How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

"When we think about the power to shape our cities in our interests, handing that power over to the private market is how we are in the situation that we’re in right now."

Last Wednesday at Riffraff, author Tracy Rosenthal of the Los Angeles Tenants Union was joined by State Representative Cherie Cruz, whose day job is tenant organizing with Reclaim Rhode Island, and Vivian Blush, a tenant organizer with the Providence Organization of Workers and Renters (POWR). Tracy co-authored Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. Dan Denvir, host of The Dig podcast, moderated the discussion.

You can watch the discussion here. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Daniel Denvir: It’s really good to be here with Tracy, who I just interviewed for The Dig two weeks ago.

Let’s dive in with you all and say a few things about your organizing work.

Tracy Rosenthal: To tell the short story of the Los Angeles Tenant Union - it started in defeat, the destruction of the largest public housing project west of the Mississippi, the Pico-Aliso in Boyle Heights. There was a community, and the project that initiated its destruction was under a Democratic administration. It was Clinton’s HOPE VI.

A community in that building did not want their housing improved - in other words, removed. They wanted to stay there. So, they organized and formed the Union de Vecinos but did not win their fight. The projects were destroyed, and 1200 families were displaced, but 250 of those who fought won the right to return and remain in their housing. They are the foundation of the Los Angeles Tenant Union, which started because what they recognized out of that defeat was that they needed more power that even in this party City, in this one-party State, they needed a lot more tenants on their side if they were going to transform the power relationships that shape where and how we all live.

When the union started, I think about it, now really, as a way to set the tools we have as tenants to work for us. What do we have? We have our bodies, stay put in our housing, and interrupt our landlords, real estate speculators, and politicians’ plans for that housing. We have our rent checks and monthly tribute, which we’ll discuss. Putting those things together in concert with our neighbors can be a source of economic power for us. We can use those rent checks as a source of power. And lastly, we have our relationships with each other. We can build trust, share risk, and redistribute that risk to organize and escalate our struggle and bring it to the people who want to put us out.

A union is an infrastructure that sets these tools to work. That’s the way that I’ve come to describe it. We’re about to celebrate our 10th anniversary this summer.

Vivian Blush: POWR was started a few years ago, but it had its origins in a little thing that, at the time, was essentially just a few friends - some of them in this room - who decided, “Oh shit, we’re all going not to have jobs because there’s this crazy virus.”

I had been a labor organizer - organizing folks in places like Starbucks and other cafes around the City, and all of a sudden, I was out of my job and out of the type of organizing I did as an activist. I said, "Well, maybe I can do this in the community." I know these people from the LA Tenants Union and their network of independent tenant unions across the country, and I’ve been following that for a long time. Maybe this is an opportunity to do this.

So we got together and formed what was then called Tenant Network Rhode Island. Because we were trying to adapt to all this new stuff like Zoom and all these other things for a long time, we just did what is normally in the organizing world called service work. We were letting people know their rights, letting people know how to get in touch with lawyers - who mostly sucked - and then eventually, we moved on to doing some more direct fights alongside tenants, often just single families that were dealing with problems in their home, and using direct action to put pressure on their landlords to do the right thing.

Eventually, we got a breakthrough with some tenants - who are also actually in this room - to try to start a tenant union across a landlord’s portfolio, which ended up being us helping these tenants organize autonomously. That was called the Providence Living Tenants Union. There’s a terrible landlord in town named Dustin Dezube. He’s a developer, and he sucks. It eventually reached the point when they negotiated with Dezube, and things like that fell away.

That’s when I met our friends from Reclaim Rhode Island and exported some of that model to them. It’s all been a big experiment.

One cool thing early on in the pandemic was that we helped tenants across a landlord’s properties in the West End of Providence go on rent strike and win a rent strike where they got rent forgiveness for things. Some needed some rent assistance, but they got most of the rent forgiven. That was a very early win with virtual organizing, which was crazy. We’ve been doing lots of other things since then.

Also, as POWR, we did a “Freeze Rents” campaign. We recognized that there’s only so much the laws can do to protect people. We wanted to put some heat on the City. Tenants are telling us that they don’t want their rent to go up a little bit every year. It was the height of all that inflation we’ve just been dealing with. So we were like, “Let’s just freeze it.” We’ve been fighting for lower rents and gathering our forces.

Daniel Denvir: What’s Reclaim RI up to? What are we trying to do these days?

Cherie Cruz: I want to add that the laws are not meant to help you. They are intended to ensure that the profits go to the landlord.

I was born and raised here. I’ve been a renter all my life, whether it was section eight or public housing. I got to see life in the slums and landlord profits grow. Our rents never go to something that creates habitability, dignity, or respect. I met Reclaim RI with the Formerly Incarcerated Union (FIU) because one of the big issues for us, too, was that when we had criminal records, housing was difficult [to obtain]. We would have to take whatever we were given because they would hold that stigma, that barrier, over our heads with housing. So when we talk about exploitation and living in some of the worst conditions - if you’re someone who is undocumented or has a criminal legal record, this is your day-to-day life, and you try to learn how to maneuver it.

I came to Reclaim working on cannabis justice, and some of our members with FIU were dealing with a real slumlord called Pioneer Investments lead poisoning children...

Audience: Shame!

Cherie Cruz: Yes, it is a shame to think about poisoning our children - not only taking our rent and not fixing things - but poisoning our kids and destroying generations and lives. So from that, how do we take on these slumlords? We’re seeing, especially since Covid, even though for many of us in Rhode Island, this was happening long before - anyone who’s read the book knows that this has been in the making for a long fucking time.

So we started coming together, and you know what? There are a lot of people within Reclaim that are being impacted by slumlords -experiencing homelessness because of these slumlords. We asked, what can we do?

Starting, it was a lot of trial and error because we were working and fighting alongside families who were in some of the most severe living conditions and going through some of the most severe retaliation, harassment, and violence from these slumlords here in our State.

You can imagine that when people are trying to survive day-by-day when you’re trying to build a union and community, it’s hard to organize. We are separated and divided. So we started working and successfully got some tenants to organize and mount a legal defense against Pioneer. For many of us, it was the first time we saw something happening - some accountability with the Attorney General. We were able to get stories from tenants - coming forward and using their voice - to bring that slumlord to the table and hold him accountable for lead poisoning their children.

That was one of our first campaigns. From that moment, we started learning about tenant unions across the country and just over the line in Connecticut and learned about that organizational model - one that’s used by labor unions, one that’s tried and true over a hundred years of organizing, being militant, and having the plan to win.

With that, we started to shift. We started empowering people to find their organizations, agency, and will to fight. Because people have been oppressed so long - living in fear and holding onto the last bit of hope of a roof over their head and not being out there on the street, like 800 to a thousand of our Rhode Island residents are facing right now - some of the highest homelessness rates in the country.

We mounted a campaign using this model and became militant at getting people trained and working alongside them to build their union. One of our first campaigns was taking on one of the most vicious slumlords in our State, Jeff Butler and Elmwood Realty.

Audience: Boo!

Cherie Cruz: It’s still going, but we were able to see some tangible wins. And I want to shout out the Atlantic Mills Tenant Union, the first commercial tenant union in Rhode Island.

As I speak, if you’re saying, “She’s all over the place,” - this is not a straight line. This work is not a straight line because what happens is there are ebbs and flows in building community, and it takes time. But we’re planting the seeds and building the foundation of what that looks like. Atlantic Mills came while we were working with residential tenants. We thought, “Hey, wait a minute, you can apply this model to commercial tenants. Why not? Right?”

There’s a landlord and a tenant, people are being displaced, and rents are going up. How do we do that? Atlantic Mills tenants brought the landlord to the table for their first negotiation yesterday. Keep watching out for it.

That said, there are more campaigns and events happening, and we’ll keep being militant about them.

Daniel Denvir: Obviously, this work is important. It’s possible to do, but it is also full of challenges. Could you talk about one challenge that you’ve confronted or seen tenant organizers confront and how you dealt with it?

Tracy Rosenthal: We’re swimming in challenges, and this moment is challenging. But I think that’s part of what we struggle against. Part of what I was responding to - and what both of you said - is that we are trained to solve our problems in one specific way: by asking an expert for help or individually expressing our opinions with a vote. The biggest challenge is often that leap from believing there’s a law against that or that this service agency will solve this problem for me, so I need to come together with my neighbors, and we have to do something together. People are isolated, and they often don’t know each other. We don’t know the people with whom we share this fundamental aspect of our lives. Where we live determines so much of where we go to school, what environmental harms we’re exposed to, and what food we eat every day, yet we’ve been so trained out of the notion that we have power at all or that the way we’re going to find the power is collective.

That, in some ways, is why the word “union” that we are using is a tool that we can use. There are so many ways that the labor model helps us. Also, one of the coolest things you can do as a tenant is not going anywhere. That is the power that we undersell if we are too focused on the labor model and the strike’s power - the sense that if you don’t go anywhere. You have the support of your community to defend you if necessary, and only a court will evict you; we can rely on the historic winds of the tenant movement of the past to let us stay put.

So the two challenges I’ll name are this culture of individualism, the way that we’ve been trained to solve our problems, and the real terror that we experience as tenants because someone else controls this fundamental basic need that we have.

One of the most basic organizing challenges is figuring out ways to come together and move through that fear collectively. But because our homes are supposed to be our refuge, we have a lot more fear about losing them.

Daniel Denvir: Tracy’s saying about staying at home is that if you’re a tenant who goes on a sit-down strike, you can sit in your recliner and play video games or watch movies. It rocks.

Vivian Blush: It’s interesting, right? Because in our organizing, we’ve dealt with organizing in a City where everyone is atomized, where there isn’t, except for a few gentrifier landlords in the northern part of the City - there aren’t these mega landlords, there are a lot of mom and pops and things like that, or there’s State housing, public housing, and affordable housing - things like that that might have more units. When we started organizing, we were organizing many individual tenants who needed to find community in the height of a crisis. Of course, because of our circles, the people we were getting were many activists, people from the LGBTQ+ community, and also students.

I would say that people having fear is a big thing. Once the fear was gone, once people had, early on in our organizing, their stimulus checks, the guarantee of a potential eviction moratorium, and things like that, we saw a lot of people fade away because, again, it is your base - your home - you don’t want to lose it. Pushing leftist activist people, people who have at least a marginal level of privilege, even if they’re downwardly mobile or something like that, is a lot harder than people who have nothing to lose.

Many of our organizing started with women of color coming to us. The challenges we’ve faced and have had to come to terms with because we aren’t organized enough as working-class people and tenants and need more power are that it’s easy to get repressed into smithereens. We’ve seen the full power of the police and DCYF in every fight that we’ve had.

There’s this great quote in the book. It’s a chapter four. “It takes courage to say that the good were defeated, not because they were good, but because they were weak.” We might have all the right intentions, but things won’t get better if we don’t have power and have everyone in this room join a tenant union tomorrow. In another part of that book, it’s said that Organizing as tenants clarifies the function of the police as protectors of property rather than as law enforcement. If a landlord wants to kick us out, the cops arrive to carry it out with brute force - whether legal or not. If your roof caves in or your pipes burst, breaking habitability laws, you wait weeks for housing inspectors to issue a flimsy complaint. And we know the suspicion that greets us when our neighborhoods “change,” what can happen when police decide that we are “out of place” somewhere, even when we’ve lived there our whole lives. If it’s the relations of private property, not our safety, that police exist to protect, fighting against rent will inevitably set them against us and us against them.

That resonated with me because our biggest struggle in the past year was that they tried to take our tenant friends, who were children, away from our community. To overcome that, we took them in even further. Our members actually ended up taking in one of our member’s children and making sure that they had a safe place. We all pretended to be nonprofit service providers.

We did everything that we could to fight. One of our tenant members’ husband was brutally attacked by the police - with no warrant - in their home just because they were playing music outside on the street, and they didn’t want them in the neighborhood. What we’ve been coming up against is sometimes landlords, even the smallest ones, not just the big corporate ones, but sometimes the smallest ones, are the most ruthless. Our struggle is, how do we deal with the repression?

Daniel Denvir: Cherie, you’ve knocked on a lot of doors. It’s not hard to find people who are upset or angry about their situation, but it’s a lot harder to get them to take action.

Cherie Cruz: I’m glad you read that quote because systems are one of the challenges, and you set it up right there. We think systems are there to help - or at least the people whose doors we knocked on have tried that - have been let down over and over again, if not ending up in a worse situation, when we look for these systems that we think are there to help us but are there to protect the interests of that landlord and to keep you in these unsafe conditions. When you talk about this at the doors, that’s where a lot of the fear stems. The violence we see - you just made me think about a door, and one of the vicious slumlords hit my car when he caught us knocking on the doors and organizing his tenants. He came chasing us with his little selfie stick.

Daniel Denvir: He’s a TikTok landlord influencer with 200,000 followers.

Cherie Cruz: I tell him, you fix your shit, and then we can leave. You’re not doing your job, taking their money, or doing what you’re supposed to do. There was a reason he did that - to instill that fear. The challenge is real. The people we get on their doors as this vicious landlord tells organizers that they can’t talk to someone at their door. Literally - you can’t speak to anyone, or you’re evicted. You can’t organize or talk to your neighbors or are evicted. If you say anything, I’ll call the cops on you. I’ll call DCYF on you and have your kids taken away. These are not exaggerations. These are tactics to ensure they can extract profits and make you live in unsafe conditions. When the tenants ask, what do I do, and where do I go?

There isn’t anywhere to go other than to band with your neighbors and build that collective power. There is strength in numbers. We all understand strength in numbers. One of the things I say when I’m on those doors is, “Listen, they’re going to do it regardless. You could either cower in this corner while they kick you or stand up and start hitting back because it will happen regardless.” But how about when you stand up and stand arm in arm with your neighbors and hit back? Because there’s more of you than them.

And I’ll add another. We went through the system to get the conditions repaired. There was no heat; there were rats everywhere. These were kids placed by the system, DCYF, into these units, and the units were paid with our tax dollars to protect those young people aging out of DCYF. This is the system putting them into this place to be abused. They banded together. They went through the courts - set up to protect these landlords - but they went through the courts to ensure this landlord goes in and fixes all of these things while still collecting money from the State.

When he came to do the repairs, he agitated conflict and fought with the young people in this unit, and the police came. What did the police do? Arrested them!

Daniel Denvir: The landlord also got arrested.

Cherie Cruz: He did. He was crying in his cell. The cops came out and said, “He’s crying back there. They were like, get that on TikTok.” We were at the police station in moments. All the neighbors were waiting in the lobby. The police finally realized, “What are we doing here?” because the landlord called the police, and they were told, “This is what we do. We go up after the tenant because it’s the landlord’s property, even though they’re harming people.” This is the power of fighting back and coming together. Those charges against the tenants were eventually dropped, thank God. But it still left a sting for them and a fear about the risks they take every day.

Tracy Rosenthal: As you were talking, I realized that the relationship [between landlord and tenant] is built on violence - the idea that if you don’t pay this person who works an average of four hours a month more than 50% of your wages, they’re going to call the agents of the State to force you out of your homes. That alignment is clear. And that foundation of violence is present in all of our fear when we go to resist our landlords.

One of the other things that I wanted to describe is that when we’re organizing tenants, one of the things that we face is that we are living in so many layers of history - of failed solutions to the problem of this housing crisis.

There is a building that we organized in Chinatown called Hillside Villa. In that building, tenants live under three governing regimes. Some of them get section eight. Money from the State goes directly into the landlord’s pockets. Tenants are separated from their economic power. It is explicitly so that people don’t have access to their economic power, and they live in shittier conditions because of it, right? Other people are living in so-called affordable housing, a footnote in Reagan’s tax cuts that produces most of the so-called affordable housing we have right now. That is a means-tested restriction such that if you get another job, if you get a partner, suddenly you could have to pay more in rent or you would have to leave.

Daniel Denvir: It enriches private interest.

Tracy Rosenthal: Of course. It starts with tax breaks auctioned off to developers who compete to write down their obligations to the State. Then those affordable housing covenants expire, so after 25 years, you are shit out of luck. The landlord is going to make market-rate profit in perpetuity.

In that building are also market-rate tenants. And what does the market rate mean? It’s basically: How far can you push people to give up food and medication and pack more and more people into their housing or stay in partnerships that you want to leave? That’s what we’re talking about when discussing marketing rate housing. We’re talking about the lengths people will go to put a roof over their heads.

So, in this building, these three housing regimes are all in the same place because this is how we’ve decided to deal with the social question of shelter. These tenants are not only organizing; they’re organizing in three languages, but that’s easier in some ways because we have interpretation systems. That’s hard, but we can build the tools to get people to talk to each other. The fact is that in Los Angeles, the majority of people don’t speak English at home; they speak Spanish. In this building, it was Spanish, English, and Cantonese. So we built systems for people to organize, but we had to do more than that: deal with these different tenancy regimes that create different risks for different people.

We have to recognize that as we organize people. One of our main challenges is responding to the fact that over our hundred-year history of housing policy, these regimes have made us more disorganized.

Cherie Cruz: To add to that organizing layer, the different regimes, specifically section eight. We found ourselves organizing the workers in the section eight offices to say, “Listen, you hold the money, and you’ve got them captive. They’re organizing, they need to build a union, and you have the power. You need to hold this landlord to the table with that power.” For some, it was frustrating. For others, it was a light bulb. Because the default [strategy] for tenants under this disorganization and powerlessness was to move, section 8 providers would tell tenants to move, even though landlords are getting this large subsidy a profit under Section 8.

I noticed tenants in these different buckets of financing, where landlords are getting all this money and profit, need to start organizing those through whom the money flows to ensure that power goes back to the tenant.

Daniel Denvir: I ask far too many questions of many people. So, I want to ask Cherie and Vivian a question or two about Tracy. What came up in the book that resonated with your own experiences doing this organizing?

Cherie Cruz: There was something that came up, to put on my legislator hat, [during a hearing] these landlords come boohoo-ing about how they don’t want to fix shit. They want more money. And they called themselves housing providers. I laughed when they came before my committee at the State House. I went, “Housing provider? What are you providing? You’re a slumlord. You’re getting money, and you’re going to feel bad because you’re getting paid?” This is insane. I thought [calling themselves housing providers] was just here, but when I saw that in the book, I realized it is national. Where the hell did that fucking come from? Because they’re not providing shit. So, I want to hear more about that terminology.

Tracy Rosenthal: One of the things that we know about landlords and real estate is that one of the worst things about paying rent is that part of those checks go to this lobby that is used to create the laws that exploit and dominate us. That’s part of the circuit. Every time you pay rent, you pay the landlord lobby because that’s where our money goes.

One of the things that they’ve been up to is basically to rid themselves of the title of landlord because it makes the power that they have over us clear. Instead, they talk about providing a service [as in], “Where would tenants go if we didn’t provide them with housing?” But what they’re describing is their spare fucking house. One of the things that is so important, and one of the things that’s a challenge, is that there’s so much of the system that we accept as natural - that it’s okay that somebody hoards all of the space where human beings can live and then forces us to pay a tribute to access it.

When they call themselves providers, they don’t provide shit, they hoard it, and then they charge us to be able to access it. And while they’re charging us that, they’re also pointing a gun at our heads. They can use their ownership, their voucher for State violence, to force us to do that. They are now using many insidious techniques that they trot out in the New York Times as their small landlord owns 6,000 apartments. I’m like, baby, you’re tiny.

It is all built on this foundation of us thinking that because this is the way it is, this is the way that it always has to be, or that this is normal or natural.

I wanted to respond to what you mentioned earlier regarding slum conditions. I wrote about a tenant struggle in New York. This tenant, Ashley, used to live in the hole, the neighborhood in East New York that is in a cross-hair of ecological and housing exploitation. Her bedroom was growing mushrooms. I remember her saying this: “It’s getting to the point where we’re paying them to kill us.” And that’s what was happening. She was going to the hospital, her kids were going to the hospital, and she was trapped in this relationship. Anytime you hear someone call a landlord a provider, that is the sentence we should have in our head.

Cherie Cruz: We call it the domestic violence relationship because it’s very violent. But in these last couple of years, they insulted the term landlord, the title of Lords of the Land, but now they are also co-opting the spaces where we fought to empower tenants to have a voice to be heard. They took over a tenant-landlord commission and used their lobby to get developers and landlords to speak for what’s best for tenants. That’s how powerful [they are] with the money and the branding - to hold on to these profits to be able to poison you, to be able to extract, and to be able to keep up that domestic violence relationship, as we call it when we meet with a tenant. That’s what tenants say. “I’m trapped in a domestic violence relationship.”

Vivian Blush: For three years, from 2021 to at least 2024, I was a member of the Rhode Island Coalition of Housing Providers. They organize in a Facebook group. That’s the landlord union, and they’re like 3000 people strong. Even though a lot of our local tenant unions have been growing, the landlords are still very strong, even though they’re mostly just writing emails and then have 30 people show up to the wrong hearings half the time to complain about how having to make more of that shitty affordable housing we were talking about earlier and or going to the wrong hearing for rent control [on a bill] that would never pass, but expending all their effort on that.

They were reacting to developments in capitalism and the rebalancing of power. Their daddy decided that it was okay for the CDC to issue an eviction moratorium, and that made it so they finally couldn’t evict people unless they found bullshit reasons to evict people - saying that they were a bad tenant, so they needed to evict you with 30 days notice or things like that.

I had a firsthand seat of what it’s like to be on their side, and it stems from their fear that they thought they were going to lose their property rights to a bunch of socialists or something like that, but that’s not really what’s going on.

My question for you: In the manifesto part of the book, you talk about the war on tenants, and it’s great that you bring it back to the class war that started with the development of capitalism.

There’s this great song I encourage everyone to listen to. It’s from Songs of the Tenants’ Movement, The World Turned Upside Down. It’s about how this old movement from England back in the day, the Diggers, were saying, “Fuck you for trying to take our common land and dispossess us from the land. We’re going to take this back.” It’s like that skit from Monty Python: “This is an anarcho-syndicalist commune.”

Something in this work that’s always struck me is that it’s not just a struggle; it’s not about housing; it’s about ourselves as the subjectivity of people without land and property. Anyone who’s a tenant, unless you’re a rich ass fucking tenant that’s living in a little condo and you have some other place to stay, we are homeless too. That’s what you have to think about. We are unhoused, too, and we’re only a step away from that.

In a lot of our early organizing, we did as Tenant Network RI and POWR, we named the 10 biggest slumlords or evictors in the State, and we focused on the private ones. However, this zip code was one of the places with the highest eviction rates throughout the last five years because the only way to get rent assistance was to become evicted.

A lot of the housing crisis that you hear about when you’re reading the newspaper or if you’re concerned about more and more unhoused neighbors on your street is because they’re getting pushed out of public housing.

I’m curious about the long history of that disorganization because I’ve been studying it here. How do we deal with that restructuring? Another big thing for us is the experimental nature of it. Some local chapters and neighborhoods work on community stuff, and some work across landlords. We’ve been struggling to find a model that works for this City. Some models work for the State, but are there models that could work when you are so atomized?

Tracy Rosenthal: One of the reasons we define a tenant as someone who doesn’t control their housing is that it includes people who live outdoors. We know that more and more people are being forced to go outdoors. In that situation, as we were organizing with the tenants in Echo Park Lake living outside, abandoned by the State and subject to sweeps across the City and contained there, we recognized that the State is their landlord. The State deprives people of bathrooms. It doesn’t give you showers. It denies you amenities when you’re outdoors, and it subjects you to incredible harassment and violence. Using that frame for our organizing was powerful, helping to draw people from the broader community in solidarity with that struggle.

Also, why does the State have an interest in sweeping these people in what amounted to the largest police eviction in LA history? It took 700 cops over two days to finally sweep this encampment that had been the home of people who were struggling to survive. It also showed us how they did that. How did they build the survival networks when they were completely abandoned? Part of it was they relied on solidarity; they relied on people to draw in resources, but then they relied on themselves and their capacity for self-organization to redistribute those resources to give people tents who showed up with nothing because the City wasn’t going to do that and to hold the space to occupy the land. That struggle helped recenter what we think of in our work in the Los Angeles Tenant Union about claiming territory so people can organize themselves to survive.

Something else I heard in what you said that is important is that it is not a struggle because we want to fight. It’s a struggle because we want to organize another way of living together, one in which we can survive and thrive together. That’s something I saw there. As we build these networks, as we think about our relationships as a source of our political power, we’re also thinking about them because, as we’re doing that, we can see what it might be like if we didn’t live in a system that makes us struggle.

Daniel Denvir: How does one plug into POWR and Reclaim RI? Reclaim is doing tenant organizing work, working on just cause eviction at the State level, rent control at the Providence City level, and advocating for a public housing developer as part of a social housing vision for Rhode Island. And Tracy, how should people who’ve never been involved in this before consider getting involved?

Vivian Blush: You can get involved with the Providence Organization of Workers and Renters by attending our meetings every third Tuesday of the month. You can just drop in at 6:30 at 95 Empire Street. We are a completely dues-funded organization. It’s all volunteer, and everything’s democratic. We decide everything in those meetings.

When the weather gets a little bit warmer this spring, and through the summer, we do big pushes in the community. So we’re going to be continuing to organize. If you have a shitty landlord, we want to talk to you. You can get in touch through the Internet or anything like that.

Cherie Cruz: On the third Monday, come. That’s where the magic happens. We meet at 1199 SEIU on 319 Broadway at 6:30. That’s where you can get plugged in, and that’s where you’ll meet us. Even if you’re thinking about coming, give us a call. We can start talking about where you’re at and what interests you so you can be meaningfully engaged. As you heard Dan talk about, Shana, my tenant co-organizer, and I go everywhere within the State. We get calls for all tenant training, what could be possible, and just cause eviction and other political things. Just join us. It’s a community, and you will be pleased.

Daniel Denvir: Came. If you’re a leader in Reclaimer, Rhode Island, in the room, you can raise your hand so people can come and see you.

Tracy Rosenthal: I’ll say two things about what it feels like to get involved. Something I learned is that every skill can be an organizing skill. Our visions of what the thing looks like from the outside won’t necessarily match how it is. There is a place for you because we all must find a place in the movement to transform this world. I heard a tenant who went on a rent strike during the first emergency measures of the pandemic say that not doing this or going on strike is the bigger risk because I know what would happen if I gave my money to my landlord. He’ll leave me alone for a month, but will I be able to eat next month? Am I going to get a job? What if someone gets sick? That is the insight that I want to take to this moment, that not doing something is the bigger risk; it’s an enormous risk to let this burning planet get ground under rising fascism. I want us to take that risk and take it together. I hope you do find your place soon.

Daniel Denvir: Yeah, fascism is rising, and it’s scary right now. Questions and comments?

Steve Ahlquist: You mentioned organizing unhoused people. What does that look like? Does that look like having a lawyer say, “You’re not giving us the services we [are entitled to], so therefore, we’re suing the City?” For trash pickup, for bathrooms, etc.

Tracy Rosenthal: As I said, every skill can be an organizing skill, and I would include lawyering in that. Oftentimes, we turn to the law to do what we think we can’t do ourselves. We found in organizing that the law and lawyers have a place in the division of labor of our movement. We have a story here of the Mariachis who were able to go on a rent strike in a market-rate building, win a collective bargaining agreement with their landlord, and get the equivalent of rent control for their building. They had a lawyer, and what their lawyer did was stall. I was talking to Scout Katovich, staff attorney at the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, and she talked about how the role of law in defending homeless people is often about stalling, [creating] more time to think about policies that are sentencing people to banishment or jail.

So yes, there are legal strategies to rely on, but for me, what we describe is a project that looks like knocking on tent doors, meeting people, and creating spaces for people to get to know their neighbors and build relationships of trust. That process is sometimes harder, sometimes easier than when someone can slam the door in your face. If their living room is outside, sending you packing is a little harder. In my experience, those projects have required the same skills, commitments, and capacities.

Steve Ahlquist: In Rhode Island, I see a lot of homeless encampments, and they bring together the community you’re talking about, but then the Mayor will come in with the police and evict them. I’m not sure what it looks like to stand against that.

Cherie Cruz: I see a path to organizing and unionizing people who are experiencing homelessness and being shuffled by the State into those spaces and the opportunity to demand dignity and respect and not be policed with violence. We have a great opportunity, as sadly, more people are becoming homeless and suffering, to find, build, and empower them to realize that dream of coming together in collective action - unionizing to demand respect and dignity.

Vivian Blush: If anyone is interested in organizing that right now, I know some people in the exploratory stages with things like that, so feel free to contact me. It’s a powerful way to do the type of stuff we discussed. Back in the thirties, the way that people did eviction defense, massive amounts of eviction defense, were that all the unemployed, unhoused folks who used to be union members decided, fuck this, that grandma’s about to get evicted. We will stop her from getting evicted, and the police will go. The drug war was an attack on the ability of unhoused, unemployed people to be able to organize. It’s all connected.

Question: One of our biggest goals is supporting tenants interested in building tenant unions. Our biggest challenge in Providence and Rhode Island is how our rental housing stock is set up. Unlike in a lot of other cities, we don’t have these big apartment buildings that have 300 tenants in them. What we see more often are landlords who own many properties that aren’t in the same neighborhood or even in the same City. A lot of Reclaim’s organizing focuses on tenants in multiple different cities. So I’m wondering, Tracy, in your research, either in LA or other places, what approaches have you seen be successful when it comes to neighborhood or block-based organizing, or organizing among tenants of one landlord but who are geographically spread out?

Tracy Rosenthal: That is a great question. We organize it through local chapters because it’s hard to develop systems if your conditions differ. Organizing in our downtown local, in SROs [single room occupancy] looks different than organizing in Highland Park in our northeast local chapter, which I think is probably the closest analogy to people living in back houses, really splung, very spread out. But they’re geographically connected in that place, and we benefit from that. But oftentimes, what that looks like is people circulating between each other’s houses as their meeting space.

Over time, we went from having one central meeting place in Hollywood for the entire City of Los Angeles, like that was going to fucking work. Then we said, “We’re going to have these local meetings. What’s been happening is we are meeting in people’s houses.” That is made possible because of the geography and weather - you can be outside - and because many people are willing to be in each other’s living rooms.

Many people who don’t have the same landlord are coming together and figuring out how to keep coming together to share strategies. Even though they’re not necessarily building a tenant association, they are building that local chapter. I think people are always thinking about how to do more.

Question: With the current State of politics and everything that’s going on, how do you encourage immigrants and, particularly undocumented immigrants, to participate, given that they are one of the largest populations affected?

Tracy Rosenthal: This is a moment when I wish my mentor Leonardo Vilchis, who wrote this book with me, was here because he’s one of the founders of unions, and he is from Mexico. Immigrant communities make up the majority, if not the super majority, of that chapter, and then maybe a majority of undocumented people. We write about undocumented people joining the struggle and going on rent strikes and the fear that emerges from that experience.

It’s important for us as organizers to give people information, but have that information not dissuade people from taking risks they can take. My answer to your question would be: What is our role as organizers? It’s about that process, that dialectics, where we are listening to people and their real fears - this is the knowledge we have, and these are the tools that can be deployed.

That meeting point is about giving people agency to make the calls and inviting them to a long struggle. What we’re seeing now in Los Angeles is some of the most militant actions that have taken place. These actions concern the depth of undocumented people’s and immigrant communities’ organizing. There’s no antidote to risk, but there is solidarity and information. Those are the two things that can help that situation.

Vivian Blush: We need to have faith in the people because one of our strongest fighters in POWR for most of the time that we were organizing is an undocumented person. They’re no longer undocumented, which is great. But like Tracy was saying, it gives people agency and understanding that people can take risks - even if they’re highly calculated. But do not defer to this liberal thing of “I shouldn’t tell someone to do this thing.” If someone wants to fight, they want to fight, and we need to help them fight harder.

Question: It’s hard to imagine not paying rent. Do you have any ideas about what it would look like?

Tracy Rosenthal: So good. Part of what you’re talking about is a long-term strategy to create the scale of the crisis we need to extract any of the fucking concessions that would save our lives. On the one hand, I admit that I am a romantic, and I can sit here and say, “Fuck yeah, we need a general rent strike.”

One way of thinking about abolishing rent is a permanent and general rent strike. But I also want to think about how we get there. For me, my whole building does not pay rent. It rocks. In many ways, I’m luxuriating in the historic tenant movement of New York City. To be able to do that, I can just sort of say, “Yeah, fuck it. Come get it.”

We’ll see what happens. At first, people were risk averse and didn’t want to get in the court records because some landlords would look at that and say they couldn’t rent in the future. The slow process of getting more attached to our homes and each other and the organizing project changed people’s minds. In my building, I have the experience of watching people go from not knowing how that would look and not being able to imagine it to being, “Oh shit, it’s been two and a half years!”

Cultivating that at the building level is important. To do that, we need an institution. We need an organization. And that organization is the tenant union. You have examples here of people doing that work - not just local fights so that they win their demands and dissipate - but so those local fights can come together and transform the conditions of power we’re in. We are not there. We do not have that power right now. We’re building power to defeat landlords and push back portfolios. Let’s think about starting where we are, but there’s nothing wrong with dreaming that dream together.

Nina Sparling: I’m a local reporter. I cover housing, and one of the things we hear all the time is this housing crisis is simply a supply and demand problem - as though we can build our way out of it. Can we talk about where tenant organizing fits into the notion of the housing crisis and the dramatic increases in homelessness that we’re seeing?

Vivian Blush: It’s not just a supply problem but also a supply problem - that is the easiest way to put it. It is a tenant organization problem. The way that they were able to reduce rent in China was by Mao going out to the countryside, and peasant organizations of hundreds of thousands of people were able to do that because they had hundreds of thousands of people organized and passed laws saying that they were going to reduce rent. That’s one part of it. But also, eventually, that gave them the power of the State to be able to make a lot of fucking housing. One of the biggest housing programs in world history was in the Soviet Union, where they were able to build so much freaking housing that eventually, rents were only 5% of your income. So it is both.

Daniel Denvir: And I can add our vision for social housing. Rhode Island is starting modestly with this proposal for a public housing developer. We got $10 million in the housing bond passed in November for that purpose. That will not build so much. But when that builds something, we’re going to push for a much bigger amount of money going towards that. And then well beyond that, well beyond anything we can even grasp right now, the vision is that everyone has a right to housing and can demand it from the State, a public option for housing for anyone, at a level that works for you. Beyond that, there are other horizons.

Tracy Rosenthal: For me, let’s look at the power relationship. Why is the call for more supply usually delivered with the call for deregulation? It’s because it’s about making the financial incentives possible to pencil out so that developers continue to make ridiculous profits. The idea that real estate developers will build so much that they destroy their profit margins is laughable, but that is what they’re selling us.

We need to think about what they’re telling the public in their shareholder meetings. They say things like, “We’re investing in scarcity. What we want is scarcity.” In economic downturns, who builds for the poor? No private developer is doing that work. When we talk about the supply question, we’re left with the idea that we need public housing provision because that is who is willing to provide public housing for the public good.

The term “housing provider” is becoming a model for landlords and developers because it is a role developers claim for themselves. When we think about the power to shape our cities in our interests, handing that power over to the private market is how we are in the situation that we’re in right now. Suppose we want to take control of our housing and take control of our cities. In that case, that means investing in our unions, in the places that we are, in building tenant associations so that we can stay in the housing that we live in, and capturing State power so that we can build the housing that needs to exist that will never exist under the conditions that we’re living in right now.