December 10, 2024
January, 1997, San Francisco Poster Brigade, designed by Rachael Romero, from the Library of Congress archive
Interview with Tracy Rosenthal
Tracy Rosenthal is a writer and co-founder of the L.A. Tenants Union. Their work has been published in the New Republic, TheNation, the LA Times and elsewhere. They serve on the advisory board of Housing the Third Reconstruction at UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Their book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, co-authored with Leonardo Vilchis, was just published by Haymarket. They are now on rent strike in New York City.
Angel Food: You're both an organizer and a writer and your work often overlaps, as in Abolish Rent. In the spirit of our publication (an attempt to merge literature and politics), can you talk about your background in both, and how those two things intersect and feel interconnected to you?
Tracy Rosenthal: I never really thought I would be an organizer. I blame some convergence of God’s plan (I was just at the right place at the right time and the language God speaks to us in is coincidence), vengeance (watching my father bankrupted because his recording studio wasn’t as profitable as Soho real estate), and actually becoming a communist. If communism is the really existing movement to abolish the present state of things, then “communist” doesn’t name what you think, or what you are, but what you do; it’s not an identity or a position, it’s a practice.
And the thing that brought those three together is that I was organized. I had mentors (including my co-author for Abolish Rent, Leonardo Vichis) who took the time to help me connect my own experience with the economic, political, and social reality that produces much more vulnerable people than me, to thread my personal stake into broader revolutionary commitments, and to show me that when people take action together, it is in large and small ways possible to change the world. In the early days of the LA Tenants Union, one of those mentors handed me Spin Works (which I never returned—sorry, Walt!), and I signed up for our media team. It’s something we rehearse again and again as we bring people into the union: Every skill can be an organizing skill.
Angel Food: It seems like there was an upsurge of interest in rent strikes in 2020, with employment precarious for so many. Despite this, rent has surged in the years since in major cities and anti-eviction laws have been stripped away. Your book is both a diagnostic history and a manual to empower tenants to organize. What does the current landscape of tenant organizing look like and can you speak to some of those tools that you offer?
Tracy Rosenthal: We learned so much during Covid about people’s capacity to organize even in times of abandonment and desperation. And we learned so much about the state’s response to crisis, to shore up the status quo. LATU built on our past rent strikes with “Food Not Rent.” The message was simple enough. Feed ourselves, not our landlords. Prioritize our own basic needs, emergency supplies, our health, and our families over our landlord’s profits. Cancel rent became a worldwide demand that when we lost the incomes we work for, our landlords shouldn’t expect the tribute they extract without working at all. But government policies shielded landlords, not tenants, prioritized financial, not physical risk. While every other economic sector ground to a halt, the state stepped in to guarantee passive income on real-estate. In the end, they handed out some $46.5 billion in rental assistance, subsidies that went into our landlords’ pockets.
It was a landlord bailout. Relief funds subsidized profits while leaving rent prices intact. They also served to disorganize us. Individualizing inability to pay disrupted the capacity of tenant associations to collectively bargain with their landlords, and helped peel off solidarity strikers, who couldn’t receive the aid. Redirecting tenants’ rage from their own landlords to the state, the funds diffused class antagonism into the seemingly dispassionate workings of state bureaucracy. Like the inability of the state to contain the virus itself, the state’s inability to protect tenants rested on an unwillingness to challenge existing power relations, and the crisis has resumed in full force.
We organize in our unions to change the balance of power with our landlords and create mass crises to extract concessions from the state. The tools we have are classic: forming associations (to share and thus thin out risk), direct action (to inflict reputational damage or raise the social cost of displacing us), collective reclaiming like repair and deduct or neighborhood improvements (fixing our apartments and deducting it from our rents, installing crosswalks and bus stops and cleaning our streets or giving out food is work to take back ownership of the places we live in) and the rent strike (that fundamental economic sanction that reveals our landlords’ dependence on us).
If a tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then it’s our task in our unions to rebuild a sense of control. If tenants suffer from the vulnerability of atomization then it’s our task to organize, which means to nurture the social relationships that are the material for our struggle. If tenants are trapped in the role of victims, clients, collateral damage, then it’s our task to restore our sense of political agency over our lives.
Angel Food: You have covered the recent Supreme Court decision allowing states to criminalize homelessness and its origin in liberal strongholds. Since then, Gavin Newsom has been photographed personally participating in sweeps in an attempt to pressure cities into conforming with the law. Can you speak to the broader, far-reaching implications of this law for our public space and communities?
Tracy Rosenthal: The threat of homelessness and the criminalization of homelessness are central forms of discipline for the entire housing system. You don’t just pay rent because you need housing and you can be thrown out of your home by force if you can’t pay, you pay rent because it’s a crime to live outside. In other words, it’s a crime not to be exploited by a landlord. State violence ensures we can be exploited.
The Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass deemed it constitutional to ticket, arrest, and jail unhoused people for sleeping outside, even when cities have failed to provide an alternative place for people to go. The ruling will help cities banish poor people from public space, unleash even more sweeps, and has laid the constitutional groundwork for Trump’s federal camping ban.
It should go without saying that sweeps don’t solve homelessness, but make it worse: they separate people from their survival gear, resources, outreach workers, and fragile support networks. But they do help make neighborhoods more attractive to speculators and shore up the revanchism of property owners that public space should serve their interests. (A real estate listing adjacent to Skid Row just advertised that the Grants Pass ruling makes it “a great time to invest.”)
And the ruling was a bipartisan project. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, Democratic Mayor London Breed, Democratic politicians across the West joined in to beg the Supreme court to take the case, knowing full well the composition of the court. The lead up to the decision shows us how liberals collaborate with the right to deny autonomy to poor people, launder incarceration and population control through discourses of care, obfuscate the systemic causes of the crisis, and dehumanize people who live outdoors. It reveals the extent of abandonment promoted by our two-evil government. And it forces us to commit to another kind of politics and organizing, centered around the most vulnerable.
Angel Food: In her 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris adopted a housing platform that would reduce zoning regulations and encourage development, in addition to offering an incentive to young people to purchase property. But Abolish Rent demonstrates how maintenance failures and precarity are baked into the landlord/tenant relationship. Can you talk about the "supply side" movement and the vision it offers us for cities and housing?
Tracy Rosenthal: I think we should talk about both party platforms as equally desperate and complementary strategies to control housing prices by literally any other means than controlling housing prices. The Republicans offered mass deportations, arguing that forcibly ejecting people from the county would decrease the population and therefore ease demand on housing. Democrats offered subsidies to real estate developers to encourage them to build and increase supply.
The latter “supply side” theory is often framed through a labor analogy of choice: when there are more jobs available, bosses raise wages and improve conditions to lure workers; similarly, if there is more housing available, landlords would be forced to lower rents and improve conditions to lure tenants. But supply side policy rests on a fantasy that we can cajole developers to act against their financial interests. We know what developers build: mostly high end housing. And we know in economic downturns, they simply don’t build at all. And the problem is, we don’t just compete for housing with people who want to live in it, we compete with speculators who want to use it to extract rent. The market doesn’t produce homes, it produces opportunities for investment. Just like a tight labor market doesn’t eliminate deadly jobs and poverty wages, a slack housing market will not eliminate slum housing and rent gouging. Since housing is a human need and it is effectively illegal to not have it, our landlords can simply continue to raise rents.
The Republican strategy is obviously more galling, but we need to understand both parties' platforms as two sides of the same coin: establishing the private market as the sole answer to the social question of shelter, obfuscating the role of the state in providing for people’s needs. This is what’s underlying the unique American project of homeownership, which recruits people into alignment with elite interests by subsidizing private, asset-based wealth and abandoning support for public welfare and public goods. And this is what’s underlying the decades-long policy shift from rent control and public housing to public-private partnerships and landlord and developer subsidies. Our entire economic system is now designed around the constant, unending inflation of property values. Since 2021, just owning an average home has made you more money in a year than working an average job. Of course, this ensures rents will go up and that tenants will lose their homes. As former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti once put it, “in a good economy, homelessness goes up.”
When we say in the book that rent itself is the crisis, we mean that having to pay for a fundamental human need is a crisis, that there is no system of paying for housing without exploitation and domination. That’s the crisis. We’re trapped in this power relationship that is aided and abetted by policy and police.
Angel Food: You also write cultural criticism. You wrote a really beautiful essay for X-TRA about the relationship of poetry to market value. Could you talk about what an anti-capitalist ethos looks like in art for you and any writers you love who particularly embody it?
Tracy Rosenthal: Probably the most important piece of writing I’ve ever done doesn’t have my name on it. It was a letter that maybe 10,000 tenants sent their landlords, in April of 2020, to say they wouldn’t be paying rent while a pandemic raged. I suffer when I get stuck in the paradigm that says being a writer is about individual achievement, becoming a social media brand, or accepting praise and money from genocidal institutions. I’m grateful for the discipline and accountability that comes from collaboration and from being a member of a political organization. Working on Abolish Rent with my mentor, writing with my semi-anonymous writing collective, and participating in Writers Against the War on Gaza’s public programs, actions, and The New York War Crimes, all point to other values for writing, to how writing can serve really existing social movements. A very partial list of a criteria for that ethos might include: to run against the grain of ideology; to help us reflect, or record our experiments so we repeat them better next time (to make the joke: that’s praxis); to agitate, or to make intervening in our lives seem like something everyone can and should do.
I will drop everything to read (for lack of another indicator of social vulnerability, this list includes people who have seen me drunk): Tobi Haslett, Kalem Hawa, Dylan Saba, Kay Gabriel, Hannah Black, Bea Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant, Max Fox, The New York War Crimes. I will drop everything to re-read: Mike Davis, Ruthie Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, James Boggs, Mohammed el-Kurd, Ananya Roy, Gabe Winant, Malcolm Harris, K-Sue Park, Bernadette Mayer (drinks anytime or in heaven).
Angel Food: You've also written about how universities often function as real estate companies. With the crackdown on organizing and political speech that this year has seen on campuses, what future do you see for student organizing around housing and the right to the campus as a public space?
Tracy Rosenthal: Your questions were so perceptive you predicted my last piece for The New Republic(!) There, I talk about how those real estate speculators that sell degrees (universities) collaborate with police by leveraging the grammar of encampment sweeps. Broadly, the student encampments demonstrated the contradictory role of the university in reproducing social movements and reproducing the status quo: a site of leverage to create outsized disruptions, media attention, and extract concessions; a target of right-wing retrenchment to maintain the rule of the (Zionist) elite; an engine of displacement and gentrification at home, extractivism and imperialism abroad.
I have joked that I find it ironically lonely on team left unity, and sometimes it seems like our conversations can get locked in a debate between calls for more militancy and calls for organizing more buy-in, but a zoomed-out read is one about a division of labor between insurgent tactics of direct action and those of mass base-building, which come together across time to create crises for institutions and grow our power long term. (The division of labor between a Palestinian civil society boycott and its armed resistance factions is one well established model of this).
We heard Kamala Harris on the campaign trail rehearse a particular deflection again and again, from genocide to the price of groceries. This may seem like a non sequitur, but one of the central excuses for imperial warefare has always been American jobs—occupation, apartheid and genocide promised as a strategy of economic growth. I think this in some ways explains the Squad’s failure to abandon Biden, in a bid I might edgily but meaningfully call “national socialism”—a fantasy that domestic economic benefits can be secured in the context of imperialist slaughter. More importantly, it points us to the potential of building economic power in our workplaces and in our homes as a meaningful (albeit long-term) strategy to end the genocide. (Everything is connected when you’re a communist.)
As a bounded institution implicated in both gentrification and genocide, the university is a target that can link struggles as workers, tenants, and students. In 2022, UC grad workers organized around their rent burdens and went out on the largest academic worker strike in history. Targeting the UC as an employer (and extracting wage increases), their (yet unmet) demand for cost-of-living adjustments has the potential to target the UC’s role as a real estate speculator and Blackstone investor—benefiting entire regions of tenants affected by rising property values and rents. In 2024, that union used that same infrastructure to strike in solidarity with the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions and the student encampments’ demands.
Struggles for divestment, higher wages, lower rents, public goods, local democracy, are already connected, and can feed into each other and help each other grow. I hope the organizing in and around the university, the dynamic between militant unions and the student intifada, the demand for divestment, gives us a sense of what a multi-tendency, multi-scalar organizing strategy could be like, how we might create the kind of institutional crises we’d need to extract concessions for our demands. And I hope the shared repression of students and unhoused people lead to further reflection on shared stakes, ongoing political education connecting land grabs here and in Palestine, and renewed commitment to those banished into tents on American sidewalks and in Gaza.