Getting Renters Organized

Interview by
Ben Mabie

Workers have been in crisis for decades. Stagnant wages have meant a declining standard of living, leading to social catastrophe. Declining life expectancy, rising alienation and estrangement, astronomical rates of violence — none of this is the direct result of jobs getting worse, but they aren’t entirely unrelated either. The recent upsurge in energy in the labor movement offers reason for hope — unions are the one proven method to win higher wages and benefits and safer working conditions — but it remains a movement in its infancy.

There is a parallel crisis for renters. Rent is rising faster than wages, leaving some tens of millions of households rent-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities. Dystopian algorithms from the likes of RealPage are intensifying the crisis, jacking up rents to their utmost limits, throwing entire communities into chaos. In turn, evictions keep rising, now up 50 percent over the pre-pandemic averages in many cities.

In Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two cofounders of the largest tenants’ union in the country, offer an account of housing, tenancy, gentrification, and what the authors call the “centuries-long war on tenants.” This is an issue that has moved from the margins of politics — the sideshows of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party — to one of the most animated and central parts of the presidential election system: one where the Democrats call for greater subsidies for developers and where Republicans call for a campaign of mass deportation to slacken the demand on housing supply.

At a time when people are…