Isabel Garcia could name every past owner of her building for nearly 60 years. She moved from Mexico to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, in 1962. In 2010, a new landlord bought her unit and those of several other tenants and began a campaign of harassment. Garcia’s apartment was protected by a local rent stabilization ordinance, but that didn’t stop her landlord from trying to evict by other means. Rosenthal and Vilchis recount how he installed surveillance cameras and removed the building’s amenities (washing machines, clotheslines, and common spaces), filed repeated “cure or quit” notices, which threaten tenants to “fix” a lease violation in three days or face eviction, and targeted Garcia’s son, who passed the time outdoors, with nuisance complaints. Rather than abandon their homes, she and her neighbors stayed put. The harassment drew Garcia “closer to her neighbors than ever before,” and in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, she decided to withhold half of her rent in solidarity with those who could no longer afford to pay at all.
The rent strike, Rosenthal and Vilchis argue, works on several levels. On the first night of withholding rent, the authors note, tenants are often shocked that nothing really happens: The building doesn’t crumble around them, their keys still open the door, the police don’t come crashing through the windows. While risky (this strategy of attrition can last years, they acknowledge, and “victory isn’t guaranteed”), it also exposes landlords’ overarching dependence on tenants. Just as a labor strike hampers the owner’s ability to profit off the production or distribution of goods, the rent strike tamps the landlord’s source of income, creating leverage from which tenants have won “rent cancellations, rent reductions, direct payments, structural repairs, the restoration of amenities, and more.” Tenants rarely have a say in the condition of their home and cannot predict sometimes steep rises in rent from year to year; people forgo food and medications, exhaust themselves by picking up extra shifts at work, or secure payday loans at extortionate interest to make rent. Even if tenants do everything right, landlords can unilaterally decide they want a different tenant by refusing to renew the lease, thrusting tenants back into the churn of the housing market. But rent strikes claw stability back. “We fight,” Garcia tells the authors, “because we have to continue living.”
The tactic goes back over a century, when thousands of Jewish immigrants living in New York’s Lower East Side tenements withheld rent from slumlords and secured the country’s first housing regulations and rent controls. As a “simple, purposeful inaction,” the rent strike suggests that “the right to housing already exists; all we need to do is claim it.” That purposeful inaction also serves as a shared experience among tenants; it requires coordination, trust, collective decision-making, and community support. “Rent strikes are a means and guide toward the ends of our work,” write Rosenthal and Vilchis. They create an “internal culture of tenant democracy,” connecting residents through a “stronger sense of ownership” over shared space.
