These dire statistics and degrading experiences are often collected under the banner of “the housing crisis.” But the capitalist housing system is working exactly as designed: to enrich landlords, developers, and real estate speculators. In the 2010s, landlords raked in over $4.5 trillion from tenants in rent payments.6 In 2019 alone, those rent payments totaled $512.4 billion. As land-lording has become an irresistible way to make money, landlords have taken over more and more homes, enriching corporations and the already rich. In 2021, landlords bought nearly one in seven homes sold in the forty largest US cities—and nearly one in three homes sold in Black neighborhoods.7 Framing the consequences of our housing system as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine. The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most tenants. It’s designed to maximize profits and to extract the most rent.

Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement. We suffer trauma, loss, precarity, panic, poor health, and premature death. For poor and working-class people, particularly people of color, this crisis is permanent. The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes, and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments—both its compromised regulations and its deliberate deregulations—maintain crisis as the norm.

The frame of “housing crisis” trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, interchangeable “housing units” and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives.

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.

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

The supposed cure for renting is owning your own home. But rent is a trap. When tenants try to buy a house, we find that landlords already have the advantage. Tax work-arounds, special interest rates, and all-cash offers make housing effectively cheaper the more money you have, crowding us out of options.23 Our landlords can buy more buildings just by pulling out equity from their mortgages or borrowing against the buildings they already have.24 They can use their assets, which we pay for, to surf from debt to debt. Meanwhile, as homes get more expensive and further out of reach, tenants are compelled to keep renting for a longer period of time. The longer we rent, the further we are from saving enough to compete. Paying rent is keeping us from reaching the first rung of that imagined “property ladder.” And our lost ground is our landlords’ gain.25 Our rents don’t just vanish when we send in our checks. They pay off our landlords’ mortgages, so they can claim their second (or fourth, or hundredth) house.26 When people say paying rent is like “throwing money in the trash,” they’re only half right; it’s our trash can, but our landlord’s bank account.

Landlord lobbyists have crusaded to rebrand themselves as “housing providers” and rid themselves of the feudal title that makes their power clear, but landlords do not “provide” housing, they extract rent from housing by hoarding the places where we can live.27 When our rents are leveraged for more housing grabs, landlords take over more and more space.28 Already-wealthy people, corporations, and financial firms profit; more of us are tenants than ever before.29 Rent is an engine of consolidation. It drives the ownership of housing into fewer and fewer hands.30 In 2013, Invitation Homes issued the first-ever rent-backed security with 3,200 homes in its portfolio.31 Just ten years later, the company now owns more than 80,000 homes nationwide. Its business model turns rents into securities to sell to investors, so they can buy up more homes, and start over again.

Securing housing doesn’t mean competing just with other people who want to use it to live in. It means competing with people and corporations who want to use it to make money. More than 68 percent of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 79 percent of that is in residential housing. In 2020, the total residential real estate value in the US—the second-largest share in the world—amounted to $258.5 trillion: that’s more valuable than all global equities and debt securities combined, more than twenty times more valuable than all the gold ever mined.59 To speak in the language of supply and demand, the price of housing is not determined just by local demand for housing, but by the global search for opportunities to seek profit.60 The housing market doesn’t produce homes, it produces opportunities for investment.

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.

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