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EVIDENCED IN BOTH the skyrocketing price of rent and the colander of policies we have to protect us, tenants are losing the class war. It is landlords who shape the policies that govern us while they extract rent and evict us. Landlords claim a greater and greater share of what we earn, while we lo…

When tenants win rights enshrined by legislation, it’s because we’ve fought our landlords. The mass rent strikes in New York’s Lower East Side tenements brought us building codes that mandate basic habitability standards, the requirement of a court process to legally evict, and the country’s first …

But policy is not a neutral tool that balances the interests of tenants and landlords. Policy reflects and congeals class power; it is a tool for class war. The founding document of the United States, the Constitution, designed our electoral process around protecting property holders from the prope…

But as they continued to meet, the Mariachi tenants came to understand rights not as upper limits but as instruments. “Tenants’ rights” became ingredients in the organizing adage of “turning what you have into what you need to get what you want.” The association learned about California’s protectio…

A solicitation deck for Dunleer Investments, founded by Turner, confirmed they’d found their target.9 It listed key features of their building to entice investors: it was “non-rent controlled” (a phrase both underlined and italicized), in a neighborhood “slated for new ‘metro-centric’ development,”…