Neither building nor, for that matter, blocking new private housing will overcome the misery and injustice of rent. We need to transform the power relations that keep this system in place. We need to break the private monopoly on development—its stranglehold over the pace and type of production, determined by profitability and not by our needs. We need to break the private monopoly of landlords over pieces of the earth—the hoarding of human shelter that ensures they can extract rent from us and evict us at their will. We need to dismantle the institutions of state violence, which empower the real estate industry to draw profit from a fundamental human need.

The housing crisis is not a problem to be solved; it is a class struggle to be fought and won. The conclusion that Engels drew still applies now: “In order to make an end to this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.”75 Rent is a fundamental engine of inequality and injustice, a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, which drives millions into debt and despair and onto the streets. From the perspective of tenants, the answer to the housing crisis is as simple as it is revolutionary: a world without landlords and a world without rent. Our self-interest as tenants isn’t just fixing the leak in our shower; it’s dismantling the capitalist unhousing system.