All human beings need shelter. All human beings need a home. If we don’t own property, we have to pay rent to meet these needs. Rent is a fine for having a human need. If we can’t afford to buy a home, from the day we are separated from our parents or caretakers, we have no choice but to pay rent. We don’t get to decide if we pay or not, and we don’t get to decide how much we pay. In the absence of rent controls, landlords have complete price-setting power. Average rents have more than doubled over the last two decades, while wages have plateaued for the last four.10 Over the last half a century, as wages stagnated and the cost of rent ballooned, we’ve simply paid more and more to keep our housing. We’ve had no other choice.

Rent is the gap between tenants’ needs and landlords’ demands. It benefits tenants for housing to be built to last, well maintained, easily accessible, and cheap; tenants need stability, safety, a place to live and make a life. It benefits landlords for housing to be cheaply produced, rarely maintained, scarce, and expensive; landlords seek to maximize profit, driving down costs and driving up rents. They want to take more money out and put ever less back in. This is the fundamental contradiction between the use of a home as a place to live and the use of a home as a place to extract wealth, what it means to live inside a system in which housing is something used to make a profit.