into a cogent, potent class figure. City Wide’s constitutional geniality with labor in general, and the specific labor formations that dominated its prewar New York City ecosystem (the AFL, the CIO, the American Labor Party, and so on), was less a feature of class unity, and more of a progressivist recognition and pursuit of mutual interest. The City Wide itself emerged out of the fiery kettle of a labor strike. When building maintenance workers across the city walked out over poor conditions in 1936, Norden and his fellow tenant organizers recognized the necessity for tenants to stand in solidarity. Norden helped organize pickets and organized tenants demanded that new maintenance hires show union cards. Moreover, they recognized that the crisis, which stretched up and down Manhattan, created the conditions to form an independent tenant union that went beyond the boundaries of a given neighborhood. Despite this origin in class struggle and its class struggle character, the City Wide’s relations with labor remained largely thematic. Although the City Wide often worked with building trade unions and maintenance unions, it did not necessarily recognize the tenant fundamentally as a worker (or vice-versa). This meant, then, that while the City Wide collaborated with both the CIO and the AFL, and advised them and the Communist Party on their housing programs, the prospect of true class unity emerging from the auspices of the city slums and projects remained forestalled.²⁷

Working-class control over how and where we live is the lodestar shared across the nascent independent tenant union movement.

Rosenthal and Vilchis’s lucid emphasis on class struggle belies a particular theoretical quirk that is in some ways analogous to the City Wide’s. Both evince a focus, at times a fixation, on rent as the tenant’s prevailing antagonist. The book’s first chapter, “Rent is the Crisis” (a title that responds to the liberal claim that we are, again and for the hundredth year in a row, mired in a housing crisis), is described in the introduction as a “polemic against rent”²⁸ and provides the theoretical framework for the book’s later elaborations. The chapter is rich in declarations: “Rent,” the authors write, “is a power relation that produces inequality, traps us in poverty, and denies us the capacity to live as we choose”; “rent is a fine for having a human need”; “rent is an engine of inequality”; “rent is a trap”; “rent prevents us from caring for ourselves and each other”; “rent is the private capture of public investment”; and, lastly, “rent means some people won’t have housing.”²⁹

While it would be incorrect and ungenerous to suggest that the authors overlook the landlord or “the system” as antagonists—as they write, “our self-interest as tenants isn’t just fixing the leak in our shower,” they write, “it’s dismantling the capitalist unhousing system”³⁰ and “eviction is personal for us; it should be personal for our landlords, too”³¹—the theoretical emphasis veers into attributing agency to, or perhaps even reifying, rent. Vilchis and Rosenthal employ a definition of “tenant” that, in keeping with the broader tenant union movement, extends far beyond the “renter.” Because of this theoretical emphasis, they end up arguing that rent itself is the reason that some tenants are houseless while others are (precariously) housed. Though the authors dutifully reference Ruth Gilmore’s notion that abolition is also productive, both the title and the work place the abolition of rent at the center of the project of tenant unionism without—asides from vague formulations such as tenant organizing “makes homemaking a project to remake the world”—tying it to any broader political project or vision.³² Just as Norden’s City Wide is peculiarly naïve to class, Abolish Rent is at times peculiarly naïve to socialism and communism. At one point the authors describe the tenants union as “an instrument to produce small-c communism—collective control over our housing, our land, and our lives.”³³ What the “small-c” here represents is vague: is it a repudiation of existing state socialism (an anachronistic attack on Stalinism), a mere reference to the tenants union scale, or perhaps something else? Regardless, just as Norden’s class confusion is a clear product of his prewar popular front context, Vilchis and Rosenthal’s abolition framework, disconnected as it is from a coherent and scaled political project, is at home in the continuing post-George Floyd moment wherein the negation of politics at higher levels of abstraction (perhaps due to the lack of large and principled national organizations) is coupled with intimate and neighborly proactive radicality—as in other cases, the latter often fills the glaring gaps of the former.

Rosenthal and Vilchis’ conception of rent—as “the index of struggle between those who own or invest in housing and those who live in it”—melds well with that of a young Marx who, in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts wrote that “[t]he rent of land is established as a result of the struggle between tenant and landlord.”³⁴ However, Marx would revise, nuance, and expand his theory of capitalist (ground) rent in the posthumously published third volume of Capital by drawing up the dialectically tethered categories of absolute (that is, class-control) rent and differential (that is, relative) rents. This elaboration—unfinished, at times inconsistent, and concerning primarily agriculture-capitalist tenants—has produced nearly a century and a half of confounding Marxian and heterodox accounts of rent, of the relation between urban rents and agricultural rents, and of the importance of rent to capitalist reproduction. An exhaustive foray into the sprawling caverns of rent theory is far beyond the purview of this review, but two contemporary poles can help elucidate my aversion to the rent fixation of Abolish Rent: on one hand, heterodox geographer Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism (2020) takes rent to the extensive extreme by arguing that contemporary capitalism is best defined by the proliferation and centrality of “rent”—that is, of monopolized resources that produce for their owners regular income.³⁵ Everything from infrastructure to land to housing to intellectual patents to financial instruments falls into this expansive category. On the other hand, the Marxist geographer and tenant organizer F. T. C. Manning’s 2020 dissertation, “A Defense and Expansion of the Theory of Capitalist Ground Rent,” argues that what the residential tenant pays monthly for their housing is not actually rent at all but rather a regular, repeated purchase of the commodity of home (produced by the “capitalist tenant,” that is the management company).³⁶ These two diametrically opposed positions suggest that rent is the categorically confusing object to theoretically center.³⁷

And, to their full credit, Rosenthal and Vilchis do provide and recognize the way out of such wobbly theoretics. As they write toward the end of their book, “if a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves….Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.”³⁸ Working-class control over how and where we live is the lodestar shared across the nascent independent tenant union movement.³⁹ Control, whose negation defines tenancy for this movement, necessarily constitutes its horizon. But the excessive focus on rent, akin perhaps to a trade union fixation on increasing wages, obscures the forest (capitalism becoming a world without rent) for the trees (rent itself).

Criticism aside, Rosenthal and Vilchis’s focus on rent allows them to celebrate the rent strike in all its glory as a political and tactical tool of the masses. And it is here, in brandishing the tenant union’s most effective weapon, that the book soars and that the tenant union movement unearths its excalibur. “Perhaps,” the authors write, “no other experience can provide us with the same insight into the parasitic role of landlords and the power of collective action than withholding rent in coordination with our neighbors. Rent strikes lay claim to housing as a human right—to shelter, no matter tenants’ ability or willingness to pay for it.”⁴⁰ And, most importantly, they explicate, in plain language, the role of the rent strike in the cultivation of tenant union consciousness: “Each rent strike develops the power of tenants as political subjects.”⁴¹ Such an emphasis extends Engels’ notion that labor strikes are, for the proletariat, “schools of war,” wherein its “peculiar courage” is developed.⁴² Rather than emphasizing any specific achievement, singular transcendence of intransigent property relations, or evidence of shifted class relations, both the authors of Abolish Rent and Engels celebrate the strike’s capacity to transform its protagonists.

A last, and most striking contrast between this text and Norden’s is this: Whereas the City Wide forbade local rent strikes “without the sanction of the Council”and employed them only in last resort—for fear of their failure or of landlord retribution—LATU and Rosenthal and Vilchis recognize that rent strikes, while not infallible (like any volley of class struggle, losses happen and are happening), are instrumental in the realization of tenants as political actors.⁴³ Rent strikes are central in sparking tenants’ recognition of the home as a site of political (and class) conflict and to their assumption, through collective action, of protagonism in organizing the conditions of their life. This protagonism, beyond anything else, is the beating heart of the tenant union movement and of land struggles across the world: that I, my neighbors, and this network of working-class people remaking daily life in the face of everchanging conditions are veritable and powerful historical subjects, limited only by the extent and sturdiness of our social fabric and its organizational containers.

Book Review, Housing, Tenants Unions

Holden Taylor

Holden Taylor is a tenant unionist and an academic. They are a member of both the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union and the Crown Heights Tenant Union. They are an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Baruch College and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where their work focuses on tenancy and political economy.

Is Rent the Crisis? On the Tenant Union Movement, Old and New

Holden Taylor

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