Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through brisk, unequivocating analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, finally rebalance the scales.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants' union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

What People Are Saying

“A thoroughly researched primer and a beautifully articulated guide. Based on a decade of community-based organizing and extending the growing demand for abolition of the prison industrial complex, Abolish Rent is a righteous call to reclaim sovereignty over the shared places we call home. It shows us how the struggle for housing as a human right is more than that: it’s a class struggle for land and power, so life can thrive. READ THIS BOOK.” susan rosenberg, prison and human rights activist 

“The American dream of homeownership has turned into a nightmare of landlord and bank profits, unpayable mortgages, sky high rents, evictions, and unnecessary suffering. At once an insightful manifesto for a new housing paradigm that can provide shelter for every human being and a shrewd tactical guide, Abolish Rent can help us build a tenant-powered movement capable of winning the radical change we need. This urgent book is a rousing wake up call that can help snap us out of our collective slumber and into collective action.” Astra Taylor, cofounder of the Debt Collective and author of The Age of Insecurity

“A spectre is haunting landlords—the spectre of land seizures & rent strikes. Abolish Rent provides clear analysis and vivid stories of Los Angeles grassroots tenants, whose efforts offer a path towards abolishing commodification of land and housing. The authors situate tenant struggles as essential in today's worldwide movement to secure dignity, or as Isabel Garcia of Boyle Heights says in this book: ‘We fight because we have to continue living.’”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography, and Craig Gilmore, co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project

"This essential book provides a concise history of racist, colonial housing policy and its central role in racial capitalism; an accessible analysis of the injustice and illegitimacy of rent; inspiring accounts of effective tenant resistance; and a crystal clear call for collective action that we can all take up right now. While rents skyrocket, police budgets bloat, wealth consolidates, and global temperatures rise, we need this book. Abolish Rent shows why we don't need more empty declarations of our rights, more policy reforms that keep things the same, or more efforts to appeal to the moral conscience of politicians owned by the rich, we need to abolish landlords and take over where we live." Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

“A riveting polemic and a convincing argument for why our housing system must be radically transformed. Their on-the-ground reporting is sure to persuade anyone angry at how much rent they pay that we all must organize for a better future. Abolish Rent goes deep into the history and theory of housing and provides tangible solutions to our housing crisis, ones that we can all take part in today." P.E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City

"Inspiring and powerful, Abolish Rent is a passionate handbook of community organizing rendered through moving—even thrilling—case studies of tenants reclaiming their buildings and public space. The utopian vision of abolishing rent is potentially within our grasp." Lizzie Borden, Director of Born in Flames

“An essential primer on rent and the collective struggle required to liberate ourselves from its grasp on our lives. Rosenthal and Vilchis give us precise language for what we’re up against and equip us with deeply human stories that demonstrate how tenants might change our housing system and the world—if we take our own power seriously.” Tara Raghuveer, founding director, KC Tenants

"Across America today, the social crisis is in large measure a housing crisis, and housing crisis is in large measure a crisis of rent. This book is both an angry account of how the rental crisis came to be, and a loving paean to those at the sharp end who are coming together to take collective action and fight back. Don’t miss it." Brett Christophers, author of Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World

“Abolish Rent is a manifesto—but it’s more than that. It’s an archive of the lessons learned in struggle and the deepened analysis that comes as a movement grows. The LA Tenants Union has mapped the arduous path out of the housing crisis." Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift

“This is a transformative book, one that radically shifts our attention from the seeming ‘housing crisis’ to the crisis that is racial capitalism and its relations of extraction and domination. It is also a hopeful book, one that centers tenants as the collectivized subjects of a space-making/world-making history.” Ananya Roy, Professor and Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

"Abolish Rent makes the case against our system of real estate domination and for a world where tenants no longer dread the first of each month. Shifting our understanding of the crisis from one centering landlords and the state to one centering tenants, Rosenthal and Vilchis demonstrate the true toll of our extractive capitalist order and point us to the already-existing seeds of a better future—a future of liberation, solidarity, and convivencia." Samuel Stein, author of Capital City

"A manifesto and manual for tenant organizing, Abolish Rent is an invaluable resource for anyone with a landlord." Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto