The third of Americans who rent their housing make these payments to a handful of corporations and the mere 6.7 percent of the population who own that housing. This is a transfer of wealth from over 100 million tenants to just over 11 million landlords.15 The poorest Americans are overwhelmingly tenants; the richest own real estate.16 Rent is an engine of inequality. If you’ve played the board game Monopoly, you understand the idea: a roll of the dice and a purchase allow you to extract rents until everyone else is bankrupt.

Tenants work; landlords live off our labor. According to 2021 US Census data, the average individual landlord spends less than four hours a month maintaining a property, while the average revenue they claim on that property is over $25,000 a month.17 The “passive” income of rent is active income stolen from those of us who work.18