IF A TENANT is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, then the tenant movement works to establish collective control. Our aim is not to eliminate tenancy by becoming owners ourselves—an impossible prospect whose promise is an engine for our competition and denigration. Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging. Now tenants are subjected to expulsion and exclusion, gentrification and social cleansing. Financialization dematerializes our homes into flows of capital; monopolization puts them into fewer and fewer hands. But already immanent to everyday tenant struggles is the possibility and practice of another way of governing the places where we make our lives. The ends of the tenant movement will not be an improvement of the exploitative conditions under which we now live, but a wholesale transformation of the social relations that make those conditions possible. As these two struggles demonstrate, rent abolition is a practice of occupation and a process of socialization. The tenant struggle is a land struggle. It is a struggle for collective sovereignty over the use of our resources and the places we inhabit.

But as we contest capitalist management of space, we contest and remake the capitalist state too. We insist that land use is not a mere technical or economic but a social and political problem, which means it is about how people get together to exercise power. This is a strategic orientation that privileges autonomous organizations and institutions, the practice of taking responsibility for our collective selves. It is neither state-phobic nor state-philic. It views the state as a terrain where resources are often more available to our enemies than to us, but one that we can—and we must—constrain to our will. It understands the history of reforms as concessions to revolutionary social movements and liberation as a project beyond rights, which achieves rights in its wake.

THE GROUP’S FIRST action was a collective letter that announced the formation of their association and demanded a meeting with their landlord. The letter focused not just on the rent increases, but on the landlord’s attacks against the building’s communal life: “Our children used to be able to play outside in the common areas, now they are forbidden…. We never had armed security, now we have a rent-a-cop who routinely interrogates us, despite knowing who we are.”15 It took months for Botz to agree to meet. When he finally arrived, as tenants recall, he stood cross-armed by their courtyard wall and insisted on his rights to collect market-rate rent. As he’d later reiterate to the press, he had no plans to “coddle” tenants who’d already “ been subsidized for thirty-two years.”16 Management retaliated by ignoring the maintenance requests of households who’d organized.

Many of the tenants of Echo Park Lake were already connected to LA’s homeless services agency. They had done everything their caseworkers asked: collected documents, signed paperwork. They were told to survive outside and wait.46 But with no permanent housing available, they knew what was at the end of many of the city’s waitlists: a bed in a congregate shelter, whose cramped, shared spaces were infamous for noxious conditions and COVID outbreaks; an unshaded tent in a fenced “safe sleep site,” subject to twenty-four-hour surveillance; a “tiny home,” where two residents share a prefabricated shed smaller than the American Correctional Association’s standard prison cell for one.47 The converted hotel rooms in Project Roomkey, an emergency pandemic program, banned guests, pets, or more than sixty gallons—one trash bag’s worth—of personal belongings. Residents couldn’t gather or visit each other and had to abide by a 7:00 p.m. curfew, after which they were locked inside. To many, those options didn’t look like housing as the provision of a human need; they looked like incarceration for the crime of not being able to afford rent.

TO SOCIAL AND political demands, the state answers with technical and economic processes that only facilitate capitalist accumulation. Under this paradigm, the call for public housing is answered with privatization schemes. The call for community investment is answered with gentrification. The call to solve the housing crisis is answered with affordable and carceral housing. The actions of tenants in struggle point to the direction we can follow to overcome these contradictions. Just as tree roots slowly break up the sidewalks that order the spaces where we live, we can cultivate our movement over time, through the patient, everyday activity of organizing, which Ella Baker called “spadework.”

The tenant as a political category collects the landless and propertyless, the disenfranchised and undocumented, those placed outside the category of citizen, even outside of the category of human. To reclaim a place is to struggle for, with, alongside, and because some of us are made to be “out of place” by the logic of policing and property. By deepening relationships with our neighbors, we can resist displacement and build lasting institutions of tenant democracy. We fight dispossession not with possession but by cultivating new forms of belonging.