Less than a year out from the congressional midterm elections, President Trump has at times styled himself as an economic populist — signing executive orders against institutional investors in the single-family housing market, floating credit card interest rate caps, and teasing “Trump Accounts” to help Americans build wealth.
Many of these ideas have clear appeal across party lines. Indeed, some of them are borrowed directly from progressives. But Donald Trump’s seriousness about these proposals is highly questionable at best. At a cabinet meeting in late January, for example, the president said off the cuff that he actually wanted to “drive housing prices up,” adding that he would not “destroy the value” of existing homeowners’ property “so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”
For affordable housing advocates, a larger question looms over the particular contradictions of Trump’s presidency: Why should millions of people’s ability to secure a good home depend on the prevailing political winds in the first place? Housing is a basic need, just one step above food and water. A transformative politics would reclaim it as shelter, home, and community — not a financial playground for Wall Street speculators.
Crucial to achieving that vision is recognizing the existing power of tenants and homeowners. We don’t need to rely on elected politicians to prove their sincerity and take action. Just as workers can withhold labor and halt production, tenants and homeowners have collective financial power too: our monthly rents and mortgages trickle up to the 1 percent and keep the economy running.
In this age of financialization, in which every corporation is seemingly a bank, what does leveraging tenant power actually look like? In Los Angeles, tenants and former tenants are lighting one path to victory.
Nine months into a historic utility strike, tenants in multiple buildings — led by the Virgil Square Tenants…
Auteur: Braxton Brewington
