Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 362: The War On Tenants (w/ special guests Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis)

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

This week we're joined by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis to discuss their excellent new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. We discuss a wide range of topics, from the rent relation, to the state's relationship to landlords and developers, and finally to how the struggle against rent is ultimately a part of the land struggle. Please purchase their book here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent And you can support us on Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Music Welcome to the show, Trubilli family. We are joined by two very special guests this week. Returning guest, Tracy Rosenbaum and their co-author Leonardo Vilches. Did I say your last name right? Is it Vilches? Perfect. The best exciting so far okay great I'm very excited to interview both of you I love the book it was you know Tracy had hyped it up to me for months and it's kind of like a how-to guide it's well it's a lot of things it's a critique it's a how-to guide of how to organize tenant unions. It's you know, there's all kinds of ways we can take this conversation, but to like ground us, to like start us off here. What I wanted to do was just make some observations from just this

past week mixed with some that you include in your in your book. So first thing on the docket, we have a tweet from L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. The sheet is a base or bass bass bass. OK, it was me. I'd say bass. But, oh, yeah, 15 people used to live here. Yes, it was a tweet. Yes, it showed an empty sidewalk and a triumphant message of victory. It said 15 people Died walk. Yes

very very disturbing image a very disturbing message like you could if it was if this was a compassionate person you would read that as Like a oh Jesus like that's a very, you know dark and depressing observation But no, it's from her point of view, this is a triumphant victory. And, but, you know, just like I said, going through the docket here, I also have, this is just from the Wall Street Journal, a statistic. U.S. is on track to set a new record for unhoused people with over 650,000 people living on the streets. The. Wait, it's five hundred thousand, no? Six hundred fifty. It's six hundred fifty thousand, not fifty thousand.

Did I say six hundred fifty thousand? What did I say? I heard six hundred and fifty thousand. Oh, my God. I just heard fifty thousand. Please delete this. You guys edit, right? No, this is all. Relax, Tracy, relax. Breathe in and out.

Oh my God. I'm being bullied. About those streets, by the way, we're currently in the middle of an unprecedented climate disaster in the Southeast. I'm sure all of you saw the footage from Hurricane Helene, decimated at least six different states, has displaced a lot of people. And as of this recording, Hurricane Milton is barreling towards Florida and was sure to displace a lot more people. And also another thing, this was pointed out

by the Debt Collective, just as a little example of what we could probably expect in the new climate, the Asheville Public Housing Authority is forcing its tenants to pay rent at this moment of displacement. And we'll get, I wanna touch a lot about on public housing in this episode. It's something that you all touch on in your book and it's a very important thing.

But again, just going down the list here, now these are some statistics pulled from your book. So the book is called Abolish Rent, How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. According to your book, almost half a million affordable housing covenants nationwide will expire in the next eight years. In 2021, for the first time in US history, the appreciation of a median home outstrips the median salary. So owning a home now makes more money than work. There are 100 million tenants in the US

and 22 million households spend more than a third of their income on rent. It would take four full-time minimum wage jobs to afford rent, to rent a typical two-bedroom apartment in the US. And every minute of the day, landlords file seven evictions. That's seven evictions per minute. So that's 3.6 million evictions per year. Really, I think this kind of like lays out, perhaps the conjuncture

we're at, you know, climate crisis, perhaps a war on the horizon as well. And these, I guess you could call them social or demographic bombs that are kind of like, you know, on the horizon for us. And so I kind of just wanted to start out this discussion with how you all start the book. You know, you write that like, the current crisis that we're in, it's not, it's framing it as a housing crisis is inadequate, it doesn't quite fully capture

what's before us. What is the problem with that framing? Like what is the actual crisis in front of us? I mean one way to think about it and it might seem at first like a pedantic point to talk about the framing of this crisis as a housing crisis right but I think part of it is that when we think about who experiences this crisis right like it's tenants tenants, tenants who are starving to pay rent, who are doubling up in their housing, who are taking on third and fourth jobs, who are giving up medications and like basic necessities to ensure that they have enough money to pay for a human need, right? And so I think that for us as tenant organizers,

we have to follow the experiences of the poor and working class people that we're organizing with and alongside, right? And from our perspective, right? Like that housing crisis, right? The idea that there is a crisis of a system that from their perspective, that crisis is permanent, right? Like housing for poor and working class people

has always been in crisis. People have always been pushed out and displaced, have always struggled to put a roof over their head. And so what may seem like a pedantic point also, I think really constrains our imaginations for like what solutions there are and who is going to bring them about. When we talk about this language of the housing crisis, we're often focused on policymakers,

on economists, and on the developers and landlords themselves, the owners of our housing, the people who invest in housing, the people who profit from housing, suddenly this framing of a housing crisis really like imagines or presents those people, right? The people who are benefiting from tenant immiseration as the people who are gonna solve this crisis, right? And so I think for us, you know, we wanted to make it clear that it's the thing

that produces this crisis, right? Is the power relations between produces this crisis, right, is the power relations between landlords and us, right? We could have a very different system of organizing where we live. But you know, it's like this housing system that we're in to say that it is in crisis is to imagine that one day that system could work, right? But what does that system do, right? I think it's really important to think about a system, the point of the system is its outcomes, right? So if the purpose of a system is what it does,

what does our housing system do? It puts trillions of dollars into the hands of landlords and real estate speculators, and it ejects people into the streets, right? So like in the years of the 2010s, in that decade alone, landlords raked in $4.5 trillion. As you said at the top of the show, we are now entering record levels of homelessness.

And so I think that framing the housing system as a crisis, it kind of ignores the fact that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine, right? Our capitalist housing system doesn't exist to provide the best quality housing to the most people. It is designed to maximize profits and extract the most rents. And the consequences of that system is increased poverty, displacement, and homelessness. And so this is why this chapter is like that when we start the book, we name rent itself as the crisis, right?

Right. Like the idea that we have to pay for a human need, the idea that we live in a society structured by this power relation, where we have to hand over our wages as a monthly tribute to people that are already richer than us so that they can build more wealth and hoard more places where we can live. Yeah, just one quick thing. And I think also the important thing about naming it the housing crisis is that this language only appears when the system is no longer able to hide its problem. And coming from public housing, Union de Vecinos, our local, got started with the demolition of public housing and we were fighting against

that demolition. And as we were fighting against the demolition, everybody and their grandmother, the nonprofits, the politicians, the speculators, the investors, the experts, urban planners, the college professors, everybody would talk to, they would say, oh, don't worry about it. There's a whole new program that is developing of affordable housing and public-private partnerships. And basically our tenants themselves, as they were moving out, they were realizing that this new system wasn't working out. So it became a crisis when the people who were buying into the system realized that it wasn't working.. So it became a crisis when the people who were buying into the system realized that it wasn't working. And you know, you see it in 2008, you see all these processes, but basically

the people who the system is supposed to serve are reacting, are responding. And now we call it the housing crisis. And as Tracy says, it's just an excuse to then keep the machine going and hiding the fact with new promises. And this is the 19th century. I mean, like you read Engels, the housing question and it's a literal exact description of what's happening right now. Right. Maybe like, you know, the, the rise of housing crisis and dominant discourse like only occurs when a problem that has existed permanently for poor and

working class people spreads to the middle and upper middle classes, right? Like, and that's when it becomes like that's when it's named as a crisis is in that in its point of generalization, not actually naming like the underlying system that has existed permanently. See also opioid crusts. Exactly. See also opioid crisis. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's a fascinating point because yes, I think the average American, or I always say the average American, I don't mean to invoke something that mythologically may or may not exist, but in our discourse anyways, housing crisis is framed as something that

is an outgrowth of or the cause of what happened in 2008. And we understand it exclusively from that point of view. What your book does is you're basically trying to recenter like analytically and, and, and materially the site of struggle. And so, yes, that's why rent is identified as the, as the point of crisis. And so, you know, one thing that I love so much about your book is there's just so many stories in it. And like I said, in many ways, it's kind of like a how-to guide

of how to not only organize just the bare bones of a tenant union or a tenant association, but also what you're doing socially, what you're doing culturally, what you're doing materially while you're in the process of doing that. So Leo, this is kind of more of a question more for you, but I wanted to talk about the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Could you talk a little bit about your history with that? Like why it got started, when, and yeah, what you've been able to do with it over the years? Well, I mean, so since our local LA Ten, the Union de Vecinos, Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, got formed like 30 years before the Tenants Union. And it came out in response to the demolition of public housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, which was the largest housing project west of the Mississippi. At the time when the decision had happened, the community had gone through a long, protracted process of organizing by Dolores Mission Church. Basically, in that community, the leadership of the church, there were Jesuits who were coming from Latin America, influenced by liberation theology. We're working on a concept of church that was basically everybody around the neighborhood, everybody who's part of the neighborhood gets to, has to be organized.

With the idea that from that theology that really, it is the poor who make history. It is the poor who have to, who change their own conditions and through their own visions and their own dreams are building the society that we live in. And our role is to accompany the poor in this process. So the people in that community, in that parish,

the 1,100 families who live in the projects, were benefiting from a process of organizing that was addressing by police violence, gang violence, and immigration rates. And they did a hunger strike to fight for unity of families. When it came to the gang members, rather than calling the police and asking for more jails, they decided to develop a relationship with the gang members. And in the process of developing that relationship, they started to figure out how to negotiate the problems that come with gangs and the situation, the excessive drug dealing, the shootings and all that stuff. The community developed the mechanisms to address those problems, to manage those problems, to intervene with those issues were happening. While the rest of the city was just saying more jails and more police, the community was managing the issue. And the issue of the gangs, of course, is bigger than the housing projects and what's happening in that community. But they were managing it. They knew what to do better than the police. You know, the police

always would come right after the shooting what happened. The community would stop the shooting before it happened. The police would put people in jail just to prevent something. The community would like have dinners with the children and talk to them so nothing would happen. So it was a preventive process, a managing process. But at the same time, the housing authority decided to say, we're gonna demolish these projects. And the excuse that they were giving

was the violence in the community. And of course, everybody who lived in the neighborhood said, well, this is not true. We're not afraid, We know what to do. We know how to confront these things. And the problem is bigger than us, bigger than what happens in this housing project. But lo and behold, you know, the Housing Authority offered millions of dollars to nonprofit organizations and organizations around us to say demolition is a good thing, housing is going to be better for the people. But nobody told them that two thirds of the people were going to be pushed out. So we organized to stop the demolition of the projects, the community organized to fight back and in the process, we came up with the idea that basically this housing was the housing of the people of the community that they had paid for it over and over that in this context, they have created a space for them that was that they had paid for it over and over, that in this context they have created a space for them

that was family and community, positive community experiences. And we fought and fought and fought for many years. And at the end of the process, our members, the members of the Tenan Union de Vecinos were able to gain a contract that allowed them to stay during the development of the project, to have a house at the end of the process

and to have the housing that they wanted, that they deserved. So we started working with the families that were displaced. And as we went to talk to the families that were displaced, we found horrible problems with slum housing, really, really bad conditions, hostile, terrorist landlords that were always carrying them into paying more rent, making more charges on their housing, and the city department that didn't care about the conditions of the housing. So we started going to all the tenant and advocate organizations, and basically all of them were saying, oh, we need to produce more housing.

We need to support all the programs that build more housing. And our tenants would go to the housing and support these campaigns. And when they would go apply for the housing, they wouldn't qualify. They didn't have the right credit, they didn't have the right history, they have the right income, so on and so forth. So it became very clear for us that that wasn't the solution to the problem. So we started saying, well, we need more policies that protect the tenants and that actually expand the rights of tenants to organize. And we'll go to the politicians and the policy makers and we'll say, well, that's

not really what we want. What we want to do is deal with zoning and all the issues that have to do with production. Again, sort of like what Tracy's describing. So we came up with other ideas, said, well, you know what? We need to have something that's centered around tenants. We need to attend as union and organization of tenants in the city. And we started a little tenants union in Boil Heights with bringing the tenants together and organizing.

But the problems were bigger than the Boil Heights community were working. They were across the city. And we started going to foundations and the foundations would say, well, you know, we need to start it. We don't have capacity. We need were across the city. And we started going to foundations, and the foundations would say, well, you know, we need to study it. We don't have capacity, we need to study the problem. Nothing would happen. At the same time, some of us in Union de Vecinos were members of this arts group called Ultra Red. We're done right here from Los Angeles. And we were doing a lot of work on neoliberalism, which was connected to the issue of public housing. And we were like really asking questions about how is neoliberalism affecting us here and the rest of the world. We

went to Ireland, we went to Finland, we went to Spain, different places. And we learned a lot about neoliberalism and the things that we had in common between the United States and the rest of the world, which opened up our understanding that, you know, this whole notion that United States is different. No, we're saying the United States is part of the whole world. And our understanding that, you know, this whole notion that United States is different. No, we're saying United States is part of the whole world. And not only that, looking from Los Angeles, United States looks more and more like the third world. But the problem with this whole artist process is that whatever we were learning, we were not able to apply

or to develop within the city. And also as we develop a lot of knowledge, there was not much that we could do in terms of practically, organizationally. So we started doing this experiment called School of Echoes. And School of Echoes was basically inviting people to come to dinners, to gatherings, in garages, in artist spaces. And the people who were invited was everybody and their grandmother. You know, if you're an activist that you were concerned about the issues of the city, you're invited. If you're a person that lives in the neighborhood and is concerned about the issues in your

neighborhood, you're invited. Everybody that we knew was invited. And out of that circle, there were several circles that we started developing. People started talking about the issues in the neighborhood and a wave of gentrification was going through Los Angeles, in Echo Park, in Silver Lake, in Boyle Heights. So people started talking about, and who were the first targets? Were the tenants. So again, in that place, we started talking about the need to form a Tenants Union and we started having conversations around that.

So after lots of discussions, we come to a meeting and we start talking about, well, what is it like to form a Tenants Union? And at that meeting, everybody starts again speculating on how to form a Tenants Union. And Tracy here decided to say, well, you know what, Tenants Union has members. So here's my $5. I'm the first member of Tenants Union. So here we have member 001 of the Tenants Union. But really the impetus of saying, let's just do it, is what created Tenants Union. Because of the relationships that you know, but really the impetus of saying, let's just do it is what created Tenants Union. Because of the relationships that we had in the other neighborhoods, people started engaging in the struggles

in other neighborhoods. So people who had Section 8, that basically were ignored by the system because they were saying, oh, you know, your Section 8 binds you to this building. And if this building doesn't want to take Section 8, you have to move out. They decided to fight back and say, no, we're going to stay.

In other places where they were going, illegal evictions were happening, the tenants wanted to stay. The tenants started working with them to bring them back into their homes, even though lawyers were saying, no, that's too complicated. Let's wait until that and then we'll sue. We said, no, we're going to push them back inside. In a context where people forever were saying, I want to withhold rent and the lawyers were telling us, oh no, this is too complicated, try to negotiate

with the landlord or maybe negotiate your way out. We started supporting tenants to withhold rent. And then, you know, we started building a movement that became the LA Tenants Union across the city, six locals that now has become like 12 locals everywhere it's interesting that I think that this is a there's a tension in the book and I think that this is the thing that you're sort of driving at which is that like there there is this idea that there are rights for people and this This kind of gets at a thread in the book that like Tom and I have hammered home ever since the show has began

but there's a whole cottage industry and sector of the economy really that is what you would call like the NGO or like nonprofit industrial complex and they can plug into these struggles and You know show up at your doorstep and say, well, here are your rights, we can provide a lawyer for you and all this. But it's not, it's basically aimed at either getting concessions out of the individual or out of the group, but not out of like a movement.

And what you're describing is essentially trying to not only, not only just build a movement, it's much deeper than that. There are multiple times in this book where there are struggles over gardens. That becomes the site of struggle, like a communal space in a building or on a property. And to me, it shows that there are like two conflicting ways of life here, two conflicting, really civilizational struggles or, or, uh, you know, ways of being in life ways. And it's like, on the one hand, there's the pursuit of profit and thronging and conflicting really civilizational struggles or or you know ways of being in life ways and it's like on the one hand there's the pursuit of profit and

throwing everything towards that and then the other that's like building communities where we look after each other take care of each other provide for our needs and the work in the tenant union builds towards that right it's not something that you can just like say, well, here are our little rights and like we can, you know, get a lawyer to help us work through that and get these concessions. Like you're trying to not just get concessions

for large amounts of people, you are trying to literally build a movement in a different way of being basically. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just to go back to what Leo was talking about, right? Like when we sit, when we think about like, where's the nonprofit industrial complex fitting in, in the like history of US housing policy, right? Like the destruction of the public housing projects, that was a Clinton project, right? Like this is part of the Democrats making their own

participation in the abandonment of poor and working class people and their alignment with real estate developers and landlords, right? And so these are like liberal forms of abandonment. This is Los Angeles. It's a one party city in a one party state, right? And at the same moment, you know, in this moment of the abandonment of federal resources from community problems and in the devolution of federal responsibility for problems that people are having in their neighborhood, right? Like these nonprofits emerge at that moment and they're both tasked with dealing with the immense fallout of austerity. And then at the same time, right, in engaging in some of these political processes. But what often what we see, right, is that tenants who relate to

these NGOs or these support networks, they're treated as individual clients, they're treated as victims, and either they're being helped as individuals by social services, or they're being helped on the defense in the state of emergency that is going to housing court. Right. And these are both sort of individual casework solutions to addressing what is ultimately a massive political problem, right? So I think the formation of the union is also about thinking of tenants as political subjects who are capable of organizing, right? And changing the balance of power that we have through collectivizing risk. You know, we say like organizing is the alchemy that turns shared vulnerability into shared power, right? It is a vision for tenants as political agents and political subjects. And all of these systems

have emerged to basically depoliticize the struggle, to make it a bureaucratic process, to make it a forms of negotiation, and to individualize all of the problems. And I think that the way that you situated our rights, too, I think it's really important that we remember that all of the laws that we have right now that benefit tenants were won through a historic process of struggle, right? It was rent strikes, in many cases organized by militant communists in the 20s that got us the first forms of rent control. It was forms of tenant militancy that produced even the basic habitability standards that mean that we have windows in our bedroom. And so I think that, you know, we have experience in our own union, right? Like, and maybe we'll talk more about rent

strikes later, but like, you know, I think we really learned this lesson when the Mariachi rent strike happened, which is a story that we tell in the book also. But basically that building through a rent strike was able to change the conditions of governance in their building. It was a non rent stabilized building that through organizing, through a rent strike, through their engagement with the larger union, was able to bring their landlord to the negotiating table and win the equivalent of rent stabilization for their building. So they were actually changing the contractual structures that govern their building

without appealing to that long legal process, right? And we have a fantasy in this country that legislation is like the end goal and the vanguard of political possibility, right? But what we're doing in the union has shown us that actually it's organized tenants who are extracting these concessions both from the landlord and from the state that make those changes in the laws possible, right? I mean, James Boggs said rights are what you make and what you take. And we see that, you know, both in our buildings, when like, you know, technically speaking,

we have rights to heat in our apartment. Do we live in apartments where every person has heat? No, right? If rights are what you take, they're only as good as their enforcement. And in many cases, we can only enforce the rights we have through organized struggle. And how do we win more rights, right?

Like that process, what we've seen is that it's not that these are like offered as gifts by the elite ruling class that controls our cities, right? They're extracted through processes of collective struggle. Yeah, a couple of things on that too too also. I mean, let's talk just for a start, when we talk about nonprofit corporations, there are corporations, okay? So in the context of the fight against the demolition of the housing projects, the tenants who were living in public housing in 1996,

they went to a nonprofit that helped them organize and said, well, you know, we want the organization to help us in support in fight against the demolition. And they asked for a vote. And there was a vote in the board of directors of this nonprofit, where two thirds of the people who voted voted in favor of demolition. The two thirds that voted in favor of demolition were not residents of public housing. They were the outside advocates, supporters, money, money givers, and that stuff that we're giving this stuff. So when we're talking about this corporate industrial complex, we're talking about corporations that are led by a specific hierarchy with specific interests, with specific relationships. And I mean, all of us probably know about this stuff, probably a lot of the audience. But it's very important to remember that because then in this context also, these non-profit corporations are subcontractors of foundations who are the ones who develop the strategies for change. Yeah, I mean, the strategies for change don't come from the organizations. Organizations implement tactics

to promote the strategies of change that come from the foundation. And these are not strategies for change. These are strategies to reform the system. So at the end of the day, that whole structure assumes that the system is okay as it end of the day, that whole structure assumes that the system is okay as it is, although we need to tweak it here and there to help some people. And really to help some people in the context where tactically somebody's organizing and mobilizing the policy that is possible. Because that's the other thing is very, very important here. It's everything is about what's possible, never about what's impossible. Because if you're about what's impossible, then you're talking about dismantling the whole system and changing it. So that's also the ideological

kind of thing that goes through this organizations, basically implementing the subcontractors, the tactics of the foundation, and pretend that these are the strategies for change. And basically, what we're surrounded is by tactical mobilizations of negotiated defeats in on behalf of the tenants themselves, or on behalf of the people themselves is never about reconstructing the system and addressing that. And it's not centered the people who are most affected. And that's basically why the LA tenants union started doing basically we said, we're centered on the tenants. And as tenants were centered on the most poor and

the most affected, and we're going to move forward. And we have to be careful not to become subcontractors of foundations or of other organizations. And I think too, right, to think of like, what is the right that we want as tenants? It is the human right to housing. And, you know, that and in a sense, I mean, we know that that is in some ways become a cliche because foundations that have attached to it as a kind of like slogan that has no political meaning. But what would it, what would the human right to housing actually look like? It would be shelter without our having to pay for it, right? It would be a transformation of the private property relationships and the policies that govern housing in our country

right now, right? So I think, you know, the demand for rent abolition is the demand for housing as a human right. And that to get to win that right would take an entirely other kind of system, an entirely other kind of world. Completely. And if you look at the pandemic, from the pandemic to today in Los Angeles, the amount of rights that tenants have has expanded tremendously. But these were rights that we're asking for 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Now they're giving it to us because they don't have the capacity to do anything else. And the bad news is all these nonprofit corporations are declaring victory. We have more rights. We have more rights, except that these rights, you can only defend them in the court when you're going through an eviction.

So these rights are completely symbolic and completely ignore what Tracy just said, which is the point of departure is the right to housing. So if these rights don't guarantee you the right to housing, these rights are flawed. These rights do not belong into the struggle of the tenants. And these rights are not transformative of the conditions that create homelessness, displacement and expropriation and the destruction of our communities. Yeah, it's it's interesting. There's a lot to unpack there. I mean, it's like the whole issue, the whole concept of rights in and of themselves generally reflect some fundamental structural changes in political

economy. I mean, I've just, um, listeners of the show will know that I have been banging the drum about Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois for months now, but like something that he's trying to get out in that book is that like the process of the end of slavery was the process of proletarianization. And that process meant that certain rights had to be meted out, because that's what proletarianization was. Like to be a pro you had to have a certain set of rights. In America, housing was never one of those rights. And I think that COVID probably initiated, it's probably too early to tell, and granted we may all four of us have different opinions on how on on this, but it seems like

what we call neoliberalism is decaying and something is replacing it. We don't know what it is, but COVID was a sort of like pivot point in that process and as a result we were probably going to see a fundamental shift in the in the relation of subject to state and all of which is to say that that's what that's what all that rights are rights are just the measurement your measurement from the subject to the state it doesn't have any more fundamental you know liberatory promise than that necessarily because what you're saying is exactly right, Tracy, to have a fundamental right to housing and not only that, but yet to not have to pay rent.

That is a different system, fundamentally, substantively, systematically. And it's interesting, like I think one of the most fascinating chapters in the book, which one of the most fascinating chapters in the book is the last chapter. And it's, I really enjoyed this a lot because it's, you know, you're kind of getting at something that like, you know, a lot of lefties in America haven't talked about a lot a while, but like communists in general just haven't really talked about in a while and that's land reform. We're talking about and it's interesting that like one of the I think it's like a landlord as like laughing my ass off one of the landlords in in the what was

it the Hillside Villa like the guy that said oh yeah it's the Venezuela yeah he said the government efforts to protect Hillside Villa made him feel like I'm in Cuba or Venezuela or Sudan But certainly not the United States So, uh, I don't know it's just we're talking about like a fundamental reorganization of our relationship to the land itself and and how we make Our lives here how we make our families how you know how we make culture how we survive So, you know I I just wanted to talk a little bit about the rent relation because that is the that is the sort of like, you know

Molecular form of what we're talking about here The first chapter opens with like a really great rundown in in my opinion, of all the ways like we can view the rent relation. I mean, I know if you're listening to this, you know what rent is. But um, but what are some like ways we can think of the rent relation that kind of like challenge our preconceived notions of it? Yeah, and I definitely want to get more into thinking about land struggle later and maybe Leo you people to think about rent really for what it is. And in some ways we're writing down all of the things as you said, that we already know, but just to give language to our frustrations,

our sense that this system is completely rigged and completely bullshit, right? So, you know, when we talk about rent, we talk about like the constraints that make it necessary that we have to pay rent all the time, right? We pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of a gun, right? And so what that means is, right,

you don't, you have to pay rent because you have to have a roof over your head. And if you don't own a place to live, you have to pay a landlord for it. So in this way, rent is a fine for a human need. It is a fine for having a human need for housing that you have to pay every month, right? We talk about how rent is a monthly tribute

to people who are already richer than us, right? And this is because I think it's, sometimes we have this, when we look at how things are, we realize, right? Like, oh, like our fucking landlords don't own our homes because they are better than us or smarter than us or more hardworking than us. Our landlords own our homes because at some point

in the past, they or their parents or their parents' parents had more money than us and use that money to take over the spaces where people can live, right? So when we say rent is a monthly tribute, we like mean to really get at what is the power relation that makes like landlord, right? There's a reason why we still use the name landlord that comes from the era of feudalism, right? Like that people that already richer than us have claimed all of the places where we can live. And in order to access it, we have to pay them a tribute.

It's also, you know, like what is this rent that we pay every month, right? Like this is passive income for our landlords, right? The average landlord spends four hours a month, four hours a month, like maintaining a property, right? And it takes four full-time minimum wage jobs to afford the average two bedroom rent. So what is rent, right?

It's the passive income stolen from those of us who work. Right. And again, like what is our what do our landlords do with our money? Right. They take our rent money and they invest it for their gain. Right. So we have to pay rent, which is basically the fee that our landlords have to pay the state to maintain an asset that makes them money over time. And then they get to collect that growth in their wealth. So they use our checks to pay off their mortgage and then they extract tribute from us in perpetuity.

And so what does this mean? Rent is also a trap. People will often say like, paying rent is like throwing money in the trash. Well, it's not really the trash, right? It's our landlord's bank accounts. And while they're getting richer, we're stuck paying rent.

So this system, it's part of the project that continues to consolidate housing in their hands and also keep us broke while making them rich. And then finally, I think it's really important that we think of rent as only like as a relation that is made possible by incredible amounts of state violence, right? The threat, I mean, this is the barrel of the gun part, right? Like we pay rent at the threat of the agents of the state throwing us out of our homes with physical force if we can't pay it, right?

Like that's what an eviction is. Landlords can use their ownership deed and like what is a deed besides a voucher for state violence that they can call, they can cash in that deed, call on the state to eject us out of our homes. And then more than that, right? Like, because it is effectively illegal to be homeless, right, it's effectively illegal to not pay rent. It is a crime in this sense, like because it's a crime to live outside,

because we can be fined, ticketed, jailed, incarcerated, harassed by police if we find ourselves living on the street without housing, right? This means that we pay rent not just because we need housing, but because it's a crime not to have it. It's effectively a crime not to be exploited by a landlord. And so these are some of the ways that we wanted people to understand. This is the depths of depravity that make up our so-called normal housing system. I mean, but let's be clear.

We're talking about capitalism, just basically, where everything that we need for everyday life is commodified. And now we have to pay for it. We pay for bottled water. We pay for it. We pay for bottled water, we pay for housing, we pay for food, and it's all about the extraction of profit throughout the whole process. And that's part of the biggest challenge of this whole situation. So it's very, very important then to look at the tennis movement within the context of a larger picture and within

the national global context. And we're talking about, for example, land reform. Going back to a little bit to what you were talking about before. One of the things that you have been having Latin America, mostly because of the struggles against colonialization and for independence, is that the alliances that had to be developed between the middle-class and the bourgeoisie

with the landless peasants and with indigenous communities, somehow in the constitution, you ended up with right-ofs that say people have a right to land, which continues to feed the machine of revolution and of struggle. In the United States, they killed anything that looks like that.

Anything that looks like that. I mean, we have capitalism and it's more purified form to the degree that all these things seem natural. But there's other places in the world where this is just not accepted, where this is always questioned and where people are always like saying why is it that why do we have to be this way? The whole issue about around rent apart from all this larger global economic situation is the fact that when people are paying rent, if you look at this as a good that you're paying for, you expect at least some kind of results in terms of what happens with

your rent, but no, the housing has been already paid and nothing happens to the housing that you're paying for. And that's capitalism, you know, the most you can squeeze out of your product, the most the most they will they will take that they will give you the effective products, damaged products, damaged goods, you will fly in airplanes that will crash as long as as long as they survive. So the system is just basically pushing everything, squeezing everything out of our lives. So when we organize in our communities, it's about reclaiming that right to live, reclaiming the right to stay, the right to remain, the right to build community, the right to build a society to get past this contradiction where capital organized how the city is constructed. Where basically,

right now we're talking with our neighbors, basically how is the city organized? Where is traffic going? So traffic goes really fast through our neighborhood because it's going to downtown, the places of production, of speculation, of consumption. There was a time where traffic was directed by factories. We're living in a country that has been industrialized tremendously and where everything is speculation. So land has become a core part of this whole process. So I mean, we're talking about capitalism, we're talking about financialization, and we're talking about a country that is ignoring its relationship to the rest of the world. I was trying to think of another profession and I put profession in square, scare quotes, you know, whose name is, uh, you know, a callbacks feudal.

I can't think of another one. Blacksmith blacksmith. That's your goat herd. I mean, are those things still? Well, they have to do with relationships to, they have to do with like relationships to property and to land and to the production products, like to another kind of another era of the production process. Right. And like, I think it's really important, you know, like landlords right now are trying to rebrand themselves as housing providers because they do not want people to recognize

the relationship that makes their power so clear. Yeah. And it's interesting. It feels like the process of enclosure is again, this is probably a not probably. This is definitely an inherent logic to capitalism because it's how it creates new frontiers for surplus extraction but the process of enclosure is always ongoing and that's partially because on this program we're not in the business and say of saying what human

nature is but it does seem like humans it does seem like humans are trying to have a relationship with the land and are trying to carve out space to use it to support themselves. That seems like a kind of like fundamental act that humans do. And but you know, your your book, especially I think the second chapter goes through this process of just, you know, and you you outlined it a little bit earlier, Leo, talking about like in the 90s and, you know, the destruction of the largest public housing authority, you know, the destruction of the largest public housing authority, you know, west of the Mississippi. But like it's this ongoing process of like forcing

people out of their homes. I mean, these are these are homes. People live their entire lives here. And as one of you said earlier, at this point, they've probably more than paid the value for the entire building off of their rent alone. And you know, there's something that is very interesting about this that I kind of wanted to dig into a little bit. So like, you know, a lot of your book, I think there's a quote that I have pulled out here. You say, rent is the private capital of public investment. I wanted to dig in. What's that? Did I say private? I think it's private capture. Tracy has memorized

the book. It's a private capture. It is the private capture of public investment. What is the relationship of the state to landlords and developers? We touched on it a little bit ago when we talked about affordable housing, quote unquote, but I wanted to dig into that a little bit more. Yeah, what is the relationship of the state to landlords and developers? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's, I think it's really important question. I mean, I think we can say right now like that specific, you know, to think about rent as the private capture of public investment just goes to the sort of like,

you know, in real estate developers talk about location, location, location, right? Like they're talking about the value of a property that is situated beyond the bounds of the building, right? And how are locations made valuable, right? They're made valuable by our bosses, which is like where, and as Leo said, like where we have to work, but also like, you know, parks and recreations, good schools, like transit, all of those things that are public investment that then are claimed by the private capture of property value. And also, you know, like there's so much more public funding

that goes into what is extracted, right? It includes pipes, sewers, sidewalks, roads, like all of those things that connect our neighborhoods, that like all of the, and even I would say like the intellectual contracts, like all of those things that make like the public support of what makes private property possible, right? That's also part of what landlords are capturing, right?

Yeah, even Section 8. I mean, it's this thing about like, I've thought of, I've written a lot about this, but like a lot of the opioid crisis is based on the premise that the United States government will backstop certain insurance claims. And that's the whole health care infrastructure. It's like, I don't know. It's it's anyway, sorry.

No, no, no. I mean, I think that, you know, like then his story and this is like what we should talk about, like historically, right? Like how is it that we exist in this society where landlords and we're like something like Section 8 can exist, right? Section 8, which instead of which is basically a subset, it's a direct subsidy from the federal government to private landlords for the quote unquote service of housing the poor. Right? And that project of privatizing public housing, as we were talking about earlier, of replacing rent control, which is an intervention in the private housing market with affordable housing, which is a developer subsidy, right? Like all of this is situated in this long history

of housing policy, which we call the war on tenants, right? You know, like the war on crime, like the war on drugs. This is a long, this is a more than 100 years war against the poor and people of color. And what it does, right, is it creates a protected class of homeowners and it abandons tenants to the private market and then criminalizes them. And you know, I think you brought up black reconstruction, right?

And I think we should start our understanding of the state's role in housing, in shaping housing markets, in determining how housing can become value all the way back when black people in this country were no longer held as property and poor white people were recruited into alignment with elite interests black people in this country were no longer held as property and poor white people were recruited into alignment with elite interests because they were offered claim to stolen indigenous land. Right. And that process is repeated throughout the history of state intervention

in how land is organized, how housing is organized, right? Predominantly white people see the benefits and those benefits are sloughed off into private hands. And that happens like in the new deal when the US invents the 30 year mortgage and home ownership subsidies, right? And it determines the value of property through segregation and redlining. Like it happens again in the GI Bill when state subsidies

lure white people into the suburbs and support the suburbanization of the country, flipping the country to a homeowner majority while abandoning majority black and brown people to the cities. And then we see it, as I said, in the abandonment of public housing, the only form of intervention and state provision that we had, at the same time

that more and more government resources go to criminalizing and policing people who live in cities, right? And so I think that like the state's relationships to housing and to landlords and developers has to do with the way that it supports controlling populations rather than controlling the market. And we see, and I, you know, I think it's important to know like last week, if everyone, I mean, God knows why,

Leo and I watched the vice presidential debate together, but we did, we were hanging out and we did. And the two policies, the housing policies that were on offer represent these same strategies, right? On the one hand, in the Republican side, we had mass deportations as a housing policy. And on the other side, on the Democratic side, we had homeowner and developer subsidies. Right? And so that is what is on offer in our, like that is how the state deals with our deals with the problem

of housing, right? Either in population management and policing, right? Like we should think about prisons as forms of public housing. They are publicly funded pages that are, that's $200 billion of federal taxes and debt. And same with private home ownership, right? Like that's two, almost $200 billion in like lost federal subsidies.

These are equivalent forms of state intervention in the housing market. But we think of neither really as public housing, but both of them are. And that I think is really like those two sides like represent how the state does housing right now. But it's also a political question in the sense that the Tenants Union has to build the power to start confronting these things. And as we were saying earlier, during the pandemic, because of the action of tenants,

the state had to have a different response. In Los Angeles, during the pandemic, where tenants were in crisis because they couldn't pay rent, they could have said, oh, well, too bad. Let's find other places or move out or say, you know what? We're not gonna pay rent and go public and organize and push back and say, we're not gonna pay rent. And that really forced the state into started giving some concessions.

Not complete because basically all the money that they have been state into giving some concessions. Not complete because basically all the money that they have been given is being given to the landlords. But in our book, we're talking about the whole issue of also about the creation of territory. It's not just about organizing in a building for the tenant's sake and for the tenant to be able to not to pay rent or anything like that. We're talking about organizing in a building that is on a street, that is on a neighborhood. And we're trying to create territory so really we can fight the state and all these policies. So we can really control the territory and go beyond just the everyday life of being able to pay rent and survive in the middle of this stuff.

We're talking about a project, a social project that can change political conditions and can change the balance of power in the context of a larger product against capitalism. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. It's like because ultimately that's what we're talking about here, right? And I don't know. It's just interesting. I just wanted to say that one of you, I think you, Tracy, you had brought up that the housing, the houseless are the kind of like the next vanguard of the housing, the houseless are the kind of like van next

vanguard of the struggle in the war on tenants. I, you know, you towards the end of this book, in the last chapter, you, you mentioned the struggle at Echo Park, but like last time we had you on the show, you know, you had also talked about that Supreme court case that went through the Supreme court earlier this summer. I don't know. Maybe both of you just talk a little bit about like what you mean when you say that, like, the houseless would be like the next site of struggle or the next vanguard of this war on tenants. Well, I think first, just to say that, you know, like when we talk about tenants, we define that very specifically as anyone who doesn't control their own housing. that very specifically as anyone who doesn't control their own housing. And that includes people who live outside, that includes incarcerated people, that includes people who live in care

homes. And it's a specific, we wanted to name that broad category to talk about, you know, who, you know, like who are the political subjects that are going to organize to reorganize, like who are the political subjects that are going to organize to reorganize, like that are going to be our side of the class war that we're in. And so I think that it's not necessarily the next phase of struggle in that it's happening as a part of our movement in our movements, but it shows us really like what I think it does reveal to us, like what the stakes of our movement is and that is like in that is in claiming territory and organizing our own resources and land and I don't know Leo, do you want to talk about Echo Park because you're always, I think you do that. No, I think let's also use a word that also is not very common in left circles and all

that and all that stuff, because, you know, we're very afraid of the stuff that we cannot see. But it's the question of hope, you know, where people are looking for a place to live in. There is a hope that, you know, they're going to be there forever for a long, long time if they choose to move out, it's going to be their choice. It's not ever going to be about being forced to do this stuff because of the material economic conditions. And hope is very, very important because hope takes us beyond what the system is like.

We don't have to accept the fact that the state is taking away our resources. We don't have to accept the fact that the policies that we have around us are bad policies. We don't have to accept the fact that non-profit corporations are going to fight the fight for us and end up negotiating our defeat. We don't have to accept the fact that nonprofit corporations are going to fight the fight for us and end up negotiating our defeat. We don't have to accept any of that stuff. The system that we're living has been created by us. And in the middle of the pandemic, the own house people were being pushed outside

all over the place. In the middle of the crisis, the city decided to dismantle encampments and aggressively was attacking the encampments. Except one community that basically decided to take over a park in Echo Park, moving to that park about 100 tenants or so, moved into this park, put their tents there,

build a garden so they could grow their own food. They build their showers for themselves so they could take their own showers. They create a jobs program where they were connecting each other to jobs and helping each other. food, they build their showers for themselves so they could take their own showers. They created a jobs program where they were connecting each other to jobs and helping each other. They created a harm reduction program where they started helping each other and watching each other when there were problems with overdoses and stuff like that. And also they created their own security process where basically if people were doing damage to the local community, they were not

going to be accepted, they were going to be regulated. And so they create a community for themselves where they protected themselves and each other during the pandemic. That is a sign of what's possible. The community taking over the land and making out of the land what they deserve and what they want in terms of their own needs and their own conditions. And this is the one thing where the city, the city council member, the first thing that he did was drive a wedge between the people who live around the park

and the people who are in this place. When you look at the location and where the park was and where they were located, they were not doing anything. On the contrary, they were cleaning up the areas around the park and they were doing all sorts of things because they were concerned about the relationship to their neighbors but the council member drove a wedge there and started punishing them and persecuted them. He closed the bathrooms of them so they could not use the bathroom, did all sorts of stuff and little by little started escalating, escalating, escalating, escalating until it became a massive, massive attack by the state with the police but in the context where they were surrounded by thousands of people from across the city that came and support them, they were telling us where to go.

They were telling us the fight is about organizing to take over the space and build the things that we need. It's about the hope that we have in having the society and the community that we want to have. And, you know, some people would say, oh, that was a tragedy, but no, it tells us what we can do. And in a way, within the tenants union and LA tenants union, every local shows us what we can do in our different communities. In some communities, people are doing neighborhood improvements on their own by taking action themselves. In other communities, they're serving food to the people who don't have food and organizing food kitchens to help people to do stuff. In other communities, they go and bring food to the homeless. We're doing the things that we need to do. And we're not asking for permission. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do. We're doing it because we have the capacity to do

that. And we're doing it because this is where we have to go. The challenge is for everybody to take that risk. And I think that's what's important about this book. People have to be able to say the world is as it is, not because just happened. We have created this stuff and we have to change it when we do these things. And I think hope is very, very important, not optimism. Optimism is different. Optimism is blindness to the horrible things

that are around us. Hope is challenging what's in front of us and going beyond that and building something that people don't imagine right now, but it's here now for the future and for all of us to remember what we can do. Yeah, and that's a great, you know, we're coming up on an hour.

I think that's probably a really good place to start wrapping things up at. Part of the reason that I, for the last few months, have been harping so much on Black Reconstruction, but also on the Native American struggle in North America, is because with these things, you can see the outlines of a different vision. of a different vision. You know, there's not, you know, obviously reconstruction was forced to end before it could really get going.

But like I said, you could see the outlines of something new. And I think that's been the basis of a kind of hope that I've had for a while, especially during an election year that is bottom of the barrel. Just great. Were you going to say something, Leo? Well, yeah, I mean, this is very important because hope looks beyond who's going to be

elected. It really in this moment, the struggle of crisis and everything is for the part. We have to look past that. We have to just imagine something. It doesn't matter who gets elected. What we have to do, we're going to do it ourselves and they're not going to do it for us. And whatever they do is not going to be enough. So hope is looking beyond that. And while some of our friends are going bunkers, trying to figure out who's going to be the one and, you know, struggling through that stuff, we really need to understand that we need to get past that and look

at what we're going to build, especially in a country where every four years we let someone sit back and wait to see what happens. We're past that stage. I'm sorry, I just wanted to say that. No, thank you for saying that. I mean, really, I really needed to hear that, and I think our audience really needs to hear it too. Because, you know, your book does a really good job of showing what the stakes are and showing what's possible and um, and I just want to encourage everyone to go out and and get it, uh, You know last time you were on the show tracy it had not been released yet, but it is now out in the world So you can go buy it. Um

So please I just want to encourage everyone. Please go purchase the book you can get it from Haymarket Also, you can probably get it from Various online booksellers, I think the phrase is wherever books are sold. That's what people say That's right I'm gonna try to get the library here at Lexington to carry it. That's my own little Amazing when people dunk on me on the internet saying like I'm gonna get this book I'm gonna steal your book and I'm like you did you just invent the concept of a library? I'm so proud of you That's wonderful. Like I would I would like nothing more than you for you to get the book for free You can do that. We have a thing called the library where that's possible

to get the book for free. You can do that. We have a thing called the library where that's possible. Yes, that's exactly right. You can also this episode will be free into the public, but we have a Patreon that you can also probably bootleg somewhere online for free. And we don't care about that. We don't whatever. Just do whatever you want. But thank you all. Thank you both for coming on the show. Before we go, is there anything you would like to plug individually, collectively, anything or where we can find your work or anything like that? Join your local tennis union. And if you don't have one, start organizing one. That's where I am.

And I think maybe for me, I would just say like, one of the things that we've been talking a lot about in this moment where we've just passed a year of genocide is that looking for places in our lives where we have political leverage makes new forms of political leverage possible. So again, like when we think about how are we going to remake, how are we going to actually have something called democracy

where the majority will and the majority of people in this country want there to be an arms embargo and instead we have a bipartisan consensus that that is impossible and our candidates are competing want there to be an arms embargo, and instead we have a bipartisan consensus that that is impossible, and our candidates are competing over who's more pro-Israel, right?

Like, how are we gonna remake those structures? In many ways, it starts in our homes, and it starts in our backyards. And I think that remaking those structures, those institutions that we have, to be connected to our neighbors, to intervene in our own lives and our own communities actually remakes what is politically possible for us to organize for.

And so I think, too, at this moment, I have to say free Palestine. And in our own organization, I have to say free Palestine. And I, and you know, in our own organization, we have tenants who are not only on rent strike right now, changing their condition to their landlords, that those landlords are Israeli real estate developers. So by withholding rent in their communities, they're actually removing money from the apartheid state. And so I think that we need to be thinking more, maybe the thing that I'll plug, right, is start a union in, start a union, join a union where you are, and think about that

as an institution for building all kinds of political leverage, right? Not just leverage it against, you know, like not just leverage for fixing your broken pipes and busted appliances, right? But leverage for thinking about how do you demilitarize your cities? Leverage for how do you stop a genocide? And yeah, and I'll just stop there. But really just asking people to reflect on changing their local conditions, to change what is politically possible.

Yeah, no, that's a great point to end on. I mean, class struggle is ongoing all the time, even when it doesn't look like it. I think one of you pointed out, like, during COVID, just a lot of the changes we saw and both in how the state approaches tenants, but also how we approach landlords and developers. And didn't even appear to us as that at the time, but it's crazy we can look back at it four years later and say like, wow, these are the advances we made. These are some of the setbacks we've had, and now we can just proceed from there. But it was a dialectical process of struggle. And so yes, every engagement you make, everything you do and engage in will reveal things to

you about the system and about how to look for, as you said, Tracy, those sort of vulnerabilities in the sights of our enemies and how to advance our own struggle. And so this book is a great roadmap for doing that. I encourage you all to please go out and buy it. And we'd love to have you both on again sometime in the near future. Anytime. Thank you. Thanks, yeah. Thank you. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. Thank you.