Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Hello, welcome to failed architecture, breeze blogs, where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters, and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name's Charlie <inaudible> today. I'm joined by Sasha Plotnik over. Hi Sasha.
Speaker 1 00:00:20 Hi Charlie. Hi.
Speaker 0 00:00:22 So, uh, Sasha is an organizer for the LA tenants union, uh, tenant led member funded union fighting for the human right for housing since the COVID-19 lockdown and the associated impact that this has had on people's incomes. The LA tenants union has seen a huge increase in membership and involvement. So Sasha, it'd be good. First of all, to get a measure of the situation for tenants, maybe in LA in particular, but also in the U S overall. Yeah, definitely. So
Speaker 2 00:00:54 First I would say this isn't new for us. Um, there's a lot of buzz right now about national reports in the U S that 30% of tenants didn't pay rent in April. But I think what people don't realize is that already in March 1st, 20% of tenants did not pay rent. So tenants were already in crisis, right? And we call it a tenants crisis, not a housing crisis. So as we're probably tired of hearing by now, the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic externalities have simply laid bare the kind of violence of capitalism. So in new liberal cities like LA the profit motive kind of really overrides the basic rights of low and no income residents. You know, now during this pandemic, we're being asked to stay home from work, right. But yet, somehow those missing wages are still expected in that we're expected to pay rent.
Speaker 2 00:01:43 And this is really like the, the main battle that we're fighting right now. So what we've been seeing in the LA tenants union is this huge surge of new members. Um, many of whom in greater proportions than ever before are from the professional managerial class, right? So people like architects, um, who are now realizing their procarity and who, in my opinion, have endured a profession that's like really undervalued their collective labor for far too long while ironically driving their own displacement in the way. So the long and short of it is many tenants could not afford to pay rent before April 1st. Right? So that, that in itself doesn't constitute a rent strike. And our work is really organizing that fact into a rent strike, right? So an action that's tied to a demand. And since April 1st, over 12,000 tenants have access to our rent strike guide. So that's huge. We're at a unique moment, eviction courts are closed. Um, and meanwhile, a much wider demographic of tenants is enraged and radicalized than ever before. So it's kind of the perfect time to organize against the decommodification of housing.
Speaker 0 00:02:45 You were already kind of intimating that like the situation has not been created by any means by the current lockdown. The tenants were already in crisis, I guess, with that in mind. Um, it'd be nice to hear specifically what, uh, LA tenants' union's activities have been, what they've been engaged in over the past few years, but also yeah. How, how this has changed, um, since this like sudden spike in unemployment in recent weeks.
Speaker 2 00:03:11 Yeah. So just as a bit of a background, the LA tenants union was founded in 2015, and over the past five years, we've gone from one small group of people to 12 local chapters across the city. And then we always say, we want 96 local chapters to replace the 96 neighborhood councils here, which are basically useless. So those local chapters have gained a lot of autonomy in that time. And tenants come to the meetings that those chapters hold when they're faced with insurmountable rent, hikes, landlord, harassment, evictions, and habitability issues. So I think while all those things might sound like discrete problems, we see them all as tools of gentrification, which we define as the displacement and replacement of the poor for profit. And I also have to say, none of us are getting paid to do this. This is all solidarity work. So we're not a nonprofit, we're not beholden to any political campaigns.
Speaker 2 00:03:58 And our funding comes directly from our member dues. So we're doing this because we believe in the project of collectivizing. So our work is really in supporting tenants and making those connections with our neighbors, organizing into tenants associations, and then starting the process of collective bargaining using direct actions. And that's probably our most visible work, right? So we're kind of famous for traveling up the state to visit our landlord's homes and Silicon valley we've started to do occupations. We've been doing rent strikes for many years. Now, many have credited us with bringing the run, strike back as a tactic in the U S given the current tenants rights crisis, and eviction blockades as well. And all of these are acting to when a demand. So since the spike in unemployment, like you mentioned, um, during the lockdown, this whole process is simply being sped up and scaled up.
Speaker 2 00:04:46 So we've launched a campaign that we're calling food, not rent, where we're asking tenants to choose food medication and mutual aid efforts before they pay their rent. So food over rent, but that's just the first step that in itself, withholding rent doesn't constitute organizing, right? So acting collectively with your neighbors and tying a demand to your non-payment of rent that's organizing. So suddenly we have a week instead of a month to do outreach to all the neighbors in a building and help them form a tenants association. Those tenants then have a week, not another month to confront their landlord. So in this case with a collective nonpayment of rent letter, then suddenly they're on rent strike. So that's a process that typically takes months of trust, building, building up financial infrastructures, hiring lawyers that all now happens in a matter of a week or two, because we simply have no choice, right?
Speaker 2 00:05:35 People aren't paying rent, whether or not we're calling it a rent strike and calling it a rent strike actually gives them a fighting chance for getting this rent canceled. So that's kind of where tendency unions come in, when you link that action of withholding rent to collective power, and then you use that collective power to put forth a demand you're actually going somewhere and you have far more protections, at least in California, you collectivize than when you act alone. So it's this process, but in hundreds of buildings across the city, which we've never seen before, we've never done anything at this scale before all happening in the span of a few weeks so far. Right. And at a pace that no one could foresee pretty
Speaker 0 00:06:13 Amazing, isn't it? You've got to be wary of seeing a crisis as an opportunity or a tragedy as an opportunity, but it's almost like it's just a fact on the ground, as you say, it's already a material condition that is just being organized according to the sort of needs of people. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:33 Yeah. I mean, I guess one thing that we've been working on, that's a little bit adjacent to our work and this I'm sort of doing in a small kind of offshoot working group is I think for the first time, we're actually starting to build real coalitions with other groups in the city. So a few of us have started what we're calling the people city council, and that's kind of taken the place of our typical direct actions. So we're hosting car rallies at council members and at the mayor's homes. And that's not, you know, we, we really believe in the tenants union that legislative pressure only goes so far, right. Ultimately these people are, are literally being paid by developers, but it's kind of exposing that injustice, um, that I think is the real aim of these protests. And it's just been really exciting to actually start reaching out to folks like sunrise, Los Angeles, and really working closely with folks from St watch LA, which do a lot of really important work with our on house communities. And they actually have a really incredible campaign right now, demanding that the mayor come and Deere, they can hotel rooms and converted into housing for the unhoused. So there's, there's all of these things going on outside of the rent strike, but that are definitely kind of coming to the fore because of this crisis. So we're all really tired, but it's definitely a really exciting time to have the movement grow. Just
Speaker 0 00:07:46 To sort of zoom out a little bit. I think this concept of the rent strike maybe needs a bit of, um, I guess contextualizing or, or, um, theorizing it, obviously hasn't been so much in the foreground in terms of collective organizing and activism. So I wondered if you could like, maybe just briefly explain the, I guess maybe the key difference between a focus on rent and it's refused or, and say a labor strike or, or a kind of single issue protest and, and what are the challenges with say organizing a rent strike compared to other forms of protest?
Speaker 2 00:08:22 Yeah, for sure. Um, so I'll just say up front, I don't purport to be an expert on liberal organizing, but I actually think that the labor movement and the tenant's movement have quite a bit in common, right. So just to kind of take as the bottom line, we're mobilizing on mass an underclass against the concentration of power, right. And at the same time, tenants are workers and workers are tenants. So it's the same people really, but, um, it's a focus obviously on the fight for housing justice, which is very much tied to the fight for a living wage, right. Um, ultimately it's the fight for the right to a decent life, um, free of economic subjugation. One major difference that I would point to is that a lot of the tenants we work with have absentee landlords. So often they're giant corporations like Blackstone, which are kind of like international monstrous entities, but they're, they could also be out of town investors or vulture landlords who may live in LA, but certainly don't live alongside their low income tenants.
Speaker 2 00:09:20 So starting the process of reaching out to neighbors and having meetings, isn't an inherently risky activity as it often is when you're organizing in the workplace. I think a really big challenge in organizing tenants versus organizing workers is that suddenly the domestic realm has to become a kind of politicized space. And that's something that I think is really foreign to at least like thinking around the home in the us where we don't see it as a space of collective bargaining or organizing, but that's often actually where a lot of those meetings happen where your neighbors come in and you suddenly have to talk about these really heavy, personal things. Like how much rent are you paying? How much do you make, will you be able to afford rent next month? What about the month after, how do you feel about these like new security cameras that they've installed?
Speaker 2 00:10:04 Right. So making that leap to actually being comfortable with thinking of the home as a politicized space, and then seeing that as a real kind of space of political leverage, um, is a challenge. And I think on top of that, giving that kind of newly politicized space legs, by coupling it with the understanding that housing is a basic need, not a commodity is yet another leap, right? Because that thinking around the home is this kind of like earned the prize and home ownership as this ideal in the U S is really, really deeply entrenched. Um, so I would say it's, it's kind of hits at a much more personal level than, um, I think a lot of labor organizing does
Speaker 0 00:10:45 In their article we'll rent and its discontents Julian Francis park suggests that rent abolition for those who don't know what that is as a permanent rent strike, uh, ought to be their kind of ultimate goal of the tenants movement leading on from what you were saying before about trying to convince people of the house and housing and the domestic space as a site of contestation. This is like very provocative for probably a lot of people that hadn't really realized that already. But I'd be interested to know whether you agree with this assessment, whether the permanent rent strike is kind of the ultimate goal. And if so, how far are the sort of tenants unions and the tenants movement from attaining this goal, particularly in light of the increased interest in tenants activism in the past few weeks. Yeah. I'm really glad that
Speaker 2 00:11:37 You bring up that piece, which I think actually captures the current climate around tenant activism in California really well. And I absolutely agree with that assessment at rent abolition is the horizon that we're kind of always moving towards. That doesn't mean that we're anywhere near it. Right. But I think having an eye on that ever-shifting horizon helps to kind of guide our short-term and long-term goals. So it reminds us of our politics, like, why are we here? What is housing justice for us? That's the decommodification of housing that's justice? What does that mean? What does it mean when housing is financialized and built on land, that's actually stolen in the first place, right? That means taking housing off the market completely, which is really what rent abolition is getting towards. Right. Kind of understanding that housing is just this basic, right? And that everyone is completely entitled to it.
Speaker 2 00:12:22 But what I would say is that we're getting very close to actually is normalizing the understanding that cities simply can not go on this way. So through the tenants crisis, which has been exacerbated by those economic shutdown, more and more renters are realizing that they have much more in common with their unhoused neighbors than they do with landlords or politicians. And that's why our definition of tenant is anyone who does not control their own housing. We're actually challenging ownership as a precondition of power and of self-determination. And this is a huge leap again, like talking about these kinds of conceptual leaps that we're hoping to embed in the, in mass consciousness, getting out of that deeply entrenched American idealization of home ownership as a marker of citizenship or personhood is a lot of work. And as this crisis hits the middle-class, like I mentioned, some of the demands that we were so adamant about just a few years ago, like universal rent control no longer seemed so radical. Nice
Speaker 0 00:13:15 Without all in mind, it would be nice to know how can people get involved in tenant, organizing
Speaker 2 00:13:21 The thing you can do. And I think it's so obvious that we often don't think about it is just start talking to your neighbors. Um, and I think that, uh, too many of us fall into this default urban isolation mode, but I think that's really the first thing. If you don't know your neighbors yet, introduce yourself, build those relationships, help each other out, feed their cat when they go on vacation. And that's already starting to do the work of building a tenants association for your building or your block, or maybe even your neighborhood. So it's not actually two different those interactions. Aren't actually too different from what tenant organizers do in a union. We get to know each other and we have each other's backs. And I think besides that, there's a lot you can do to support a union without necessarily diving headfirst into the work of organizing, which is not quite as easy as I, as I just made it sound.
Speaker 2 00:14:08 So every union needs members who can do outreach, who can make graphics, who can put on events and keep track of membership dues. For instance, as far as actually connecting with a tenants union in your area, it takes a little bit of digging in the U S and Canada. We have the autonomous tenant's union network, which Latu was a founding member of, and that includes tenants unions from across the U S and Canada. And so you can email outreach at LA tenants, union.org, and we can put you in touch with the tendency that's closest to you, but otherwise you have to do your research, find out who's doing all the work that politicians are failing to do in your area. You might not find a tendency union right away, but you'll find the right people. And you'll very likely find someone who wants to start a tendency union with you.
