Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis with Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis

From the book description:

"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."

Tracy Rosenthal is a writer and co-founder of the L.A. Tenants Union. Their work has been published in The New Republic, The Nation and The LA Times among others. They serve on the advisory board of Housing the Third Reconstruction with UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. They are now on rent strike in New York City.

Leonardo Vilchis has been organizing tenants in Boyle Heights for more than thirty years. Trained in liberation theology, he co-founded Union de Vecinos in 1996 to stop the demolition of the Pico Aliso public housing projects, winning the right of return for two hundred and fifty families. In 2015, he co-founded the L.A. Tenants Union to organize tenant power at a citywide scale. Merging with LATU in 2019 to form the Union de Vecinos Eastside Local, Union de Vecinos has maintained a leadership role defending the long-term community against gentrification and displacement. Vilchis was activist-in-residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in 2020 and now serves on the advisory board of its Housing the Third Reconstruction research endeavor. He lives in Los Angeles.

[shadetreader]

Tbh even visual artists hate gallerists. We need to dismantle capitalism's false dichotomy between the arts and the integrity of neighbourhoods. Is there a push to transform any of those empty warehouses into a *community* art space?

[sashao.]

Do you have a list of all your books especially the ones on your shelf? I’m always curious but I can’t see the titles very well.

[cola]

strategically: a broad movement to decommodify and then totally deprivatize housing will be an important step in a transition to a non-capitalist mode of production, and does not need to wait for communism to commence

[hrwise]

Sorry, off topic but my partner and i watch all your videos, usually together, so we say the name of your channel fairly often when finding videos to put on etc.

But for reason we're both bad about getting names wrong. I always say "Millenials are Killing the Capitalism Industry" and they somehow say something different each time, like "Capitalism is Killing Millenials" or more random things like "Capitalism is Over." Now it's like a thing and we have to try really hard to say it right. Just thought I'd share.

Okay anyway, love your work, this video is good so far and we both really loved your Kali Acuno interview recently. Thanks!

[dj_enby]

I was commenting on something else and i think it went here 🙈 excited to listen to this thoughhh

[draweveryone]

All I can say listening to Tracy talk is "No shit." Everyone already knows all of this. What do we do about it, and how do we ensure a timeline, right this minute, so that the goals we want will be established by the end of that timeline? Without that, this is just agitprop.