By the League National Housing and Homelessness Committee
“I got tired of being treated the way I was treated,” said Cynthia Barlow, of the Bowen Tower Tenant Union near Kansas City, Missouri. After years of mold, cockroaches, heat shutoffs, broken elevators and rent increases, tenants in Bowen Tower organized a rent strike in 2025 with the help of KC Tenants. The final outcome is not yet determined, but some residents have already won significant rent reductions in court hearings.
Tenants like Cynthia Barlow have been spurred to action by a string of temporary, but bitter, defeats after the end of the 2020 rent moratorium and then the rash of post-Covid evictions. Just when homelessness was skyrocketing, the Supreme Court Grants Pass decision trampled all over the rights of unhoused people, followed by draconian executive orders from President Donald Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Then, in August 2025, the National Guard was sent to Washington D.C. to “get rid of” unhoused people and an upsurge of encampment sweeps all across the country ensued.
Financialization of Housing
These defeats were ultimately caused by unaffordable rents and homelessness, brought about by decades of automation and “deindustrialization.” As capital shifted from production to speculation, the system refused to provide for the basic needs of workers it no longer needed. Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha reported to the United Nations that “financialization of housing” was transforming housing into an investment vehicle for accumulating wealth, instead of a place for human beings to live in security and dignity. Today, over half of U.S. renters pay over a third of their income for rent and a quarter of renters pay over half. Financialization is projected to accelerate even faster with the spread of A.I.
At first, the housing movement relied primarily on moral appeals against evictions and homelessness. But today these are no longer sufficient to create the political power necessary to challenge the naked profiteering of the real estate industrial complex. Fortunately, the national rent spike after 2013 set off a massive surge of tenant organizing, largely led by the African American workers who were most impacted. Powerful tenant organizations arose in New York City, Chicago, Kansas City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Together, these efforts revealed an important new source of power: the fact that tenants physically occupy the buildings that billionaire corporations depend on for their income and their profits.
Tenant Power
Abolish Rent, an organizing manual published in 2024 by the Los Angeles Tenant Union, explains this power. Its conclusions are based on experiences leading rent strikes in Boyle Heights and Hillside Villa:
“Rent strikes stop the flow of cash to our landlords and reveal their dependence on us,” write Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. “Rent strikes suggest that the right to housing already exists; all we need to do is to claim it. … Our building-wide strikes have earned tenants rent cancellations, rent reductions, direct payments, structural repairs, the restoration of amenities and more. …”
But rent strikes are not for everyone. To avoid eviction and defeat, they must be carefully planned, prepared and organized with legal support lined up and supermajorities of tenants ready to participate. At the same time, rent strikes alone are not enough. They have to be combined with long range political action and organizing. Tenant participation in the Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign in New York City, for example, led to creation of an Office of Tenant Protection on January 1, his first day in office.
“Each rent strike develops the power of tenants as political subjects,” write Rosenthal and Vilchis. “A bridge between the utopian future we want and the practical capacities we need to get there, each rent strike is a step forward in realizing the seemingly impossible – a world without landlords, a world without rent.”
Just as in the 20th century, the factory “point of production” was as a critical organizing space for workers confronting industry, so today the tenant movement is becoming a key site for attacking speculative capital.
As Abolish Rent explains, “One of the most powerful weapons we have as tenants is our physical presence. We take up space. … When we stand in the way of eviction or even of rent collection, occupying our homes becomes an occupation of our homes. Similarly, when we reclaim shared spaces – hold association meetings in our lobbies, grow plants in our back yards, repair our sidewalks, clean our alleys, block traffic to hold a union party on our street – we occupy our buildings, our neighborhoods and the city.”
Class Unity
Because the housing movement brings together workers of every race and immigration status, it becomes a strategic location for resisting fascist divide and conquer tactics. While big-city mayors are aggressively organizing tenants against our unhoused brothers and sisters, it is important to fight for unity not only across color lines, but between the housed and unhoused sectors of our movement. Unhoused people are not a separate category, they are only tenants who have been evicted and have nowhere else to turn.
A recent online chat group asked some unhoused people about overcoming the rift of resentment between housed and unhoused residents and these were some of their responses:
“Most of us on fixed incomes, with disabilities and aging bodies, are lifers out here, unless fortune smiles on us. If it wasn’t for this lifestyle, I could never afford cancer treatment. … I am an economic refugee. A decade of full-time living in a vehicle. I am excluded from returning simply because I don’t have enough money. … We were thrown away by our society. Aged out, feeling thrown out. Having to listen to bullshit politicians and hearing how it is poor life choices, or my personal favorite, ‘Just ask for help.’ What help??? … The system is making it illegal to be unhoused. Because they need you back paying into the system.”
Unity requires solidarity with those who have been evicted but, even more than that, it requires understanding the fact that all tenants, unhoused people and even most homeowners, have a common enemy in the class of banks and real estate corporations that control the housing market. The system is rigged against all of us. Rent is nothing more or less than a tax or tribute paid by propertyless workers to the large corporate landlords that fix the rents in every city. When we unite against this system, we fight for a society where rent is abolished, every family will be able to own its own home and we can all live with the security, peace and dignity we deserve.
Published on March 2, 2026 This article originated in Rally!
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