"The frame of 'housing crisis' trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, fungible 'housing units' and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives."
"'All housing is public housing,' as David Madden and Peter Marcuse put it. Public investment is a precondition for private profit. Even what we think of as privately owned housing relies on vast public infrastructure to exist. That physical infrastructure includes the pipes that deliver water, the sewers that carry out waste, the sidewalks, roads, and transportation systems that connect our housing to our neighborhoods and our neighborhoods to each other. Public infrastructure also means legal and financial systems, from the contracts that govern leases, to the regulations that dictate everything from what counts as a bedroom to the terms of financing loans. The private housing market could not exist without the support of the state."
"Theirs is a view of tenant power as a by-product of market forces: like a low unemployment rate, which gives workers more leverage, incentivizing bosses to improve conditions and raise pay, a higher vacancy rate would give tenants more choice, motivating landlords to make repairs and ease rent increases. But just as tight labor market has never eliminated deadly jobs or poverty wages, a slack housing market will not eradicate slum housing or rent gouging. Indeed, it was organized labor unions that won wage floors, weekends, and safety regulations; no basic worker protection or benefit has been handed over as a gift from 'job creators.'"
"To protect their right to profit from housing, the industry consistently framed their attacks as a defense against communism. Robert Gerholz, president of the National Home Builders, threatened that public housing would allow the US to 'be precipitated into a socialist state.'"
"As Hoyt once put it, 'Communism can never win in a nation of homeowners.' By blocking a federal guarantee to a dignified home, the real estate industry forced most tenants to turn to the private market."
"By the eighties, shaped in turns by inflation, tax revolt, racism, and the red scare, Republicans had invented the housing programs that make up the overwhelming bulk of the government response to the housing question today, in which support for tenants ends up benefiting landlords and real estate developers... Rather than challenge the power of landlords and developers to extract rents, these programs hand over our tax dollars to shore up private profits."
"The decline of public housing was timed with the expansion of another institution of publicly funded housing for the poor: prisons - public housing as public warehousing."
"Like the horticultural metaphor of 'urban blight' that figures dilapidation as disease, the theory smears the quality of tenants' neighborhoods into the character of tenants themselves. It suggests that buildings in poor condition are not evidence of historical segregation and disinvestment - the decisions of landowners and governments - but evidence of residents' criminality."
"The role of municipal governance continued to shift from providing services to existing residents to growing their economies and expanding their tax bases. Municipalities perform that role by courting new, richer residents as well as real estate speculators."
"Who should we look to for help to dismantle the real estate regime? What levers do we have? What threat do we pose? 'What can we do today so that we can do tomorrow what we cannot do today?'"
"Putting a face and a name on the landlord turned the struggle against an impersonal process of gentrification into a struggle against a would-be evictor, who could no longer hide from personal responsibility for - and personal benefit from - the tenants' removal."
"They learned about the warranty of habitability, implied in most every state and enshrined in California, which ties a tenants' obligation to pay rent to a property's livability: an apartment free of pests and structural issues, heat that heats, lights that light, drains that drain. Withholding rent is often legally protected if basic living standards are not met."
"This is clear from the Mariachi's collective action: Those who couldn't pay and those who could decided to join together, organizing to withhold a majority of the rent roll for the building. The association turned withholding rent into a ritual, turning over their rent checks or money orders to be stored by the union each month."
"Landlord stakeholders claim their property taxes are their contributions to the public good, but it is we who pay our landlords' property taxes."
"A tenants union treats tenants as experts in their own experience and as agents of the changes we need. Who builds a tenants union? We do. Who is it for? Us. A union allows tenants to claim collective control of our housing and our lives."
"By reclaiming the common space of our buildings and our blocks, we assert ourselves as the stewards of the places where we live. We educate ourselves, acting our way into thinking and archiving past tactics to build an arsenal for the future."
"Enacting the principle of small-d democracy - people's self-governance - the tenants union is an instrument to produce small-c communism - collective control over our housing, our land, and our lives."
"The union builds community to overcome this sense of disempowerment, to testify to our ongoing presence in our neighborhoods, to bolster our sense of control over our lives. When we act together in solidarity, we solidify the bonds gentrification breaks."
"So many systems protect landlords from having to encounter the consequences of their actions, from the LLCs that anonymize their identities to the physical distance that separates their homes from ours."
"And, as we know from living in broken-down apartments in cities with habitability laws on the books, what laws we win are only as good as their enforcement."
"Similarly, when we reclaim shared spaces - hold association meetings in our lobbies, grow plants in our backyards, repair our sidewalks, clean our alleys, block traffic to host a union party on our street - we occupy our buildings, our neighborhoods, and the city."
"How do you resolve the tension between the emergency we are living through and the fact that the only tools we have to work with - organizing and collective action - take so much time?... The union is what makes it possible to continue in the face of all the conditions that made it seem like the rational thing to do would be to give up."
"Aligned with property values rather than human rights, city agencies conspired against residents of Echo Park Lake by denying or removing services. As public-records requests revealed, Chief Park Ranger Joe Losorelli had helped deny the park access to a hygiene trailer with showers, lest it become 'another Occupy LA.'"
"Housing without autonomy is internment."
"During an attempt at mediation, the landlord told the city attorney's office that he'd drop his tenants' evictions provided they stop their events. He said the tenants association's movie nights, chapter meetings, and food distribution were as threatening to him as eviction notices. Those communal gatherings are not outwardly aggressive actions, but, in a way, he is right: taking away his ability to turn their neighbors against them, building support for emergency response, those actions grow the power of tenants."
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