Michael: Here’s a wild thought experiment. What if your house made more money last year just by existing than you did by working a full-time job? Kevin: Hold on, made money how? You mean like its value went up? Michael: Exactly. The appreciation of the median home in the U.S. recently outstripped the median salary for the first time in history. Simply owning property generated more wealth than actually working. Kevin: Wow. That is a truly wild thought. It feels like the rules of the game are completely broken. For millions of people, that wasn't an experiment—it was reality. And it’s at the heart of why the American Dream is breaking. Michael: That very paradox is the starting point for a book that’s been making serious waves, called Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. Kevin: Abolish rent? That's a bold title. It sounds like a utopian fantasy. Who are these authors to make such a radical claim? Michael: That's what makes this book so compelling. They aren't academics in an ivory tower. They're co-founders of the LA Tenants Union, the largest in the country. Leonardo Vilchis has been a tenant organizer in Boyle Heights for over 30 years, trained in liberation theology. Tracy Rosenthal is a writer and organizer on the front lines in New York. Kevin: Okay, so they’re not just theorists. They’ve actually been in the trenches. Michael: Exactly. They've been fighting evictions, organizing rent strikes, and defending communities. This book is written from the front lines, and it’s been praised by critics as both a manifesto and a manual. They argue that what we call a 'housing crisis' is actually a 'war on tenants.' And rent is the weapon. Kevin: A 'war on tenants.' That’s a heavy phrase. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. Michael: They make a pretty convincing case that it’s not a theory, but a documented, decades-long strategy. And it starts by redefining what rent even is.

Kevin: I’m listening. Because to me, rent is simple. It’s a fee you pay to live somewhere. A business transaction. Michael: That’s what we’re all taught. But the authors argue that’s a dangerous misconception. They say rent is not a balanced equation of wants and needs. It’s a power relation. It's the price you pay for being poorer than someone else. Kevin: What does that mean, a 'power relation'? Michael: It means the system isn't designed to provide you with quality housing. It's designed to extract maximum wealth from you. They point out that in the 2010s, landlords in the US raked in over $4.5 trillion from tenants. Trillion! And for what? The average individual landlord spends less than four hours a month maintaining a property. Kevin: Four hours a month? I spend more time than that trying to get my landlord to fix a leaky faucet. That’s an incredible imbalance. Michael: It’s a massive transfer of wealth, from the many who work to the few who own. And the book argues this isn't a bug in the system; it's the feature. It’s the result of a long, deliberate war on tenants. Kevin: Okay, you keep using that phrase, 'war on tenants.' I need a concrete example. How was this 'war' actually waged? It sounds so abstract. Michael: It’s not abstract at all. Let's go back to the Great Depression. The government, under FDR's New Deal, faced a massive housing crisis. They had a choice: they could have created a robust public housing system for everyone. But they didn't. Instead, they invented the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. Kevin: The 30-year mortgage? That sounds like a good thing. It helped create the American middle class, right? Michael: It helped create the white middle class. At the same time the government was subsidizing homeownership, the Federal Housing Administration, led by a former real estate broker, created a system of 'redlining.' They literally drew red lines on maps around Black, immigrant, and integrated neighborhoods, deeming them too 'hazardous' for investment. Kevin: So if you lived in one of those neighborhoods, you couldn't get a loan. Michael: You couldn't get a loan, you couldn't buy a home, you couldn't build wealth. You were trapped. You became a permanent tenant in neighborhoods that were starved of resources. This created a captive market for landlords, who, as one judge at the time put it, could charge "the highest rents for the rottenest roosts." Kevin: Wow. So the government was actively creating wealth for one group while ensuring another group remained a permanent, exploitable rental class. Michael: Precisely. They were engineering segregation and inequality directly into the housing market. The real estate industry even used anti-communist rhetoric to push this agenda. They’d say things like, "Communism can never win in a nation of homeowners." President Herbert Hoover himself said that great songs were written about 'Home, Sweet Home,' not about "a pile of rent receipts." They were culturally and economically stigmatizing tenancy. Kevin: And that legacy is still with us. Michael: It's everywhere. The authors bring up a modern, chilling example from just a couple of years ago in Los Angeles. A secret recording was leaked of city council members discussing how to redraw district maps. The council president was caught on tape saying they had to break up a certain neighborhood because it would "solidify her renters' district, and that is not a good thing for any of us." Kevin: They said that out loud? That having a district full of renters was a political threat? Michael: Yes. It’s the quiet part out loud. It shows that even today, at the highest levels of city government, tenants are seen not as constituents to be served, but as a political problem to be managed or diluted. That’s the modern face of the war on tenants. It's a class struggle being fought in city hall, in boardrooms, and on the streets. Kevin: That is incredibly bleak. If the system is that deeply rigged, from the New Deal to today's city council, what can one person, one family facing a rent hike, possibly do? It feels hopeless. Michael: It would be, if the story ended there. But that’s the brilliant pivot the book makes. It moves from diagnosing the war to providing the battle plan. And it all comes down to shifting from 'I' to 'we'. This is where we get to the return of the rent strike.

Michael: The authors tell one of the most powerful stories I've read in a long time: the story of the Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos. Kevin: The Mariachis? Tell me more. Michael: It starts in 2017 in Boyle Heights, a historic, working-class neighborhood in LA that’s being hit hard by gentrification. A construction worker named Alejandro Juárez comes home to a notice on his door. His rent is going up from $840 a month to nearly $1,500. Kevin: An almost 100% increase overnight. That's a de facto eviction notice. There's no way a construction worker can absorb that. Michael: Exactly. He was terrified. His family had lived there for years. But instead of panicking and packing, he did something different. He reached out to the LA Tenants Union. An organizer came and helped him knock on every door in his building. They called a meeting. Kevin: And people actually showed up? I feel like most people would just keep their heads down, hoping they aren't next. Michael: They did. The building was full of working-class immigrant families, including several mariachi musicians—hence the name they eventually took. They were all facing the same fate. In that first meeting, they realized their isolation was the landlord's greatest weapon. So they formed a tenants association: Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos. Kevin: I love that name. So what did they do? Write a strongly worded letter? Michael: They tried that. The new owner, an investment firm founder, completely ignored them. So they escalated. They held a press conference. They protested. And when the date for the rent increase came, they did the unthinkable: they went on a rent strike. Kevin: A rent strike. That sounds incredibly risky. Weren't they terrified of being evicted immediately? Especially if some of them were undocumented? Michael: Of course they were. One of the organizers, Melissa Reyes, said, "We felt like we were making it up at some level. Sometimes we didn’t know if the things we were doing were gonna generate something. There were no guarantees." It was a huge leap of faith. The landlord immediately filed eviction papers. Kevin: So it became a legal battle. Michael: It became a full-on war. The landlord tried to break their solidarity. He offered secret, individual deals to the most vulnerable tenants, hoping to peel them away from the group. But they held strong. They had a rule: nobody negotiates alone. It’s all of us or none of us. Kevin: That solidarity must have been incredibly difficult to maintain under that kind of pressure. Michael: It was. But they had the union's legal support to stall the evictions in court. And they had the community. They kept the pressure on. They organized protests, not just at the building, but at the landlord's home in his wealthy neighborhood. They brought the fight to his doorstep. Kevin: That's a bold move. They were turning the tables, making the person causing their precarity feel a little precarious himself. Michael: Exactly. They were disrupting the power dynamic. And after a year-long struggle—a full year of withholding rent, facing down eviction threats, and constant organizing—the landlord finally broke. Kevin: He gave in? Michael: He didn't just give in; he signed a formal, collective bargaining agreement with the tenants' association. The first of its kind in the city in decades. The deal canceled six months of their withheld rent, drastically reduced the rent increase, capped future increases, and, most importantly, formally recognized their right to have an association and bargain collectively. Kevin: That's unbelievable. They didn't just stop a rent hike; they fundamentally changed their relationship with the owner. They won power. Michael: They won power. They went from being isolated, terrified individuals to a recognized collective with a seat at the table. That story is the heart of the book's argument. It shows that even the most vulnerable tenants—working-class, immigrant, undocumented—can win against powerful real estate interests when they organize.

Kevin: So the book lays out this massive, historical problem—the war on tenants—and then offers this very specific, very human solution: collective action. Michael: Yes. It argues that rights are not something handed down from on high. As the activist James Boggs said, "Rights are what you make and what you take." The tenants of Los Mariachis didn't have a 'right' to a collective bargaining agreement. They took it. They made it real through their struggle. Kevin: It reframes the whole issue. It’s not about finding a slightly cheaper apartment or hoping for a nice landlord. It's about questioning the very foundation of the system. The book’s title, Abolish Rent, starts to make more sense now. It’s not just a slogan; it’s the end goal of this power struggle. Michael: Exactly. The authors are clear: they want "a world without landlords and a world without rent." Each rent strike, each tenant association, is a step toward that. It’s about building a world where housing is treated as a fundamental human right, something you're born with, not something you have to earn. Kevin: There's a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin in the book that really sticks with me now. Michael: "Any human power can be changed by human beings." Kevin: That’s the one. The system of rent, the laws, the power of landlords—it all feels so permanent and unchangeable. But it was all built by people. Which means it can be unbuilt, or rebuilt, by people. Michael: And that's the ultimate takeaway. The book is a call to action, but it's also a source of profound hope. It shows that the antidote to the despair of the housing crisis isn't a better policy paper; it's your neighbor. It's the person living down the hall. Kevin: It really makes you wonder, what does 'community' actually mean where you live? Is it just a collection of buildings and addresses, or is it a group of people who are willing to fight for each other when things get tough? Michael: That's the question the book leaves you with. It’s a powerful one to consider. We highly recommend Abolish Rent for anyone who feels trapped by the housing market and is looking for not just answers, but a plan. Let us know your thoughts on what community means to you. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.