Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

Both a forceful polemic and a practical guide, Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent is a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, a monthly tribute that drives millions to debt, despair, and into the streets. In the context of a permanent housing crisis and governments in the pocket of real estate interests, Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants themselves: political actors who can, through organizing, direct action, and collective bargaining, bring about a housing system that meets their needs.

Abolish Rent is the first book-length engagement with the resurgent tenant movement. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis--cofounders of Los Angles's many thousand member tenant union--offer a deeply-reported account centering poor and working class tenants who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. They take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line.

If rent abolition is our aim, tenant power must be the means--built through everyday resistance in our buildings and on our blocks. This is the revolutionary project we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.