We Won’t Take Risks Alone. Our Relationships Make a Better World Possible.

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Movement Memos

“Our power comes from knowing who’s around us, from trusting who’s around us, and from strategizing with every lever that we have,” says tenant organizer and Abolish Rent coauthor Tracy Rosenthal. In this episode of “Movement Memos” Rosenthal and their coauthor Leonardo Vilchi talk with host Kelly Hayes about what rent strikes and tenant unions can teach us about the work of collective survival in this moment.

Music by Son Monarcas, Isobel O’Connor & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about tenant organizing, and the lessons of a very important book: Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Tracy and Leo are co-founders of the LA Tenants Union. Leo, who is trained in liberation theology, also co-founded Union de Vecinos, a grassroots organization founded in 1996 to address housing and community issues, and which now functions as the East Side Local of the LATU. Tracy is also a frequent contributor to The New Republic.

I am excited to share this conversation with you all, because I think it’s crucial in this moment to learn from people who have resisted the violence of organized abandonment and won material victories. In moments when our enemies are bombarding us with violent, dehumanizing edicts, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and those feelings can lead people to think small or recoil from conflict. Having radical aspirations at such a time may strike some people as naive. That’s certainly the message we’ve received from Democratic Party officials, who have retreated into irrelevance. But submission is not safety, and acts of refusal will be increasingly important in the days ahead. So, I hope you will appreciate this opportunity to learn from Leo and Tracy as much as I did.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Leo and Tracy, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Tracy Rosenthal: Thanks for having us.

Leonardo Bilchis: Thank you for the invitation.

KH: How are you doing today?

LB: Good. It’s been busy since the fires and all these threats that Trump has sent to our community, but we’re in a place of resistance. We’re fighting back, and we’re very excited to see how the community is responding to these threats.

TR: Yeah, I’ll say about the same. One of the purposes of this barrage of executive orders is to exhaust and confuse. And so, when I feel exhausted and confused, I remember that that’s part of the project and then I just try to recenter, and ground myself in the work that I do every day. That was the work that we were doing before this election, it’s the work that we will continue throughout.

KH: Can you tell us a bit about the organizing work that you all are involved with, and how that work has been impacted by recent events?

LB: Yes. Well, regarding the fires, we’re in the more urban part of the Los Angeles, in the central part of Los Angeles. And the LA Tenants Union is spread through different parts of the community. So it depends on where we’re located. Speaking from where I am, where our local is, the Union de Vecinos, Eastside Local of the Tenants Union, we are in the low-income immigrant community right next to downtown, one of the areas that is mostly polluted and it constantly has a very low air quality situation. When the fires appeared on the first day, we were very quick to respond. We mobilized our committees, our neighborhood committees, and we began distribution of masks. One of the, I guess, benefits of having organization and being part of the struggle is that since the pandemic, we’ve been able to keep up this big reserve of masks and protective equipment.

So we distributed about 5,000 masks on the first day. And it was very interesting to see how the city still was scrambling to figure out what to do in our local council member. They barely were trying to put together the site, and they really were having a hard time reaching the community. We were able to respond. In other parts of Los Angeles, in the Pasadena area, people began to organize to do the cleanup, because again, the city was still scrambling. And with the Day Laborers Network, National Day Laborers Network residents began to come together. Day Laborers, immigrants undocumented and documented, came together and with their tools, and their energy, and their resources started removing the debris that was accumulating on the streets, and so on and so forth.

Every community responded according to their condition. It was very busy, obviously the level of destruction in the communities, it was bigger than we’ve ever seen. In our community, we saw a lot of ashes falling on our porches and yards. But from our risk perspective, it was intense, but we were able to respond to the immediate conditions. The long-term process of reflecting on why was the city government defunding the fire department to fund the police, and all these public police issues started emerging. And that was the talk of the town in the neighborhood.

TR: So I relocated to New York, where I am currently on rent strike in my own building. So just this morning with my tenant association, we were doing a collective inspection of our building and we have started the process of getting the city to do the work that the landlord has neglected. I’m also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza, and we are currently working on what we’re calling the key issue or the housing or land struggle issue, and really trying to think through what this post-ceasefire conjuncture means, because the struggle for return is not over. The struggle for the end of the occupation is not over. The struggle for a free Palestine doesn’t end when the bombs stop falling, even while they still are falling. And, I’ll just stop there.

LB: Tracy’s comments remind me also of the long protracted damage, right? So because when we talk about Palestine and this struggle, we’re not talking about something… I mean, the critical crisis that people have gone through right now is very important. It’s part of a longer historical process. And in Los Angeles with the fires, one of the concerns that we have is again, the whole issue of the erasure of the damage to the homeless, right? There is going to be a lot of talk about people losing their homes, mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class people.

Yes, some working-class people in those communities, but we’re talking about people who have the ability to get new housing, and then a complete erasure of the damage that has been done to the unhoused and the carceral housing and all these things. So one of the critical demands of the LA Tenants Union during the fires and after the fires is going to be putting the priority of the homeless, and the crisis of the homeless and the demand for everybody to get housing during this process. So we need to look at the longer process, the longer historical conditions, as opposed to just focusing on these narrow moments, the negotiation of a ceasefire or the fact that people are responding quickly to the fire, or things like that.

TR: And just to add that the forces that are shaping the housing market that is in Los Angeles, the man-made disaster of climate change is falling onto our man-made disaster of a housing system. So when people are talking about spectacular forms of price gouging, landlords charging three times what they’ve been listing apartments for, seeking to evict people, so that they can put up rents, that this is a crisis on top of a deeper and longer crisis that has been ongoing and the Los Angeles Tenants Union has been struggling against.

KH: Thank you for that background and for those insights. In your book, Abolish Rent, the two of you unpack the importance of tenant unions. Can you talk about why you wrote the book and why its message feels especially important right now?

TR: I can start. And just to say, in many ways, the Los Angeles Tenant Union was an answer to two questions. How could we fight back against the displacement of poor and working-class people across our city, and how could we make tenants themselves the center of that process, the agent of that change? And we recognize most often when we think about our housing system, tenants are treated as passive victims. They’re the clients of social services or lawyers who are supposed to step in and help them. They are constituents who get to issue an opinion every four years with the vote. And so, how do we think of tenants as political subjects capable of changing the balance of power between themselves and their landlords, themselves and city governments, and how do we think about them as political subjects who are capable of remaking the world?

And the tenant union, when we think about what a union does, I think it helps us reflect on the tools that we have at our disposal as tenants, that even though we’re trapped in this relationship of exploitation and domination with our landlords, we do have resources. We do have power. We have our bodies, our capacity to literally occupy our homes, to refuse to leave, and to refuse how our landlords and how our politicians believe that our homes and our cities should be managed. We have our rent checks, and oftentimes this is the single largest expense for people. We have our rent checks, which are the largest expense of our households. They’re the reason why people take second, third jobs, why people double up, why people cut their pills in half, why people starve. So in so many ways, these rent checks are, they’re the source of our disempowerment, but actually we have the potential of using our rent checks as a form of economic sanction.

When we come together with our neighbors to withhold rent, to engage in a rent strike, we can turn those checks into a source of power. And the way that we do that, right, is through the last thing that we have, the last tool that we have as tenants, which is our relationships to each other. And what a union is, is about setting those three tools to work, right? Allowing us to come together as tenants to build trust, solidarity, connections such that we can take risks and socialize that risk, such that we can stay in our homes. And I think that investing in our relationships right now and reflecting strategically on the levers of power that we have over the constraints that shape our lives, I think is absolutely more critical than ever.

LB: The book is a synthesis of reflections of lessons learned in the construction of the LA Tenants Union, an invitation to be part of the history of this struggle. For the Union de Vecinos, the Eastside local of the Tenants Union, we predate the LA Tenants Union and we look at the history, and what we’ve been dealing with. We’re talking about the crisis of a system, and I’m not talking of the crisis of the system of capitalism. We just take for granted. We’re talking about the crisis of a system of services. Public house, for us that struggle starts with the demolition of public housing, through Hope VI, and the displacement of 1200 families out of the housing projects in East Los Angeles. And as people moved out of the housing projects, they started living in very messed up housing, really, really bad conditions on a series of threats from landlords and the economic conditions.

And we were talking about the construction of a Tenants Union, but really what the system was telling us, “Oh no, all you need is to go for affordable housing,” on the one side. And on the other side, they would tell us, “Go to the legal aid system and they’re going to take care of you.”

But what we were looking at is that the legal aid system and the public service, public legal aid, the socially conscious legal aid system, it was a bottleneck of resources. Lawyers couldn’t afford the time to take care of the need of every tenant, so they were always looking for the key cases or for the people who would qualify. So they weren’t getting the services. So thousands of people were getting evicted. On the affordable housing end, people could not qualify for the housing, the people who were displaced from the housing projects, the people who were looking for housing, the unhoused people who had some level of conditions to be able to pay our rent, could not find that rent, because the affordable housing development was not serving those needs.

So we started talking about organizing tenants and bringing tenants together, but the foundations would not provide the resources for that. Basically, we were building tenant organizations that were just doing Know Your Rights clinics, or basically bringing the housing department to do inspections, but the inspections they were doing, they were useless. So there was a need to build something outside of this social service system that Tracy just described. And that really put at the center of the struggle the tenants.

And in the way that Tracy describes, basically the tenants themselves had to be the ones struggling, because neither the lawyers nor the housing developers, not the foundations nor the nonprofit tenant organizations were going to take on the fight, because they’re too embedded into a system of relationships, political relationships that they don’t want to threaten. So the tenants had to take the leadership. And that’s what we try to do, develop in the struggle, our own way of fighting, our own way of coming together. And that’s where the Tenants Union is born. And the book is a synthesis of that history. It’s what we learn in the process. We’re also an invitation to join this struggle. So we continue fighting and growing to change the system and really abolish rent.

TR: Yeah. I mean, just to add to that, I think Leo said it so well, but to name the fact that the so-called solutions to the crisis are part of the crisis. When we demand housing for the homeless and we get carceral housing, when we demand housing for the poor and we get subsidies to landlords and developers, right? The dead end of the Democratic Party is what is part of why we need the forces of a union and the forces of a counter power. Thinking specifically, it was [Bill] Clinton’s HOPE VI that destroyed the projects, that leveraged a line in [Ronald] Reagan’s tax cuts, the low-income housing credit tax, by which our so-called affordable housing is built. That it was Clinton’s project, that it was Clinton’s effort that destroyed the projects in Boyle Heights. And so, thinking about this long war on tenants as a bipartisan effort and thinking about our housing system as a result of class struggle, and a union is a vehicle for tenants to take up their arms in our side of the war.

LB: And in the large city of Los Angeles, in the rich state of California, which is pretty much run by the Democrats, LA Tenants Union is launched against the wave of gentrification, which basically is a product of politicians opening up our neighborhoods for investment, “for development,” but really was an investment and a development that was displacing our communities. Eric Garcetti, our [former] mayor, basically engaging in ethnic cleansing of the immigrant communities and low-income people who used to live in the areas of Hollywood, through this promotion of investment and gentrification, and in Echo Park, in East LA. So we had to respond to that. And the nonprofit organizations were basically talking about knowing your rights, or going to lawyers and waiting for people to get an eviction so they could respond. So the LA Tenants Union had to organize itself to respond to all these politics, to all these political relationships and create a movement that was centered on tenants.

KH: These themes around austerity, the destruction of public services, and the ultra-wealthy leveraging our losses to get richer are so important right now. What you’re saying, Leo, about not waiting for the courts to save us is also so important, and something that people really need to hear right now, amid everything that’s happening with Trump. Legal battles are important, but as you say, most of us are not going to be saved by the work of legal organizations. We have to build power to defend our lives, our neighbors, and the resources that sustain us.

In your book, you talk about a war on tenants and how tenants have been impoverished, exploited, and even criminalized as the real estate industry has worked its will. You also link the murder of Breonna Taylor to gentrification efforts. Can you say more about that case and about how the abuse of renters is tied to carceral violence?

TR: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really essential that when we think about why we are trapped in this housing system, why we as tenants are stuck paying rent, we think about the monopolization of state violence by our landlords and by the real estate state. And we can think about it on a very base level. If we don’t pay our rent every month, our landlords can call on agents of state violence to throw us out of our homes. And then, we don’t just pay rent because we’ll be evicted if we fail to. We also pay rent, because it is a crime not to, right? If we are unhoused, if we find ourselves living outdoors, we can be fined, harassed and jailed by the agents of state violence, simply because we had no place else to go. And so, thinking about this is that we don’t just pay rent, because we have to have housing.

We pay rent because it’s a crime not to. That system of state violence underwrites our housing system completely. And then, when we think about that historically, how the police have been deployed, we can see their role in the counterinsurgency against tenant struggle over and over. Whether that’s to police the borders of neighborhoods built through racist exclusion, whether that’s to fill up the gap of legal segregation with crime-free housing ordinances, whether that’s to really facilitate the removal of people as we see now with nuisance ordinances, to basically allow for private actors to gain access to more real estate. And that is the context through which Breonna Taylor was murdered by Louisville PD, right? That the city had invested incredible amounts of resources in gentrifying a particular area. And they, in the process of trying to clear the area of its current residents to invite that speculation, they deployed nuisance violations for as little as possession of marijuana to basically evict people out of their homes.

So thinking about how landlords worked hand-in-hand with police to cleanse the neighborhood, to pave the way for gentrification, and through a “place-based investigation,” which is the term that the police used to carry out this project, they tied Breonna Taylor’s home to her partner’s, to her ex-partner’s, and therefore were able to burst in and kill her. And I think that this kind of spectacular violence is really what emerges at the tip of the iceberg of that long-standing relationship, that long-standing tie between the police and real estate.

And I think that we see this too, when we think about the function of our prisons and the function of jails, we know that the state not only has been disinvesting from public services, the social safety net, and the base standards of our lives, and investing in police and in human caging, right? In prisons. And that happens specifically after a moment of Black insurgency and these human cages, this is a form of public housing. Our public resources go to the tune of $200 billion in federal money, go to house people in cages rather than give them homes. I’ll just stop there.

LB: Yes. I mean, just to add a little bit, and the response itself to the housing crisis demonstrates, right? When Mayor Karen Bass comes to Los Angeles to really launch a major solution to the homeless condition, basically what she’s promoting is carceral housing. The renting of hotels to house the homeless, but in places where basically they cannot engage in social engagement with their neighbors. They cannot get together in the hallways and talk to each other. They have a curfew at eight o’clock when they cannot go out and find jobs in other places. They’re heavily regulated. That’s the kind of housing that is being built right now for the homeless. And of course, also it’s temporary. You only have 90 days to stay in this housing, and then God knows what happens. So it’s just very highly regulated, highly controlled, and basically it’s not a solution to the problem.

And then, in the waves of gentrification, the first thing that happens is to talk about crime in the neighborhoods and in the communities. And instead of addressing the causes of the crime, instead of looking at the roots of the problem, they say, “Well, what we need is more police, more surveillance,” more things like that. So the whole approach to housing is to create the condition that we’re in a crime-ridden society. And the only solution to that is more jails and more police. And our locals have responded in the opposite direction by developing stronger relationships between the neighborhoods and through those relationships, manage the conditions that are described as violence, or as crime and things like that.

TR: I think really importantly, crime doesn’t actually name specific activities. It’s a catachresis of basically people’s feelings about racialized poverty and the presence of racialized poverty. And as cities have transformed, meaning that at one point they were abandoned by capital, as white residents had been lured to the suburbs by state subsidies, now they’re being reinvested in, meaning that the locations are desirable for speculative accumulation. And that process has meant only the rise of surveillance, harassment, policing, and that revanchist project of the reclaiming of cities as if they belong to the newcomers who want to reproduce their lives in the suburbs here. I think that, as Leo said, it demonstrates the failures of our cities to plan for and protect the residents who live here, right? And shows the role of police in prioritizing some people’s lives over others.

LB: Just a quick example, a few years ago, the California Endowment was funding a project in Boyle Heights, a very low-income community, working-class community to identify places that the people are afraid to go. And basically, the whole idea was to map all these places in this community and out of that to really call for more police intervention. When we looked at those places from our perspective of our committees, basically some of these areas, all they needed was to have better lighting or to have a better pavement, or a change to the material conditions of the place.

But the solution that the California Endowment was trying to build was a solution where more police was going to be directed, and to create a data map of where to go and have quicker response. And all we needed to do was change the material conditions, put in some lighting, which is cheaper than paying for a policeman. So even these entities, these organizations who are supposed to serve our communities, are still working with that frame of mind that crime is the problem and the police is the solution.

KH: Leo, I really appreciate what you’re naming about law and order politics, and what both of you are saying about how carceral logics are deployed against our communities. As the services and resources we need are stripped away, police are presented as the solution to every social problem. The answer is never to improve our living conditions or meet our needs, but to inflict more violence, exercise more control, and to surveil us more closely. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes in her work, this is how organized abandonment functions. We are robbed of the means of survival, and investments in policing are ramped up, to control, contain, and dispose of people who suffer in the wake of that abandonment. But unfortunately, it’s not just public officials, and the people who benefit from these dynamics who clamor for more policing when our communities suffer. People who actually have a lot to fear from the everyday realities of policing will often default to law and order politics, viewing police as the solution when their communities are hurting.

In your book, you talk about how self-organized safety cuts off the recruiting power of law and order politics. That feels especially important right now. Can you talk about how the safety we create together as community members disempowers law enforcement, and why that matters?

LB: This is part of a pattern that we are developing more and more of the LA Tenants Union, but basically the whole idea for us is if you look at this, talk about these issues of spaces that people are afraid of. Several years ago, one of our members got beaten up as he was driving into his home, arriving into his home through an alley. He got out of the car to open the gate, and in that process, two young men came and beat him up, and tried to take his money away from him. And when the community came together, we basically said, “Well, if we call the police, they only come and arrest people and they’re going to be harassing us, and they’re not going to solve the problem. We need to figure out what’s happening.”

So they went outside into the alley and the first thing that they saw was that it was a dumpster. People were throwing all sorts of stuff in there. So the whole idea was, we as a community, we’re going to start cleaning it up, and the more people started cleaning up, the more the spaces started getting nicer and nicer and nicer. Some people put some plants here and there, some people grew some vines right next to their walls. And little by little, the spaces started changing and became a place where people started getting together to have meetings. And one summer the community started organizing these meetings, these movie nights for the children in the neighborhood. And of course, that space at night was the space where the local gang members used to hang out. And one of the couple gang members came to these women as they’re setting up for the movie night, and said, “What are you guys doing? This is our alley.”

And the women say, “Well, we just want to show a movie to the kids that are here in the neighborhood.”

And the guy said, “Well, only this time you can do this thing.”

So the women start showing the movie and the process of the night, they start turning around and they see the young kids, the gang members hanging out, sitting next to the kids, watching the movie. In the following weeks, they were the ones protecting the alleys, so the movies could happen. A relationship was developed between the women and the gang members. A dialogue was beginning and then a sense of mutual respect was developing. And this is very important, right? Because in a community where there is the neighborhood watch committee or the woman who’s always calling the police, the antagonism between tenants and the young kids, it just spikes up. And the intervention of police and the violence that comes with it also spikes up. Whereas the women were there developing this relationship, they also developed a sense of authority.

Later on when the city would bring the big dumpsters to pick up the trash, because sometimes people dump furniture and things like that, the kids themselves were the ones guarding and helping us in doing the cleanup. So the whole idea is to manage the problem through social relationships, through intervention, through occupying the space.

Years later in another context, right next to a liquor store, which is also one of those things that gentrifiers want to eradicate, which is problematic, because in our community, liquor stores is a place where people get credit and have access to things that they cannot reach by traveling miles away to go into supermarkets. We started putting benches. And on those benches, community and people who started hanging around, and one day we decided to do, on the Day of the Dead, we put these altars to remember the death in our communities, and we did this kind of celebration in our neighborhood. And the youth came with the full pictures of their people who have died in the past years, and put them in our altars. Once again, we were creating a space that was managed by everybody who was part of the community.

So the idea is to, rather than run and look for someone from the outside to come and develop a solution, is for us to go ahead and straight up develop the relationships that are needed, so we can manage the problem. Our presence, the presence of the organized community generates respect. And that respect also changes the condition of what happens.

And just to go along, years later, after we started doing this work in the alleys and where the gang situation was more movable, more flexible, we decided to do a festivity, where we’d like people would come and do something, like a small mini market along one of the streets, and we wanted to close the street. The city council member gave us permission to close the street, but he said, “Well, you have to talk to the police, because the police wants to ensure your safety.”

The women said, “No, we built our safety ourselves. We’ve developed our safe relationships. We don’t need the police here. If we bring the police, you will put us in danger.”

And it became a back and forth, until finally the council member decided to support us and push the police back, and say, “No, this community can take care of itself.”

So I think this is a good example. It’s all about managing and developing relationships here in our community amongst the people that live in it, and also learning and developing respect for each other.

KH: Well, I love those stories, and I really appreciate you sharing those experiences with us.

I want to take a moment to read a passage I really appreciated from the book. You wrote:

Strikes reverse and reveal relations of dependents. Rather than the worker depending on the boss for a wage, the boss depends on the worker to produce profit. Rather than the tenant depending on the landlord for housing, the landlord depends on the tenant to extract rent. Strikes are not symbolic actions. Issuing a negative sanction, to use Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward’s phrase, strikes do not express a demand. They force concessions. They reassert the power of poor and working class people to shape the terms of their lives. In short, they’re power to make and break history.

At moments like these, when a lot of people are up in arms politically, we often hear calls for a general strike. Those calls often come from people who don’t have much organizing experience and may not understand the scale of organization necessary to pull off something like a mass work stoppage. What your discussion of rent strikes really brings up for me is that if people want to see public refusal at scale, they have to cultivate that potential. We have to build relationships and cultivate our capacity for shared refusal in our homes, workplaces and communities. Some people want to leapfrog beyond the work of actually building fellowship, extending care, and taking risks, where we are, with the people around us. But that’s not how building power works. A lot of people seem to think we can simply launch ideas into the stratosphere on social media and the movements we desire will simply materialize.

TR: Don’t I wish?

KH: Right? That would be so helpful, but the reality is, we all need to learn to build where we are, if we want to develop something larger. So, with that in mind, can you talk about how tenant organizing can help prepare us for battles of a larger scale?

TR: I think that’s a really amazing question and one of the things that it makes me think of is precisely this dynamic that took place during the state of emergency of COVID-19, in the early days with “cancel rent.” And I think that what we saw, of course there were the loud social media calls and memes for rent cancellation, but what we, our experience in the Los Angeles Tenant Union was organizing that strike from the ground up, right? Organizing from the building up. And so, actually our work, because we had a membership in our communities, we recognized before the broad calls for rent cancellation that our members simply couldn’t pay. And so, we were the first union, I believe, in the country to organize pandemic rent strikes. And rather than the banner generally speaking of cancel rent, right? We organized people under food, not rent.

And this was an insight that I come back to all the time, that it’s a story that we tell in the book from our Second Street Tenants Association, that when they were coming together in the early days of the pandemic, they realized that sure, they could give their money to the landlord, and then they would know what would happen. They knew that the landlord wouldn’t bother them for a month, but what about the next month? What if they lost work? What if someone got sick? How were they going to eat? And so, this idea of taking the risk of withholding rent started to seem less risky than the risk of handing over their money. And that’s really how we came to the idea of food, not rent, reflecting our members’ needs back to them, right? Being a political form that people could share and that really expressed the decisions that people were making between feeding their families and paying rent, taking care of each other and paying rent.

And to me, I think that that really demonstrates that those local networks that we had for people to come together, reflect on this emergency as it happened, name their needs, step outside of their shame to be able to share those needs, and then to come up with, from below this demand of food, not rent, that then we could share with the larger, that we could share across the city that thousands and thousands of people joined this rent strike under this banner. And yes, it was echoed by the cancel rent movement, but it was articulated first in those buildings. And what we saw too, when we look at the fallout of the pandemic, when the state eventually issues its disorganization campaign of rental subsidies as the concession to this demand, as the solutions to people’s dire need, it was on the building level, where we saw whether or not that rent strike could succeed, right?

And whether or not people could ride out that storm together to stay in their buildings, to see that their needs were met, to even get repairs made during this time. And I think that to me, really it demonstrates that these institutions that we’re building, just as in the fires, people were able to reflect on their needs to redistribute their resources, to meet the moment. And it’s those institutions that have been built for the most vulnerable amongst us, and to do that work of building power long-term that are capable of responding in those moments.

And then, we use these moments as a way to grow our organizations, to build our authority, to protect people long-term. And I think that we saw that in the pandemic and we’re seeing that now in the pandemic, which is not over, but we saw that in the state of emergency of the pandemic, and we’re seeing that now with the fires, that I think it really just continues to make the case for our power comes from knowing who’s around us, from trusting who’s around us and from strategizing with every lever that we have with who’s here.

[musical interlude]

KH: In Abolish Rent, you refer to a tenants union as “a spiritual, not a professional, enterprise—even a church.” Can you say more about that?

LB: Well, I can start. One of the things that we talk about internally within our Local is the whole notion that we’re not building committees, but we’re building communities. And that’s very, very important for us, because basically when you talk about a committee, we talk about very specific functions, very specific ends and goals to achieve. But what we’re trying to do is build that space where people come together, to get to know each other, to learn from each other and to build their own spirituality of struggle. So people don’t just come together just to hang out. People come together, because they’re all tenants and because they share the same kinds of problems, and because they have different histories of struggle, and they’re sharing these different histories of struggle in a way that also builds what we call a mística, a spirituality of why we’re here, what we’re trying to achieve.

And that’s very, very important. At the same time, these communities that are building a history of struggle in relationship to other communities. So at the end of the day, what happens is when people come every week or every other week, or sometimes every month to come together, they just don’t come together to hang out. They come because they feel called to be in these places and because they feel called to support each other in this kind of struggle. So that’s the kind of church-like thing that we’re getting to develop. Also, when it comes to organizer, I think it’s also very important to distinguish the organizer with a vocation, with a commitment to be part of this movement. All of us at the Tenants Union are volunteers. Now, that brings its own contradictions in itself, but all of us are volunteers, because we feel called to be part of this process. We feel called to be part of these communities in struggle, and we bring our knowledge and our expertise to grow that movement, whereas the professional has a career and wants to develop that career, and is connected to an institution. We’re connected to the community that is building the union.

Also, it’s about the construction of a community to build a movement, versus the construction of committees to just run an organization. Our idea of the tenants movement is that it has to be a movement. It cannot be just run by one organization here and there, but all tenants have to come together. And then, as a place of learning. As people hear each other’s struggles, as the organizers test different tactics and strategies where community, we’re all learning together how the system works, how we push on the system, and how can we build an alternative system. All of this, I think has a spiritual notion, because it’s not about the here and now that exists right now in this history. It’s about the not-yet build that is coming to us, that we’re building it as we’re reflecting and learning from each other.

TR: Yeah, I mean, I just think to add, right, as you said, there is a world that is not yet here, and that is a world where everyone has a home. And to believe in that world and to believe that the way that we are living now is not inevitable. That takes faith. And that faith is something that we build when we come together. We share in the rituals of our meetings, in the breaking bread, of eating together, in the victories that we claim, and in moving together through our losses. And I think that that faith is really, I think that that is what allows us to see ourselves as not just a part of a single organization as Leo said, but a part of a movement, and as a part of a movement that began a hundred years before us and may continue a hundred years after.

KH: I think some people have a really hard time with this idea of a long struggle — something that started long before us, and that will probably outlast us — especially given the urgency and severity of the crises we face. On that note, the two of you ask a question in your book that I would like to extend to you in this conversation. “How do you resolve the tension between the emergency we are living through and the fact that the only tools we have to work with, organizing and collective action, take so much time?”

LB: Well, from a perspective of our local, Union de Vecinos Eastside Local, it kind of feels easier to answer this question. Our local predates the Tenants Union, it’s part of a 30-year history of building a movement and being part of a movement. And so, it’s very, very important to understand that this is an ongoing historic process. When we think of all the rights that we have, they didn’t happen because just one action was happening at a very specific moment, and we all got lucky that direct action happened. It is part of a historical process of movements being built with and articulating their demands, and building the organization that at the right moment is able to push that demand and make this thing possible. And the whole issue is also the important thing, and this is a contradiction sometimes. Sometimes we think that the organization is driving everything, but really the crisis is what drives us to respond in different ways to things.

So the organization learns from the crisis and moves things forward. So we need to understand that we’re working in the time of history and knowing the time of our campaigns, which in the traditional community organizing have to be specific, achievable, and measurable, so we can achieve the goals that we want for that specific season. But the reality is that our movement to transform society is a long, protracted process. And what we need is the organizations that learn in that process and are able to be ready at the moment for these transformations. At the beginning of the interview I was talking about how when the fires came up, we were able to run to our warehouse, pick up the masks, and start distributing to 5,000 families, because we’ve been building the organization that’s capable of responding to these things.

So rather than looking towards the future of how screwed up things are happening or becoming, we need to look at the past and look at what we’re building over time. The changes in Mexico with the new President that we have is a very progressive President, didn’t happen, just because all of a sudden there was a right candidate there. It’s a product of a movement. In the United States, we’re talking about rebuilding a different kind of movement. We’re talking about understanding that the system as it exists right now is not the system that we want. As proud as people are of it, as arrogant as people are about it internationally, it’s not working anymore. The system has failed. The system of services has failed. The system of electing the candidates every four years is failing.

So all these struggles that we have accumulated over the years are building up the thing that we need to have in the future, the thing that we’re going to have in the future. So if you look forward, yes, this is really bad and very difficult, but if you look backward, you see where things are going. And I think at this moment, going back to the question of faith, we have to have faith in what Martin Luther King said, right? That the arc of justice is moving every day closer to the place that we want to be, but it requires our consciousness and awareness, and an active construction of that process, and our active engagement in that process. And that’s the long-term part that is needed for this struggle.

TR: I mean, it’s interesting, right? When I hear the arc of history bends towards justice, I roll my eyes, but part of that eye rolling has to do with how that narrative has been fed to us as a narrative of great men and a benevolent state. And I think that part of the intervention of the union and then the intervention of the book is about really challenging that narrative of history. And I think that insight that we took from the moment of the COVID-19 emergency, that it was riskier not to take a collective risk, I think that that is precisely the insight that we need to bring to this moment of climate catastrophe, housing emergency, rising fascism, that not organizing, not taking calculated risks, is risking living in this housing system, in this undemocratic, oligarchic society, which is on a burning planet for the rest of our lives.

And I think that when I think about the work of the union that Leo is describing, I am also thinking about how the infrastructures we build and the risks that we take then make new risks possible. To think about how, I’m thinking about one building that we write about, where one of the tenants ends up on solidarity rent strike, because she saw that her neighbor didn’t pay rent and then didn’t get kicked out of her home the next day. The building didn’t fall, the cops didn’t show up. And so, what do we make possible? Every time we take a risk together, every time we organize, every time we do something that we thought was impossible, we make new possibilities emerge. And I think that we can, as we’ve seen in our own work, as the union has grown and empowered new people, and involved new people, and grown to multiple local chapters across the city, and has organized associations for years, some of whom haven’t paid rent in five, that collecting these wins as we build our movement makes things possible that today couldn’t be.

LB: Yeah, and just to go back to self-consciousness though, because we have to be conscious of the role we play in history, and that’s the very, very important thing. This is not a passive thing that we sit back and watch, vote on the next elections, and then it’s going to happen. We have to see that as a very self-conscious process. And from the perspective of our community, which is with a preferential option for the most poor, it is the most poor, the marginalized, the silenced, the people who are pushed aside, the ones who are going to make the history that is going to create that transformation. It is not going to be centered on the leaders or the organizers, or the organizations. It’s basically the people themselves who have to make that history. And our role is to be part of that history, accompany a history, and take risks with the people who are constructing that history.

KH: The idea of history as something we are constructing is so important, because it’s easy to get swept up in the current of bad news, and feel like all of this stuff is simply happening to us – like we don’t have the power to intervene. I think the work of the LA Tenants Union serves as a powerful example that we can actually build organizations and formations that can reshape our experiences, and elevate our potential. That’s the construction project before us as organizers, to build what must exist, so that we can make change together.

I also really appreciate what you were saying, Tracy, about it being more dangerous not to take certain calculated risks together in these times. I think that’s something we all need to think deeply about as we decide how to interact with the threats we’re facing. Submission is not safety. We have to leverage the power of solidarity if we want to create more safety for ourselves, now and in the future.

As we wrap things up today, Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

LB: I mean, on my end, I think part of the issue, part of the importance of writing the book and part of the conversations that we’re having, for me, it’s very important to have the conversation with the organizers, the people who are engaged in the struggle. Because sometimes, we think that this book is somehow going to change everybody’s mind, and people are going to say, “Oh my God, I should start going on rent strikes, and so on and so forth.”

But the organization is key on building this thing. And when it comes to the organizers, I think it’s important to understand that we have to change our frame of mind of negotiating with the system as it is, because we really need to think in terms of we have to redo a whole system. And a lot of times we’re stuck with organizers that think that… They start confusing the strategy with the tactics, right? Electing the right person, being the right relationship, getting the right funding and so forth, and they get stuck in that place.

The long run, the long game goes beyond those relationships, and a lot of times it endangers those relationships and a lot of times it breaks away those relationships. This is why at this moment in history, the LA Tenants Union gets no funding from foundations. And if there is any unions that are being funded within the nonprofit-industrial complex, it is because the conditions in those places are so bad that what they need is an organization that is going to negotiate with the system. But at the national level, we have to go beyond that system. We have to rethink how the economy works. We have to rethink how people get elected and understand that right now, when you look at foundations, community organizations, and some of the political parties, they’re all interconnected to maintain the status quo. We need to break the status quo.

TR: I just want to end by thinking about how our movements are connected. I’m thinking about how my neighbors in Crown Heights are organizing against Pinnacle, which is a real estate company that invests almost exclusively in Israel bonds. I’m thinking about how the police tactics used to decimate Palestine solidarity encampments were pulled from the policing tactics developed against unhoused people.

I’m thinking about how the demand for divestment can carry over to public pension funds that are overly invested in Blackstone, and the real estate companies that are hoarding more and more spaces where human beings can live, and therefore charging us more and more to access it. And I think that as we move forward, especially in this moment where an executive order can seem like it’s targeting one population, like one state agency, I think it calls us to really see the intersections between us, and that’s just how I want to end today.

KH: Well, I want to thank you both so much for joining me today. It has been such a gift to hear about your experiences with the LA Tenants Union, and the lessons you’ve learned. Your book, Abolish Rent, is likewise a gift to our communities, especially in these times, so I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss it with you. Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

LB: Thanks a lot, Kelly.

TR: Thanks so much, Kelly.

[musical interlude]

KH: If you are part of a book club, or you’re thinking about starting one, Abolish Rent is a great text for group discussion. It’s a quick read, and it’s packed with knowledge and insights about a critical form of struggle.

I really want to honor the life-giving work that groups like the LA Tenants Union have done recently and over the course of many years. As we heard from Leo and Tracy, tenants who banded together and refused to pay their rent were more likely to survive the early period of the economic crisis spurred by COVID. The fires in LA have been less deadly for those who have built the kinds of organization, relationships, and capacities for mobilization that this union brought to its community. We live in a time of spiraling crises. I know that, right now, in particular, it feels like everything is collapsing, all at once. But as we have seen, during other moments of crisis, the people best equipped to survive together, and to help others survive, are people who have formed bonds of fellowship, who know how to work together, and who are accustomed to taking risks together for the sake of a just cause. None of us is going to devise a formation today that solves all of the problems we’re up against, but well organized people can pivot far more effectively in a crisis than individuals. And people with shared interests, such as tenants, or people with a shared workplace, or people who live on the same block, have a natural jumping off point for such endeavors.

However you band together with other people in these times, whether it’s through structured organizing, like a tenant union, or through small affinity group action, I encourage you to find your people. The work of collective survival requires us to build bonds of fellowship, and defy the isolating, alienating norms of this system. That’s where change begins, for all of us – with a defiance of what isolates us. So let’s rebel against what secludes us, find each other, and fight back.

I want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Don’t forget to check out Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis.
• Do you want to organize a reading group? Political educator David Kaib will be hosting reading group trainings in the coming months. You can sign up to learn more here.
• For more advice on organizing in these times, you can check out Kelly’s book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You.