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We need to put class conflict at the center of the housing question, and the housing question at the center of class conflict. Workers have often been the focus of this fight, but tenants (both working and unemployed) have a crucial role to play too. Exploitation through our housing has long ensured exploitation at our workplaces.77 (Said one studio executive during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments.”78) And more and more, as we’ve seen above, our homes are the places where our bosses park their money and where that money goes to make more of itself.79 Tenants can be key political subjects, the architects of a long-term project of expropriation through which that hoarded wealth becomes shared by us all.80
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A Craigslist ad for an apartment in their building animated their commitment to each other. The “affordable luxury apartment” in the listing’s photos was renovated with distressed-wood floors and pristine white walls and staged with mid-century-modern furniture. Figuring Boyle Heights as a place to leave rather than a place to live, the ad called the neighborhood “an ideal location for commuters … minutes from Downtown.” It even rebranded the building with a new name: “Mariachi Crossing.” The new landlord, Melissa Reyes put it later, was “trying to make money under the name of the mariachis, at the same time he was displacing mariachis,” leveraging the neighborhood’s past to erase its present.8 Taking on both the community’s iconography and the position of the most vulnerable members of their association, the tenants began referring to themselves as Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos. The people who gave the neighborhood its culture would not willingly be displaced.
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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,” and had a projected rate of return of 20 percent. The deck promised potential clients access to a “rapidly gentrifying” submarket—a self-fulfilling prophecy of speculation—and identified not just asking rents for the property, but kinds of renters: “millennial tenants … [who were] willing to pay” for good design in “jeans and coffee.” For those tenants, it insisted, “housing is less of a financial decision, more of a lifestyle decision.” For the current tenants, the document was evidence that they stood in between the new owner and his plans: displacement and replacement for profit.
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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 protections for undocumented people, which prevent landlords from turning over information on immigration status. “I learned that even though I don’t have papers, I have rights,” one member of the association said. They learned about the First Amendment right to organize and California’s statutes against retaliation for organizing, which make tenants associations not only legal, but a strategic form of protection in court. They learned about the warranty of habitability, implied in most every state and enshrined in California, which ties a tenant’s obligation to pay rent to a property’s livability: an apartment free of pests and structural issues, heat that heats, lights that light, drains that drain. Withholding rent is often legally protected if basic living standards are not met.
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 propertyless. US housing policy has privileged homeowners over tenants, and private, asset-based wealth over a social wage. Even programs aimed at supporting the poor prioritize privately owned, publicly subsidized housing: they entail payments to landlords or developers to prop up their profits and help them hoard land. The history of housing policy is a war on tenants, a love affair between the state and real estate.
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 rent controls.2 During World War II, militant tenants physically blocked evictions and inspired national protections against price gouging in the form of rent control. The tenant movement of the 1960s and ’70s, including an intrepid squatters movement that laid claim to abandoned housing, managed to reestablish limits that had been rolled back in cities nationwide.3 Like all history, housing policy is a product of class struggle.
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 lose our footing in the neighborhoods we helped create. Of course, a view of history as class struggle may be inconvenient. It means the sorry state of things has obtained because we let it. We accepted unjust rent increases. We moved when things got hard. But it also means we can be the ones to change things. We’re all we’ve got, but we’re also the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Their tenants association both forged new relationships and gave new meaning to old ones. Some members remarked how little they knew of who lived next door, how “good day” and “good night” was the extent of their communication with people who share a profound aspect of their lives. Now, they’ve put in nearly four years of sharing space and strategizing. Alcazar has seen the production of community—building one-on-one relationships with individuals, negotiating conflicts, and maintaining a group culture that people want to be in and return to—as necessary labor. Alcazar explicitly connects that labor with their association’s capacity for self-defense. “No one is going to be there to defend us. We have to defend ourselves,” she said. “Working together as a community, it makes you feel you have this power in you. Like nobody is going to take it away.”12
A tenants union helps transform groups of people into defensive and offensive communities. Community isn’t a resource waiting to be tapped, or a static object ready to be discovered. It isn’t a network we access or a system we unveil. Community is an intentional process and a long-term commitment. The meanings of our communities are often shaped by those who seek to exploit them, negotiating defeat in their names. We reject these white-washed notions. Our communities are forged in struggles for tenant power, which put poor and working-class people in control of the institutions in which they participate. Community names our braided relationships, anchored by place and shared activity. As LATU cofounder Dont Rhine often says, “We make our community by defending it.”
Alone in our apartments, we are likely to ignore the disrepair of our housing, believing that we should be grateful for the roof over our heads, that nothing would change even if we complained, or that speaking up would make us targets for retaliation. The union builds community to allow tenants to overcome their shame and share their living conditions with each other. Collectively identifying a pattern of neglect, that community helps us find the resolve to intervene and the will to collectivize risk.
Political risks are more than strategic vision; they are acts of faith. “In biology, one learns about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly,” writes Mike Davis. A movement “does not evolve by incremental steps but requires non-linear leaps … [through the work of] non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual.”40 A tenants union is a spiritual, not a professional, enterprise—even a church. We don’t mean this because we share a religion, but because our unions help us develop and sustain a relationship to something greater than ourselves, something we don’t yet know is possible, something we commit to whether or not we see the fruits of our work.