Rev Left Radio - Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End The Housing Crisis

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, co-founders of the LA Tenants Union, join Breht to discuss their organizing and their new book "Abolish Rent". Together, they discuss the housing crisis, the role played by private equity, developers, politicians, and landlords, the history and experiences of LA Tenants Union, the importance of political education, how the housing struggle is tied to land struggles, how the housing crisis is inexorably tied to the broader crisis of capitalism and connected to almost every other issue we care about, the forms and strategies of fighting back (rent strikes, eviction defenses, etc.), the socialist struggle and the communist vision, advice for other organizers, and so much more! Learn more and support the LA Tenants Union HERE Purchase Abolish Rent HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left HERE Follow RLR on IG HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on Tracy and Leonardo, who authored the book Abolish Rent, how tenants can end the housing crisis. They are also the co-founders of the L.A. Tenants Union, which is a really successful, really inspiring movement based out of L.A. that is fighting for tenants, you know, survival and community against the housing crisis, landlords, the corrupt government, etc. This conversation is incredibly detailed, wide-ranging. They're both brilliant and they're equipped not only with theoretical knowledge,

but with the wisdom that can only be forged through real organizing experience. So this is an essential listen for anybody at all engaged in or interested in becoming engaged in. The tenant union struggles, creating your own, tenant union, fighting against, you know, the, the depredations of the housing crisis in your community, et cetera, but also for people who organize more broadly. There's so many incredibly important strategic and tactical points made, so many crucial connections with all these seemingly disparate problems and issues in our society, wrangling them all together and showing

how they're all deeply and inexorably connected and so much more. I really found this conversation enriching and engaging and generative and in profound ways. So I'm very excited to release this episode and to encourage people to go check out the book and learn from the example set by the comrades in the L.A. Tenants Union. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio. We are 100% listener funded. Always have been.

Always will be. And it makes a huge difference in me and my producers. lives. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Tracy and Leonardo about their newest book, Abolish Rent, How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Hi, I'm Tracy Rosenthal. I'm a writer and a tenant organizer. And I'm here with my mentor, Leonardo Vilches. And we just wrote Abolish Rent that is now out with New Market Books. Hello, I'm Leonardo. Also, co-write. will abolish rent with Tracy and community organizer with the L.A. Tenance Union at the

Union, the Vecino, Ciside Local, which pertains the L.A. Tenance Union. Well, it's a pleasure to have both of you on. L.A. Tenets Union, as I was saying, before we started recording, has been inspirational for many like-minded tenants organizations across the country, including here in Omaha. So it's a real pleasure to have both of you on and to learn from your organizing experience and the sort of knowledge that comes from years and years of actual on the ground organizing in your community, something the left clearly needs as our only real path to power is organizing, right? We can sit online and we can have our different ideologies and our little disputes, but the rubber hits the road when we put the theory that we've learned

into action, then that's precisely what you're doing around a core issue, which is housing, you know, the ability for people to have shelter over their heads. I mean, it doesn't get much more materialist than that. So let's go ahead and get into it. And first and foremost, I want to examine the terrain of the housing crisis that is at the core of this book and the tenant organizing movement more broadly. Historically, housing security and high rent and slumlords and homelessness have always been a site of struggle for poor and working class people. But in the last several years, especially since 2008 and then 2020, the crisis has only deepened. And I think anybody that has a little bit of age on them, I was born in the late 80s. So there was a sort of time before

where, you know, the change when it comes to homelessness, the cost of housing has been incredibly apparent. We've lived through a real deepening of this crisis, and we've seen it with our own eyes. And, of course, if you live in any major city in the United States, you know, you see the homelessness crisis on a daily basis. So with all of that in mind, can you kind of orient our listeners to the scope and depth of the crisis, where it kind of comes from, and why it remains a central side of struggle for working people today? Yeah, that's a great way to start out. I mean, I think that we should just start by saying that foundationally, we live in a capitalist system that and that system demands that we pay to access a basic human need. As you said, the human need of housing, having shelter over our heads that is at the center of so much of our lives, like our most intimate moments, our connection to our communities. And that housing also, our ability to have housing decides so much about our life, like, you know, our life outcomes, whether or not our health is stable, whether or not we have access to decent education or were, you know, exposed to environmental harms, right?

Like that our housing really sits at the center of all of these things. And in our system, you know, I think that we often hear this fantasy of, you know, the housing system, you know, there's just so it's just, it just needs to be tinkered. There's only like a little bit wrong with it. If only we like deregulate or if only we, you know, added a little tweak, we would be able to fix the system. But I think that it's really important to recognize that like, you know, the capitalist housing system has never provided access to state and stable housing, particularly for poor and working class people. And that is historical, you know, through the history of capitalist development that has been the case. And that is, you know, to a large extent, because this system is one of exploitation and domination. This is not a system that exists to distribute the best quality housing to the most tenants. It is a system that exists to reduce the most profits and extract the most rents. And in that system, tenants are, tenants are, you know, required at the peril of their need

and at the barrel of a gun to pay a monthly tribute to people already richer than us. And that is the basis of this system that not only do we have to pay for housing because we need it, we have to pay for housing because if we don't, our landlords who have a monopoly on state violence can call on the agents of the state to throw us out of our homes using physical force. And then if we end up outside, because it is effectively illegal to be homeless, those same agents of the state can throw us in a cage because we don't have housing. So we not only are trapped in this system because we need housing, we're trapped in it because it is a crime not to have it. In this sense, it is a crime not to be exploited by a landlord. And so I know I've gone on, but I think that it's really important. And it's in those places of monopolization of state violence that we really start to understand what is the state's role in maintaining this form of exploitation and domination that we call our housing system, right? And as you said, the deepening of that crisis is in many ways a decision like is in many ways a reflection of the deepening love affair between.

the state and real estate and the abandonment of tenants to the private market over and over again, the removal of any forms of protections or market interventions that we had. And basically, you know, that over time, the state's continuing role in inflating property values on the one hand and abandoning tenants on the other. And so I think that where we're at now is really the result of, you know, the base fact of our capitalist housing system combined with a state that has in, that has completely refused to intervene in it in any way to materially benefit our lives. Well said. Leonardo. Yeah, just, I mean, in mind, just to have a little bit or to look at also a other parts of this thing, it's also a question of how it's becoming more visible

here in the United States. I'm an immigrant from Mexico. And from the time I read, remember, I grew up in Acapulco, land occupations and people's displacement by the state and the struggle for a place to live has always been part of my life since I remember. And when I look around in other places in Brazil, in South Africa and all these places, this struggle has been going on forever, everywhere else. It is just now recently that the United States is becoming aware of the crisis, you know, as the number of tenants is growing, as the middle class has been pushed out of their homes in 2008, as the system has been unable to respond to the situation, more and more people are aware of it, and more and more people are asking, how do we fight back?

And for my perspective, the answer is on the third world, in an organized movement of people who forces the state to respond to the situation. And that's just one thing that I just think in the United States, just the poor were invisible, the system was able to give concessions to movements and hide the problem and split people, but as the crisis grows, as there is less and less jobs, as the industrialization continues to grow, as people don't have any answers to places, as people move out of the United States into Mexico and other places, we can see that this is more and more visible. And yet, we hide behind a system that supposedly can solve the market, and that's all right, everything that traces is relevant, right? The market is not going

address the conditions of housing for the most poor or the middle class. The market is just there for people to become rich and for people to turn things into commodities. So it's part of our history. It's part of the history of capitalism. It's part of the certification of labor. And housing is just as certified as labor is. And we can see it from the 19th century and reading angles of the housing question. Yeah, great point. And very well said. And it makes me think of the fundamental difference or the way that I put it in the most succinct way, the difference between, you know, socialism and capitalism, is that capitalism organizes society fundamentally around the right for a relatively small amount of people to exploit and extract profit from

the masses of people. Like, that's the organizing principle of everything in capitalist society, health care, housing, child care, education, everything is an extractive event for a small amount of ruling class people to take wealth from the it's a fundamentally redistributive system right taking wealth from the bottom and middle and siphoning it to the top and what the core orientation of socialism is for me is how can we use the wealth and labor that we have in society collectively and cooperatively to create the highest quality of life for the most amount of people those two orienting principles are the core of the differences that we have with the capitalist system and is at the core of our critique of the capitalist system and when it comes

to something like housing, as we were talking about in the intro, the most fundamental in many ways, material need of human being shelter. We can see how capitalist orientation radically distorts things away from what's good for people and towards what's good for a few already incredibly wealthy people. And I can never forget that the term landlord is just so condescending and comes from feudalism. It's literally a handle. It's a handle holdover. Yes, absolutely. And I think it's really important that we maintain the name landlord in a context where landlords themselves are desperate to rebrand themselves as housing providers, right? But if we put numbers to exactly the dynamic that you were describing, there are some 11 million landlords and almost 150 million tenants. And what does our system, what is our system designed to do? Right. If the purpose of that system is what it does, then our housing system, extracts trillions of dollars from tenants and ejects them into the streets. And that's why, you know, in our book, we like name it as an unhousing system that because of those dynamics that you named,

right, right, like that that is the result. And I think that not only is it important, you know, that that is a self-perpetuating system, that it is one that is implicated in the perpetuation of inequality because as we're, you know, paying this monthly tribute to our landlords, they are using those resources to hoard more and more of the spaces where we can live, right? And it's also important to name that our landlords don't own our housing because they're smarter than us, better than us, more hardworking than us. In fact, like the average landlord works four hours a month maintaining a property, right? But the way that they have, the way that they get to extract rent from us is by hoarding the places where human beings can live. And that, like, you know, I quote, we quote one

landlord in the book who said, you know, banks buy me the house. Tenants, banks buy me the house. Tenants pay off the mortgage. Property manager handles everything. Inflation builds me massive wealth, real estate, right? That is the system that landlords, you know, when they're not when they're not like crying to the state about what minimal tenant protections we have, that is the system that they're advocating, like that's the system that we're propping up. And I think also the role of the state in this inflating of property values, in this fantasy of economic growth that is then siphoned off by this minority elite. I think that that dynamic is just like really, really central to what we're describing.

Yeah, and I mean, we can see it in the actual work. I remember when I first got to Los Angeles, 1986, there were still a lot of people who lived in these buildings that were owned by small property owners. And of course, things were not better then, but the whole idea that at least the tennis had a relationship one-to-one with the landlord in a horrible relationship of a struggle. But you could see who your enemy was and you could negotiate. with our enemy face to face. Little by little that those homes have been solved to other people and to other agencies. And now these agencies are hiring managers. And now the landlord is farther or farther away from the tenant.

And it's actually a lot of times even more difficult to identify. And that also talks about the higher concentration of land that is occurring at the corporate level and how distance and how more complex the struggle is become for tenants. And that's why the relationship by the importance of, creating a counterbalance of this relationship where basically tenants have to form their own organizations to fight back, and neighborhoods have to organize to fight back against this balance of power. We're only a few corporations own more and more land, and they used all the mechanisms that

they have political, ideological, and police to exercise their power in our communities. And our neighbors, you know, they used to like think, oh, you know, we can move to another house if we have a problem with this landlord. but now it's the same thing. It's another corporation with another manager that is abusing them and extracting as much money as they come from them. And if they don't respond, then they can kick down to the streets. Yeah, absolutely.

In a rational moral society, the state would be the thing that steps in to mediate this conflict. But, of course, we understand under capitalism, the state is just a manifestation of class power. And so the state is always on the side of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist, of the landlord, etc. And I really appreciate Tracy's point about this term landlord and actually sticking with it and not letting them play this neoliberal language game where they try to obscure material relational reality through this, you know, softening of these words that also is self-aggrandizing. Like you said, this idea that their housing providers is bullshit materially. They don't provide, they hoard and extract. They don't build. They don't provide anything, really.

They work four hours a month per property, et cetera. but I think that's a hallmark of the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism sort of in one way protects capitalism from the threat of democracy by privatizing everything. And then instead of any real reforms, any real power change, any shift in the status quo whatsoever, that's shut off. So what we do instead is play language games. We try to shift the words that we use to describe reality instead of actually changing reality. And I think, you know, that is an insidious aspect of neoliberalism. But I Leonardo sort of segue into this, sort of alluded to this, the individual landlord that owns a few properties is now being increasingly displaced by these huge sort of, in many cases, faceless corporations. So I'm wondering broadly, kind of what role do private equity, huge developers, the real estate lobby, NIMBYs, right? We hear them sometimes. What role do these different forces play in maintaining the status quo of the crisis? Yeah, I think that's a really great question. I mean, I think that, you know, like we should both, you know, describe that fundamentally the ordering of space, the ordering of where people can live is determined basically in collaboration between our bosses and our landlords, right? Like the places where we need to work and the people that we pay money to in order to access the human need of shelter, right? And that has been true like throughout history. But what? we've seen now, right, as, and I think also to name that it's, like, in many ways,

democratic politicians who have been the innovators of these neoliberal reforms that have struck down the barriers between the financial markets and banks and shaped our housing system to grow the power of speculators in that system. And so the rise, we have seen the rise of private equity that is like has been empowered by the state to claim more and more of our homes, you know, with the rise of invitation homes to now like the largest landlord in the country. In Los Angeles, 75% of tenants live in homes that are in. owned by investment vehicles, right? So these actors are taking over more and more space.

And we have the sort of, now we're in the era of, you know, the scandal. Like, for instance, the real page scandal, right, which demonstrated that landlords are engaged in a process of price fixing via algorithm and that they are these private equity firms are buying in specific strategic ways to fix the market. But yeah, we all, but I think it's important that we recognize that like that is that is systemic in the market that landlords and developers are collaborating to use their class power and preserve their class interest, right, to raise rents. And then when we think about, you know, I also think it's important to point out that there's nothing necessarily

worse about a large landlord in the sense that, you know, the power relationship between landlords and us are is experienced differently depending on who owns our housing. Yet both of those landlords, I think that they access forms of exploitation and forms of domination differently, right? Like, in our experience, organizing mom and pop landlords, like organizing buildings owned by mom and pop landlords, that those are some of the most violent, like, the use of direct violence against tenants, the use of like extreme measures to evict people from their homes illegally. You know, I've said, you know, the coring concrete in a toilet, macing tenants, breaking down doors with the pickax, right?

Like, these are some of the, like, this is the level of brutality that we see in small landlords. So I think it's important not to romanticize them as necessarily better, but then to recognize that when large landlords are using bunk legalese to run tenants through the eviction process, right? Like, what is eviction court? It is an automation of that low-level violence, right? And so they have access to those, like, deep pockets that allows them to automate that process.

But nonetheless, like, that that is, that's true for both actors. Yeah, I mean, so some of this conversation reminds you, when I came in the 1980s to Los Angeles, one of the biggest crisis we had was in the community where I was working and the larger Stublii House in west of the Mississippi, Bico Garden, in San Luis Obelisk. The biggest problem was the gangs and a lot of the stuff that we were talking about around that time was the fact that the youth were no longer needed as labor or as consumers because basically what was happening in Los Angeles

and I think it's larger part of the United States it was this whole process of the industrialization right. Los Angeles was moving from a large industry place where cars were being built and the aerospace industry was involved. The place where basically we were moving into the service sector. So education for the youth was no longer needed. The schools were in crisis and a lot of these youth were being pushed out of the schools into the streets and they were forming the gangs and there was all these other situations.

At the same time, we have this movement or privatization of the schools. So basically the school system in California, who was supposed to be very very advanced. I never got to see that. It started decaying, and then we have the youth crisis with gangs and violence and all this other stuff, together with the crack cocaine, epidemic, and these different situations.

And so that change creates a surplus population that we're no longer necessary. And how do they solve the problem eventually with the jail system? And we've all heard about the privatization of jails and the growth of the prison industrial complex. Well, literally the same thing that has happened here in Los Angeles,

And we're looking at the same thing. As the industry has changed, as we become more of a service industry, and there is no more jobs and there is nothing. And Los Angeles becomes a tourist community or it's becoming sort of like a spectacle of community. We're having the Olympics coming up. There are studios that are being built. The housing that exists for the working class and the working poor is no longer necessary. Housing also follows labor in this certification.

That's why you have different levels of housing. but the market right now doesn't need to produce the housing for what used to be workers in the larger service sector or for workers who work in the industry. So it becomes land for speculation and these small owners, you know, hold onto whatever they have. And yes, they become this abusive monsters

that abuse their tenants because they know that there is no more housing around for the tenants to move on to. And that's one of the things that we've seen and are competing. We used to be when we were organizing, that it was difficult to organize people, because they would say, oh, I'm going to move somewhere else. That's somewhere else doesn't exist anymore. Everybody's trapped in the homes that they have,

and everybody else has been pushed outside of the city. That's a change in the economic conditions and in the mode of production of the city. That's a change in the larger industrialization of the country. So land and housing are becoming this type of commodity where we are trapped in terms of what we can choose and not choose. And guess what? It doesn't matter what party is in power.

Both parties are in support of this transition. In Los Angeles, the destruction of public housing has been basically endorsed, promoted, and encouraged by the Democrats. And right next to them are the non-profit organizations that do not-to see any option to fight back or basically are looking for other justifications and other ways to reduce the impact that this is having, right? By expanding rights, by talking about mythical,

or co-operatives or land trusts. But really the crisis of housing is growing and growing and growing and people are being pushed out because this housing is no longer needed for these people. This housing now is needed for speculation and for extract as much money as possible

from it as they can. And the state, the non-profit industry, the corporations are selling us the idea that the market is going to solve the problem and it's not solving it. Or that affordable housing is going to do anything for us, but it's not affordable for the most poor. So our communities have to fight

to stay where they're living, have to fight to stay in their homes, have to fight against evil landlords, have to stay in their neighbors against gentrification, have to stay in the city against a court system that pushes them out, have to stay in the in the in the in the in the country. I mean, it's just it's crazy. People are being pushed out of the city because of this system, because of the changes in the system and the modes of production. No, thank you for that, Leo. And I just wanted to specifically answer your question about NIMBY's, right? Because I think it's, you know, when we understand, you know, in our book, we describe the history of housing policy as a war on tenants. And I think it's important to understand the function of homeownership throughout American history as a political and economic project that has recruited working class. people into alignment with elite interests, right? And that is this explicitly anti-communist project. It was from the get. And we can see that, like, rehearsed over and over again in the history of

housing policy, like going all the way back, right, to the counterinsurgency against black reconstruction when white people were given, you know, like white people were recruited into alignment with capital through the capture of, through settlement, through the capture of indigenous land, right? And this process happens over and over again that, you know, when in the GI bill, when the state creates the subsidies that lure people to the suburbs, right? Like, this isn't white flight. This is like white chasing subsidies to the suburbs, right? and abandoning people of color to the cities, right? And then we see this again, specifically in our context, right?

Like in the tax revolt, in the counter insurgency to the late 60s social movements, that what California, like what homeowners in California do is they give themselves the equivalent of rent control. It's a, you know, they win stabilization of property taxes. And in so doing, like, that form of austerity is actually a form of discipline on black, brown, poor, and poor people in the cities. So this is the project, and I mean, Mike Davis obviously writes so beautifully about this. But this is the project that has produced the class. of, you know, like how people are recruited in many ways against their own interests,

the production of the middle class via homeownership and the sort of, you know, ideological project of home ownership as the American dream is really just a withdrawal of the public, of the public good, of the state's role in, of the state's role in, in, of the state's role in maintaining a social safety net and public services and its replacement with these like private you know private tiny kingdoms with a garage out front right like that that is that is the historical dynamic that really gives us the context that we're in right now yeah and and i think it becomes more evident in 2008 with the with the housing with the with the crisis of people losing their homes. And I think that's, the other side of it is how people buy into it. I remember when

we were fighting against the demolition of the housing projects, the 900 families that were displaced, what part of the dream for most of them was, you know, to live in a better community, to eventually own their home and they fight a better place. So when the housing the part, with housing authority and the government comes and says, you know, we're going to give you a section egg vouch for you to move somewhere else. And from then on, to build up to get your American dream. A lot of people were buying into it without realizing that once they were out there, the housing was not going to be existent. There was also the false promise that some of these people were going to be able to buy homes. And again, they were endorsed in the destruction of their whole community without thinking of people that were coming behind them.

And at the end of the day, for example, in Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, there were seven families that were able to buy their homes. And out of those seven families, only one, like one or two, were able to keep their homes in 2008. Like afterwards, everybody went into the street. When we talked to the tenants in the 80s or 90s also, we were talking about, you know, we have to improve the housing. A lot of them would tell us, oh, you know, no, we're just saving so we can buy a new home. And again, in 2008, that thing falls apart. So this dream also is an ideological tool that makes people slow down or ignore the current present condition in the place that they were living in. because they were having thinking that at some point

they were going to be able to move out. So that's another thing that is very, very important. And again, I want to go back to the nonprofits and the corporations. When we moved out of the housing projects, other people were being told, oh, you know, there is this affordable housing system. I wanted to fight for more funding for the affordable housing system. And we fought for that.

And when people started applying for this affordable housing, they realized that they wouldn't qualify. So then we start fighting for more rights for tenants and when we said let's build the tenants union, let's build a system where tenants can organize and we'll go to the foundational organizations. They would say, oh, no, that's not the solution. The solution is to increase incomes

and have minimum wage campaigns and to produce more housing, which again takes you to this idea that you as an individual worker can achieve the American dream and get the American house and have an American life. With reality, they're just smoke and mirror

for people to stop realizing and fighting for their own reality in the present time. Yeah, absolutely crucial points. And you're making these deep-seated connections historically, institutionally, ideologically about how all of these pieces fit together. And that's one of the things that I think is superior about, you know, a socialist and dialectical materialist analysis over a liberal analysis, which wants to take everything, separate it up and analyze it in its own right. Like, you know, we call it the John Oliver effect where every week he's talking about the problems of capitalism, but never ties those problems together. To Leonardo's point, I mean, there's so many amazing points. I just want to touch on two really quick, and then I'll go to the next question.

The way in which prisons have not only been privatized and are sites of extraction of labor and profit, but are also the main mechanism that neoliberal, that the neoliberal state uses to not solve social problems, but to hide them away. And then by hiding them away, you know, sort of concentrating them and then extracting them mercilessly for even more profit, it's really, really brutal. And then to Tracy's point, I think it's so important to really hone in on this point and to reiterate that this nostalgia for mom and pop capitalism is a complete bullshit lie that we should completely reject and resist whenever we hear it come up. Because not only in the housing market, like you've described mom and pop landlords are sometimes the most brutal. the least accountable. It's also true in the workplace, right? This idea that like all big corporations are the problem. If we just had mom and pop capitalism, that would at least be better, my worst jobs. The ones that I've been taken the most advantage of have been in these really unaccountable, you know, single proprietor, mom and pop business where it's just the one guy's

whim. You know, everything happens according to his mood and his whims. There's no HR department. There's no mechanism of, you know, redressing grievances. And so, Just a really great point. I just wanted to expand that to work because I think sometimes there is that naive nostalgia about mom and pop capitalism, right? Yeah. Before we move on, I just wanted to make the point too, right? Like, you know, when we think about prisons, I know that privatization can sometimes like come up. It's like that kind of like exquisitely horrific form that they are taking. But also like I think we need to recognize that our prisons are a form of public housing. We spend $200 billion. in taxes and debt on these facilities, like on human cages, that arose after, you know, after the attacks on public housing and the destruction of on public housing. And also, we spend $200 billion in lost subsidies on private homes. And so I think that when we think about, like, what does our, like, what is housing policy?

What, how does the state interact with the housing market? We need to look at both of those things as the two polls of what the state's role in housing is. It spends the same amount of money, caging people, providing them the, like, carceral housing as punishment. And on propping up the system of private ownership that, you know, like allows wealth to be transferred through families and maintains the racial wealth gap and the consolidation of wealth in this country and perpetuating inequality. And so I think that like putting those two things at the forefront of our analysis really helps us recognize like what is the state doing to prop up the system that we're in. If I may take a couple seconds before you ask your question also, I want to take on your comment about the mom and pop businesses because they're also part of the struggle, part of the wage that it's been driven within our communities. In our fight against gentrification in Boyle Heights, those are the small mom and pop businesses are the ones who get in the way. Because basically the whole problem is that more investment and more money is going to come to the community makes these businesses fight in favor of gentrification and support.

the displacement of their own customers. And it's very interesting to see in this process. And we've seen it in Echo Park and other parts of the community. Where these small businesses support gentrification, support this so-called investment, and they benefit from that investment and for those changes for a very short time because what happens after that, there's all these businesses and all these corporations that they start coming, have a completely different agenda from the construction of a community or a better place for people.

It's just basically turning these neighborhoods in. commercial corridors for high-end goods and luxury goods, just basically to promote a consumer society and really to displace the people who live in the neighborhood. And this is very dangerous because basically it goes back to this atomization of the struggle, right? The small entrepreneur, the small family wants a business who supposedly eventually are going to triumph and achieve the American dream, become their own worst enemy because they're the ones who divide the community and they're the ones who encourage this kind of processes and at the end of the day, they get this place from the process itself. And in the meantime,

so then you have the individual homeowners that say, okay, now is my time to invest. And then they start kicking out their neighbors, I mean, their tenants from their housing. And again, dismantled their community. So the work of the tenants union, the work of our communities of our locals, is not just to fight for the individual house and the individual tenant in their location. It's about construction, a community within a building, within the neighborhood, that fights back against their own displacement and fights back against a system that promotes and encourages individualism in our communities. Yeah. So important. Such a, such a wonderful point. Absolutely. Now, I do want to shift gears slightly here and just talk a little bit, and we'll get back into these

topics for sure, but talk a little bit about the creation and the backstory of L.A. Tenants Union. Yeah. So at the, my local, the Union de Vesinos is site local, pretext the creation of the L.A. Tenants Union. We got started in 1996, fighting against the demolition of the public housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, which at the time were the largest public housing west of the Mississippi. It's about miles square community of about 1,100 families who used to live in public housing. They used to pay a third of their rent in a very tight and dense community. And they were dealing with several kinds of issues. They were dealing with gang violence. They were dealing with immigration rates and with police violence.

And there was this church, Dolores Mission Church, which was basically, through the work of the Jesuits and the priest there, started developing this process of community engagement, where basically, regardless of where your religion was or anything like that, we were getting small groups of community coming together to talk about the issues in the neighborhood. And little by little, as people were coming to talk about these issues, then we started talking about what is our response to this issues

And when it comes to the issue of the gangs, the community basically rather than talk about sending them to jail or yelling them or disappearing them or pushing them out of our numbers, the community started talking about developing a relationship with the gang members. So they started organizing these barbecues and having dinner with them and a little by little as through this relationship, they started learning to develop their own authority and basically intervening whenever there was violence,

intervening to raise the graffiti, intervening to reduce the cell love drugs. So we had a community that was very tightly knit together, coming together to address their problems. As they started learning about the issues of intervening the issues of gang violence, they also started intervening with issues of police abuse. So as they developed a relationship with the gang members, they started learning about the violence that the gang members were going through

because of the police, how the police would pick them up from one territory and take them to another place. So they started also intervening on those kinds of issues. So we had a community with a social consciousness that was trying to address their own problems and that because of a state that was not able to solve anything, they had to do things themselves. And then, lo and behold, Bill Clinton and the Democrats and everybody decides

that the best thing to do is to destroy public housing. 100,000 units of public housing were planned to be demolished for the following 10 years in the United States. And they target this as one of the mortal places. And we have, you know, non-profits and organizations saying yes to the demolition. We have the Democrat government in the city council saying yes to the demolition. We have non-profit community development corporations saying yes to demolition. But the community was saying no to demolition because they had developed a way to be community. They had developed a way to respond to the crisis.

So we went and started fighting against the demolition. And took us a while. First we started slowing it down. then we were able to develop a contract for our members, of the Union of the Vecinos, to fight back and to get a contract that would give them a place to stay at the end of the development. Needless to say, the people who supported demolition

and who supported this process were kicked out of the neighborhood and never came back. And the promise always was, this is going to improve your neighborhood, but they didn't realize that the neighborhood was going to be improved, but without them. So our members decided to stay, but that wasn't enough, right?

We went to then pay attention to the people who moved out of the neighborhood and start looking at their conditions. And interestingly, their housing conditions were way worse that anything you can imagine in public housing in Los Angeles. Roaches, rats, bad inspections, abusive landlords, total disrespect of their rights. So we started fighting to defend the tenants, to organize the tenants around these issues. And we started firing this, creating these neighborhood committees to fight back.

but the problem that we started realizing first when we started fighting against the militia of the housing projects and later around that we were trying to do this stuff in our neighborhood was that the problem is citywide and if you want to fight back and really have to have changes you have to have changes across the city and you have to build

power across the city and basically in the public housing fight the reason why we lost two-thirds of the population was because all the time the minority was ready to fight all the way to the end and they by the fact of they have already won. So we just won a victory for our own members. So we started talking about the

idea of forming a tenant union and we started going to our friends in the non-profit sector because we thought they're going to be interested. And there was always the constant answer, oh, we don't have capacity. There is no way to do this stuff. Our funding doesn't allow us for us to get this money. It's not part of our mission, so on and so forth. Or we already have the strategies and basically the strategies were negotiating the defeat of the tenants without having a fight. And then we went to the foundations, and the foundations were telling us, you know, we have to, what we need is better salaries and more development. But also at the same time, we were part of this artist group called Ultra Ren, that was started by Don Ryan here in Los Angeles. And these were artists from different parts of the world, at different parts of Los Angeles, coming together to look at the impacts of neoliberalism in Los Angeles.

So we started doing all sorts of projects that built bridges with, for example, public housing in Ireland. with immigrants in Germany and different groups of people. And we'll learn a lot in this process, exploring the impact of neoliberalism or communities and developing social projects for reflection and discussion. But the tough part was that if you would come back to Los Angeles, the fight looked the same way. Everything was the same.

Nothing was changing. We were still in a little island of organizing, trying to protect the housing of people, trying to improve their lives. So we decided to form what was called School of Echoes. a school of echoes was activists and people concerned interested in addressing and promising in their community and our theme was what are you hearing in your community a little by little interestingly or as a reflection of the reality of the time

everybody was talking about gentrification about housing conditions about people and neighbors that were being lost and pushed away and we came to the conclusion that really we needed to organize in the neighborhoods and come together and form something that could push back against this gentrification and this displacement. So we came up with the idea of the Tenance Union. But again, a lot of people were people who were not part of the, that were not organized, there were people who were interested and concerned for the community.

And the question is, how do we start a Tenance Union? And it was kind of like nerve-wracking because we had already went through 10 years of trying to form a Tenans Union. I hear we were in a new community, people who were interested. And the cool thing is that out of this hearings, we start inviting and bringing people together that we start joining these conversations.

So there is this meeting that I remember very well where a bunch of us are together to say, well, how do we start the tenants union that we're like breaking our brains trying to figure out, how do we start? What's the plan, the funding, et cetera, et cetera. And Tracy Joseph Derely says, you know what, a union has members

that are in struggle for the housing. I'm a tenant, here's my $5. I'm the first member of a tenant's union. And that was it really what launches us to say, to go beyond our fears and our concerns, to say, yeah, we are the Tenant's Union and we're going to start fighting. So out of the different struggles that people,

so Tracy is Tenant zero zero one of the LA Tenant Union. But really is the one that launches us into this fight. So all of us went back to different struggles of places that we were having. So in South Central, there were tenants on Section 8 housing and their covenant was ending and they were fighting to stay or to gain more time. Nobody was supported them, and the Tenants Union decided to support them.

In Eco Park, there was all this criminalization of youth and all these laws that were attacking the youth to further the impact of gentrification in Eco Park, and people started fighting against these laws. In both sides, we started organizing with different tenants who were not in rent control, but we were pushing out of their building. So all these different communities grew out of interested, concerned tenants and residents, who were not impacted or brainwashed by neoliberalism, who were not impacted or brainwashed by the foundations, and who were willing and ready and daring enough to say, we start in a tenant's union. And that's what we are.

Basically, this is who we've been, a volunteer organization that is looking to put the tenants at the center of the struggle, that is focused on the tenants that are most affected by gentrification, all these processes, and there is building communities in the neighborhood that are fighting back. Beautiful. Tracy? Yeah. I just, you know, like I think that also I can talk about, you know, the things that we learned in the course of our own development. And I like, you know, being honest that, like, we are an experiment and we are ourselves changing over time.

And, you know, like our first, you know, our first action as a union, we were like, like our maybe before, like as we were starting the union, our first group action was a holding a renter's rights workshop, right? And there was this point where we realized like all three parts of that had to go, right? Like renters because the category that exists in opposition to landlords, real estate developers, and politicians is broader than people who pay rent, includes people who live outside. And so we really wanted to center. tenants rather than just renters to really name that category. Rights, like, well, workshop, right? Because, like, we recognize, you know, we can't just, like, give people information

and send them on their way. We want to build something long term collectively that people are invested in, that have that, you know, the real democratic infrastructures that contrast to the forms of participation in many ways like the value forms of participation that are offered in our supposedly like representative democratic processes right and rights because you know like the rights that we want which is the human right to housing that is something that would take another kind of world right and we recognize you know we quote James Boggs in the book to say like rights are what you make and what you take. And that, like, you know, recognizing that the rights we have are simply material that we can use to on the, in the course of struggle for the rights

that we really deserve. And that it wasn't enough to simply, and even the rights that we have are barely enforced, right? And so then I think that it's been a process for us to really recognize you know, that over time, you know, one of our most successful, one of our most successful tenant associations who we devote a chapter of the book to the Mariachi's in Boyle Heights really demonstrates this principle in that they were able in their building. This was a non-rent stabilized building of 26 units in Boyle Heights in a rapidly gentrified. neighborhood like two blocks away from Madiachi Plaza and where a third of the tenants, you know, like were Madiachi musicians and relied on the plaza to pick up work.

A new landlord buys the building and starts handing out rent increase notices, some up to $800 a month, right? Because this was not a rent-stabilized building, the landlord is legally allowed to charge whatever the market, not we as tenants can bear. tenants came together and, you know, in the context, you know, of accessing as individuals, like accessing social services or accessing lawyers or even accessing, like, you know, the long process of legislative reform, right? Like, they would all, you know, they would basically all be told that there was nothing that they could do. The laws were what they were. And, you know, maybe that they could stall or slow down the process, but that, but eventually they would all

lose their homes. And this was an unacceptable answer to the tenants that have been living in this community, had been creating this community for decades. And they decided, you know, to organize, to form an association to engage the broader community and the broader union in their struggle. And through a year-long rent strike, they were able to bring their landlord to the bargaining table and win a collective bargaining agreement, that was the equivalent for rent stabilization for their building. So this insight that rights are what you make and what you take, like that tenants themselves were able to change the conditions that governed their building to invent a new contract and a new law is really what is animating a lot of

our work in the union. Similarly, you know, and this idea that together, right, and in forming associations, in collectivizing risk, in working together in solidarity, in using our rent checks as forms of economic sanction on our landlord, in using our capacity, you know, to take direct action and raise the social cost of evicting us by, you know, showing up at our landlord's door by like protesting that eviction, right? That like these are tools that we have access together that are actually these are the tools that are able to rebalance the scales of power between landlords and tenants to give us more power and to actually give us more rights to change the laws. And this is not something that we can do as in.

individuals, this is only something that we have access to together. And that I think is, you know, like, so to call us a union is also about naming those forms of power that we only have access to together. Yeah. And I think this also points to also, I mean, the Tenance Union itself and the impetus of the people and the community that built up is something that is very surprising and very amazing. And I think it's something that is important in this history. But at the same time, This points to a crisis in the system. As Tracy was talking about, you know, the lawyers, when we're talking about organizing tenants and we're good to the lawyers, they're exhausted and overwhelmed.

And all they have left to do for you is to negotiate your victory. And because that's all there is, because there is no funding, because the funding is restricted, because they're overwhelmed because people don't want to take those jobs because people want to make money. So the few lawyers that exist are overwhelmed and exhausted. The non-profit organizations that are dedicated to advocate for tenants are in a major contradiction between the mission of their organization, the funding that they receive, the fact that they're doing a job that they get paid for,

and their ability to actually launch a movement across the city of tenants that can have an impact. So they go for strategic tactical moves that give you some success and some progress, but that does not change the conditions on the ground for all the tenants in the city because the funding is limited and because people are limited by the fact that they have a job. When it comes to the politicians, the politicians have run out of policies. When you're talking about the pandemic, from the pandemic to today, the expansion of tenant

rights have grown tremendously. There is more rights for tenants now than we had 20 years ago, but these rights can only be fought in court. So the policies that of these politicians that are giving us and granting us are not producing any change on the ground for people, evisions, continue to happen because people don't have the lawyers because they're not enough advocates and because the courts are designed to push people out so the system is in crisis when you look at the homeless in the city we have a major that is recycling the same homeless

through the same policies over and over and over but the population of people in the streets continues to grow the encampments continue to grow and she has all these policies and all these programs and systems but it's the same homeless that are going through this process and interestingly they talk about oh we have permanent house people who are being housed permanently how can a major who's been living for only two years in this city declared that people have been permanently housed we don't know if they're going to permanently house until they live there for like 10 15 or 20 years this is just symbolic so we have the politics of symbology with new rights and recycling the homeless of the system the total defeat of the courts and the fact that

Being an advocate and transforming the society is just a job that is paid by foundations. The Tenants Union unleashes that. The Tenant Union says we in our communities can organize ourselves. We in our communities have to come together, but we need to come together as an organization that is commanded and controlled by the tenants, as an organization that is building territory in our locals, as an organization that is building a new kind of politics. And in this context, I think it's important to understand that we're talking. not about just a political project, but a social, political, and cultural project.

Socially in the sense that, as Tracy was talking about, the mariachi and all the standants, we're first building relationships across the tenants in an horizontal way for them to come together and understand that they have the same problems and the only way they can address them is by coming together. Political because we're building power, a power that now is having an effect. When the pandemic occurred in 2020, the tenants who could, would not pay the rent instead of begging and crying and saying there is nothing we can do, they declared themselves and came out and said, we're not going to pay rent. And that forced the state to do something, not what we wanted to,

because basically all the money that the state gave was to the landowners were at least protected and allowed for the tenants to stay in their homes. Because if we hadn't spoken out and we haven't come out and denounce the system and said, we're not going to pay rent, a lot of eviction, more evictions would have happened across the time. So it's political in the sense that we're building power. and pedagogical because we're learning about the fact, and yes, this is an experiment. We've only, how many years ago of the Tenance Union right now, we've got. We're nine years into the Tenance Union, and we're still learning what the fight looks like,

and different locals have their own responses to this situation, and we're coming with different experiments in different parts of the city. But it has to start with the tenants coming together, who now are more and more a majority, and it has to happen because the system is in crisis. the politicians, the Democrat, where in a Democrat city, in a Democrat city, in the richest state in the country? And they cannot solve the problem. It is time for also take control. Yeah, brilliant and inspiring stuff. And I love your point about these formal tenant rights being a mirage of progress, which are then held up by liberal politicians as like real wins when they are actually very hollow and empty.

And I love Tracy's point about this framing of living in community versus creating community. And that creation of community is a really interesting framework as opposed to merely living in an area. These are people's lives. These are their connections, their friends, their families, their coworkers, and their participation is an act of creation. So I really, really appreciated that. Let's go ahead and build on what you're talking about with the union, because in your book, you highlight many of the strategies that your organization have employed in their fight against predation and exploitation. Can you talk about these marches, eviction,

defenses, rent strikes, and the creative strategies that you employ in the fight against the people in power. Yeah, I mean, we can just take turns, talking about some of them as they come up, you know. In the forming of the Tenants Union, I think one of the things that would call my attention is basically that we were starting things against the conventional wisdom or common sense, right? Like the fact for the tenants on Section 8 that if you did this 10, 15 years ago and we said, oh, you know, the Section 8, tenants have lost their rights.

rights and their covenant is ending. Lawyers and organizations, we say, oh, there's nothing you can do. And we just have to help this tenant and say, okay, help them move out somewhere else and do something. And yet we decided to fight back and take over the building and negotiate extra 10 years of, to

stay in their build, which was really amazing. In East Hollywood, the organizers and the tenants in East Hollywood, they started taking on the whole situation of tenants just didn't know where their landowners live. And tenants didn't have a sense how the landlord was benefiting from the rent.

So they started these marches in the neighborhoods where the tenants were, where the landlords were living, shaming the landlords in front of the neighbors, pasting flyers all over the neighborhood, and calling out the landlord and really forcing the landlord to negotiate and to give concessions to the tenants, which, again, before it didn't just to happen. You had to wait for an eviction to happen to help them.

So here's the tenants themselves, getting out of their neighborhood, calling all the tenants across the city to come and join them in the marches in the neighborhoods where people had never been before in all these tenants. In Boyle Heights, we have this situation where, you know, something that happens sometimes when you're organizing tenants, you solve the problem of the tenant as a unit, and they say, okay, good, now I don't have to worry about it. But the problem is they don't look outside of their building.

They don't look outside of the neighborhood, and they're missing out the problems that exist in the neighborhood. So basically, in our neighborhood, we also are talking about, you know, covering the potholes, cleaning up the alleys, making alleys safer for the community. And in the process of engaging themselves on improving these alleys or putting stoplights or doing things like that, they take ownership of the larger neighborhood and they also become leadership within the neighborhood that then supports them when they fight for their rights. Or it starts pushing and negotiating for changes in the neighborhood. So in some cases, we've been able to get stoplights to slow down traffic, put stop signs in different places,

put lighting on the alleys. We use the alleys as places to move in nights. during the pandemic, there was all these illegal evictions, and it was very interesting, you know, they looked protected the tenants for being pushed out of the apartments, and we've had all the tenants would come back, take over the, I've been breaking into the homes and bringing the tenants back into their places. So these are some of the things that I can think of right now. You can add or enhance some of the stuff that I was talking about, Tracy. Yeah, I mean, I think that also just the way that you narrated is really important to us,

is thinking, you know, like thinking of the union as, you know, as an experiment and as a collection of these different locals that are responding to, that have the autonomy to respond to local conditions, East Hollywood foregrounding direct confrontations with landlords, making evictions personal for the landlords in the way that it's personal for us. Like our Northeast chapter is really like built around socializing the knowledge of struggle and bringing people together through, you know, like the geography that they're working with is a lot of people living in, you know, small backhouses where it's not, where they don't necessarily have the same tools, right? So how do they create the social base with people who have

different landlords to come together and support each other in their, as a collective in their unique struggles. Like our K-town local, you know, was really formed around the K-3 tenant council, which is a council of tenant associations who are all struggling against the same landlord. And so, like, you know, thinking about how that building can, you know, not be outside of their building to organize across the landlord's portfolio. And then thinking about the east side, you know, it's really, you know, foregrounding strategies of reclaiming territory of the neighborhood, of reclaiming the alleys as backyards, building bus stops for seniors to sit, waiting for the bus, painting crosswalks, and then engaging the state to extract those concessions from the state

to change the conditions of the neighborhood. And so I think that, you know, it's a way to say that part of what we do is empower people to respond to their local conditions and then create the spaces of assembly where we can reflect on those actions. And I know that, I mean, I'm quoting Leo, right, who often talks about how it is our, you know, it's our practice to act our way into thinking, right? To start by, you know, taking action in our material conditions and then we're on what we did and so that we can socialize that knowledge, share that knowledge and grow our power as a union. I also think, you know, one of the things, one of the lessons that I think that we can take, you know, is in so many ways tenants have, have, you know, like what are the

resources that we as collective of tenants have to draw on, right? And those are, those are you know our rent checks that we've talked about there are there are human relationships right there are the foundation of trust that we build with each other there that's form solidarity you know like the i often tell this story because it really sticks with me but in the mariachi strike we know when we interviewed one of the tenants about you know like what gave her the strength to continue in this process. And she said, you know, I, like, eventually I got comfortable enough so that I could borrow an onion from my neighbor, right? So it's like thinking about, like thinking politically about those, that form of neighborliness, right? That is that we should think about as a material

of our struggle, right? And then ultimately, like, where are we getting our power in the union in so many ways. It's simply by staying put. It's in our refusal to leave, you know, like our working against our landlord's plans for what they want to do and staying in our housing. And this, you know, like when we're, you know, like when we're on strike, we're really have, you know, temporary access to housing as a human right. And this is a form of occupation, right? And we learn, I think, a lot from, You know, we really think about our organizing of unhoused tenants as the vanguard of the movement. And so, you know, the occupation, like thinking about occupations as the guide for the whole movement has been really important to us. And, you know, we tell the story of, you know, the Echo Park Rise Up, a group of, you know, 100, 150 unhoused tenants who claimed Echo

Park Lake in the, you know, before and then during the height of the federal pandemic emergency, you know, that and they claimed that space. And in so doing, they were able to organize, you know, a community kitchen so people had access to food, survival supplies, so that when people showed up with nothing. They would have a tent to sleep under. They would have shelter. Um, they'd organize harm reduction, right, so that people in the community who were using drugs had access to Narcan. Um, they, um, you know, had a pact for collective safety. So to like, and community watch. Um, they built a garden so that they could grow plants and vegetables. They made their own showers, um, so that people had access to showers and they you know they brought when the city um and in many ways this was in

opposition to like they cleaned up their neighborhood right when the city um refused trash pickup when the city um shut off the electricity like they organized with their solidarity networks to bring in battery packs so people had phones um and access to you know like all of access to like the rest of society. And so I think that we really learned from that reclamation of space, that claiming of territory that or and people's, you know, organizing their own resources to meet their own needs. And in with and alongside solidarity from the broader union and the community. And that really, I think, shows us, you know, they, they really showed us that they, they were solving the problems of state abandonment for themselves.

They were, like, redistributing their resources, meeting the needs for health care, for shelter, for community. And all of that, like, you know, was being produced in this context of, like, immense abandonment. And I think that when we take that seriously as a movement, it really shows us what we are capable of in reclaiming territory, in recirculating our resources, and imagining us as the managers of a new kind of society. Yeah, I mean, if you look at what's happening in United States, you know, the state is major crisis. I mean, not that we ever had better options or anything like that. But, I mean, just looking at the options that exist right now

in the global context and the local context, the impact. that they're going to have and the conditions of the most poor and the working class is just going to be, at many levels irrelevant. Of course, we can talk about specific, targeted things where maybe it would be better to have one over the other, but the reality is that overall the system is not functioning at the economic and political level. Democracy has lost all credibility. So these spaces, these places where people are coming together, it's about the construction

of a democracy. It's about people coming together and decided to remain in their place and building community in the place where they live in and building a different kind of democracy that is from the bottom of where basically everything that Tracy said, you know, people set their priorities and act on those priorities because nobody else is going to do it for them. So when we think of the Tenants Union as a union

that organized its tenants to address their crisis of housing, that's one side of it. The other start of it, we're talking about people in their neighborhoods coming together to take over their cities. And I think we need to think in those terms because as you build power and the ability to remain where you live, then you have the power to then transform the place that you live in. And to do that, you have to have the organization that helps construct that power. So no matter who gets selected, you decide what's important for you and you act on it and force those foreign power supposedly to do what you need. Now, right now, it's just the beginning, it's a dream, but we've seen in every action that we've taken how the conditions have changed.

When tenants decide to push back into their homes after they've been evicted legally and the landlord does nothing, there you are. When the tenants of northeast Los Angeles come together and learn from each other how to fight back in court without a lawyer, at win, there you are. When you have the tenants in both heights deciding where they want to stop like and they get that stop like there you are. With the tenants of East Hollywood, cross-neighborhood borders and invade the territory of the landlords, there we are showing that power. All this is happening because in a building that is in a block that is in a neighborhood, tenants are coming together. Yeah, absolutely. And I think anybody that listens to those amazing responses will understand, why if you're at all interested or engaged in activism and organizing of any sort, but

specifically around the housing crisis, this is a must-have resource for people to take advantage of out there. We do a lot of episodes with different tenant unions. We have one here in Omaha that we've had on the show many, many times, and I just want to take a second to recommend that they check out this book, support the authors, but just learn from this text and from these experiences that Leonardo and Tracy have because they're so crucial and that's the only way forward it's the only way forward the government's not going to save you the democratic party's not going to save you this broken system isn't going to reform itself it's bottom up

community mass base power that is our only hope for a livable um and decent future now that the title of the book is abolish rent which is a revolutionary demand keeping open the horizons of struggle beyond mere reforms to the existing system and toward a radically new one wherein housing is not a commodity but a human right. So with that in mind, and I'm really interested in as we get towards the end of this conversation, what is the ultimate vision that each of you hold for housing and beyond? And what does socialism or communism mean to you in this context? I mean, I can tell the story of, you know, one of the members of our South Central local Inez, who, you know, the way that she narrated her, the transformation of her thinking about communism by participating in the

union, forming an association at Flower Drive, and, you know, to stop the eviction of her entire block, you know, for the needs of landlords and developers. And what she said, you know, it's like when she first heard the word communism, she thought it was about being, controlled. And now she recognizes it as having control. What it does communism mean she, you know, she said it means like community. It means like, you know, what she imagines is a communist union that is capable of collective control of having a home for everybody. And I think that, you know, you know, as we work in our communities, we and reflect on the work. that we do. The names that we call it, I think, are in some ways less important than those

actions that we're taking. And the reflection on those actions is really where we get the access to those critiques of, oh, we need an entirely other kind of system and maybe what we heard about, you know, what the ideological project of the American dream and the propaganda that we receive about, like, even how history is made. Like, maybe all of that is wrong. And so I think I want to foreground the actions, the really revolutionary actions that tenants are taking right now as we think about what that future might be. And I think that, you know, when we look at, you know, Echo Park Lake and what people were able to claim, what we, when we look at, you know, the Second Street Tenants Association, taking back their garden and turning it into a meeting

space, a space where they do food distribution, I think that we can see the relationship between these defensive practices and these offensive practices that really are headed towards changing our relationships to each other, building those tides of community. that change the relationship to our housing, right, that displace the power of landlords to decide what is happening to the places that we live. And then, like, changing our relationships to our cities and to land, right? Like, as we build local chapters to extract those concessions from the state and take care of our own needs, I think that that is really pointing us to what that horizon might be. And so rather than, you know, like, rather than blame that we have the answer, I think just to be grounded in the real, you know, the really existing movement to abolish the present state of things that is happening right now.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, for me, there is a large global struggle that is happening at this moment against imperialism and hyper-imperialism that is trying to respond to those conditions. the United States is at the center of that struggle as an enemy, we may say. And then inside there is this deconstruction, slow deconstruction of the system itself that they're trying to sell on imposing the rest of the world. And I just have an image that responds to this thing and importance of what we're trying to do here. And a street corner on Fickett and Wabash in our neighborhood,

there is a stoplight that tenants spend seven years organizing to push to to get in there. And this started by tenants organizing by painting the slow down lines, the yellow, the white and black lines that slow traffic down. And then I couldn't know their own fake cross guards to slow down traffic that later on became the stoplight that we now have. In the opposite end on Cesar Chavez, we have the same kind of situation where a hundred people will cross the street to slow down traffic every day to force the city to put a stoplight. Right next to that corner in Ifica and Wabash, there is an alley where someone got bitten up someday a long time ago

and the tenants decided to clean the alley and to clear all the junk there and became like the authority in that neighborhood that made sure that that alley would stay clean and that then forced the city to do, rather than do symbolic clean-ups in the main streets, to come to that neighborhood to clean up the street on a regular basis and to bring dumpsters to clear the trash and the junk

that periodically accumulates there, to clean that place. A couple of blocks from there, another committee is distributing food every other week because they started that since the pandemic. In the same corner, you have stove bench

benches for this bus stop so people can stay there. And some people in some places have put all these sides that say, please don't pick up after your dog. All of this stuff has happened through community organizing over the years.

and forcing the city to do what they need to do. All this stuff has happened through the leadership of this committee. So when people in the committee have problems, I mean, in the neighborhood, have problems, they go to people in the committee and say, hey, we're having this problem. And then this committee comes together, and organizers, if they can respond to the problem, they'll respond to the problem. If not, they go to the city and push the city to do this stuff. Another thing that I think I forgot, that is also so very important.

Along this path of this committee, along this street and picket, there is to be a lot of drug dealing. and the community started organizing all these activities on the street to create presence and really like shift the presence of the drug dealing and minimize it to a certain degree, to such a degree that eventually the police was no longer needed. And when they had a big fare on that street and the police said, oh, we're going to be there to protect you. The community said, we don't need you here.

To me, it is the community becoming aware that they are the ones who have to manage what happens in the neighborhood, that they're the ones who decide what needs to happen in the neighborhood. And then building that project as a project that happens in every neighborhood, in every community. So we built what I was talking about earlier. A people's democracy, they start with the most poor, deciding what they want against a capital system that tells them how the city should be. There is a contradiction between the city that we want to live in and the city their capitalism builds to speculate, to create consumerism, to move traffic and to move goods across. us the city. The city that we want to live in is different from that. And these communities

are building that. So that's where we're going. But it's a project that has to be organized, has to be militant, and has to be put together by everybody who lives in the city, who believes that the possibility is there for us to have a better system. Perfectly said. Absolutely. It's about taking our lives into our own hands. It's about transcending a system of exploiters and exploited, the rich and the poor. It's about humans growing up. That's what communism means to me, advancing past what Albert Einstein called this predatory phase of human development, class society, where humanity is split up between those who have and those who don't, those who rule and those who are ruled over. That is something that I think

my vision of communism is humanity overcoming precisely that. And I think we're organizing towards that whenever we engage in activity like the L.A. Tenants Union and so many other organizations and movements throughout history and in the present. As a way to wrap up this conversation, I would really love, this is a big question, but you can take it in any direction that you would like. What advice would you give to anyone out there listening right now who might want to join, start their own, or take their existing tenant organizing to the next level. You know, when we talk with different organizers in different places, a lot of times we get asked, okay, how do we do this? And I think that that is the wrong question. The question for me is,

why do we have to do something? And we just need to do something. The other part of it is a lot of times, these are individuals asking the question as individuals trying to the stuff. We need to build a collectivity with our neighbors, with other organizers, with other people. Understand that this project is a collective social process, and that is difficult at times, right? We're not always agreeing. Writing the book, Tracy and I didn't, not always agreed, but we had to figure out how to get past our disagreements to put together a book. We're in the locals. We don't always agree on these things, but the collectivity is very, very important. So it's not about how to do this, but why do we need to start doing something? And as I, we said before, you know,

it is not about thinking our way into acting. It's not about predicting how things should look like, but really testing what we believe needs to happen and start doing it little by little. And if more people do it together, a larger impact we're going to have. And of course, we're going to make mistakes. But if we don't risk making mistakes, we're not going to do anything. And I think that's very, very important. So start by doing, do it collectively. And I know that if you're right, the community and the people that surround you are going to push back and join you in this process.

100%. Tracy? Just to echo what Leo said and say that. you know, we're asking, like, why is it important to do this? And then starting with, like, what is one thing that we're capable of doing now in this small group, right? Like, it only takes two other people to start knocking on doors to hold a meeting. And it might even just take one. And so I think that, you know, thinking about not the horizon from the get, but just that next right action? What is something that this group of people is capable of that we think responds to the

conditions that we're in that takes us on the path to get there? And I think that we have to commit to this understanding that this is a long process and it will take a long time. And many people have come before us who've paved the path for us. And it's our task to continue to pave the path so people can pick it up after us. And that process takes faith. You know, is it the question that you can ask about why you're committed to this? Part of what you do when you answer that question is speak to that fate, is to this desire for an entirely other way of organizing our relationships to each other

and our time, like our precious time on this earth. And I think recognizing that it's a worthy use of that minimal amount of time And, yeah, and knowing that a small action actually has the capacity to create a lot larger actions in the future. Definitely, definitely. The book is Abolish Rent, How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Thank you so much, Tracy and Leonardo, not only for coming on the show, not only for writing this book, but for your years and years of organizing on the ground in your communities to make life better. move the ball and and pave the road, as Tracy says, for those that come after.

Highly recommend this book. Before I let both of you go, can you just please let listeners know where they can find you, your book, and any other work that you do online? I mean, you know, the saying is wherever books are sold, but of course you can buy it on the Haymarket website. I'm, you know, on Instagram and I won't say the new name, Twitter at Tracy Rosenthal underscore. and Leonardo, Leo, I'm going to mix you up with your keg. What's your handle? I was just about to check because my son and I have the same name.

I will always get confused. I looked it up. It's Vilchus Leonardo. Yeah. And we're also at Uniondevicinos.org. Well, look at us at L.A. Tenant's Union at the Eastside Local of the L.A. Tenant's Union. Perfect. to as much of that as possible in the show notes

to make it even easier for people to contact the union, find you on Instagram, get the book, etc. Again, thank you so much for the work and for being so generous with your time today. Thank you so much for having us. Kill a mic, bamboo. You already know.

Yeah. No surprise, I'm from a gang-bang culture, but we can keep it civil up for the thing-thang on you. Southern California where the sun don't quit into generational gang. Don't quit, but immediately you see that the primes that's in my city A secondary till us propelling it in my city I mean really break it down

Take poor black and brown Educate them poor take the jobs from my big town Then inundate them with sedative drugs and dumb TV Locked into a zoo and hunted daily by the police Then you get a group of youth who know they don't belong Then they gather up and organize a number up strong But see the failure isn't seeing that the problem ain't the gang It's the situation in the communities where we hang

So I'm so pro gang it might scare a motherfucker Cause I fix the misconception that the enemies are brothers Bang on the setup bang on the setup bang on the setup Upset the setup bang on the set up bang on the setup Bain on the setup Homie we've been set up I tell them I went from a street gang thing Then I joined a military fleet Marine force thing

From a little bitty gang in the south of Los Angeles To dragon bodies out of their house to help a government Who hell bit on keeping money spent on the missile. The reality's the difference between them shits is little. We had the objective of arming up over money and they had the objective of arming up over money. And we told kids join us, we the truth. Lies about protecting our block to get recruits. Then we found that we're getting killed for a hood and we don't own a single speck of dirt on that hood, whether in a zone down south in Decatur or in a flatlands off of Lennox and LaBraya or in a low-rise project

In Chicago, big money coming and buy up our body off. Throw your sets up. We're about to upset the setup. We're about to upset the setup. Up to upset the setup. Throw your sets up. We're about to upset the setup. Upset the setup.

I do it for the Crips and the blooders. BGF brothers. The real free Ray Ricky Ross and Chris Dutters. I do my thing for Hoover. I represent for Ford. So my folk and my people throw they set to support. Supporting me to Matthew. She might say the shot.

So maybe next summer no mama's got to cry Because maybe next summer nobody got to die Hell, even if we fail Somebody got to try The only way the system rule is somebody got a lie And the lie they told is old They base it on your race They separate you black, you brown, you yellow and white face

Then we further separate by joining gangs and let you slates At our neighborhoods and now in war like we are separate states So the police occupy our hood to keep down all the drama So the Starbucks they just built is comfortable for soccer mama An American apparel comfortable for all the hipsters And it's zero tolerance for all you spicks and you niggas And you chinks and you cracklers And it ain't about who writer

And it ain't about who blacker But the money is a factor And the factor is the factor we've got moved up Doctor Hood When starvation is present And absent is a jar A man with simple scar Or he will form a mob If you should form a mafia

Then you should think Sicilian Bada hood for real Every block, every bill Every bill Feed the chill Game Bank Game, bang, builds, beat the children, feed the children, beat the children, game bang, on the sisters.