Home Valuation

I was interested in your work as both a writer and a tenant organizer. Why the book as a tool?

When my mentor, Leonardo Vilchis, and I first came to the idea, we had the ten-year anniversary of the Los Angeles Tenants Union on the horizon, and conceived of the book as aiding in a process of reflection. It’s part of our work to think about how the union itself is a living archive of our struggles and the tactics that we’ve deployed, the fights we’ve won, and the fights we’ve lost. In the book, we frame political and popular education as a process of acting in the world, reflecting on our actions such that we can act again, act differently, and take bigger risks. It seems like an overlap in our research because there’s so much that you’re describing in your book about the production of narrative and political education around housing struggles, for maintaining these co-ops.

As you so well describe, we live in a culture where struggling for communal ownership is not the norm. Everything that we’re taught about how so-called “progress” is made in the United States runs counter to the work that we do in the Tenants Union: the project of class struggle, which is to put poor and working-class people in charge of their own destinies through the practice of organizing. Abolish Rent is a way of deepening that work and recording something — like the rent strike of undocumented immigrant tenants in Boyle Heights — that, in so many places, would not be recorded. We also hoped that the storytelling would double as a manual: to show not just that it could be done but how one might repeat it.

Could you talk about how you came to think about recording struggle in your work?

Yeah. I was actually working as a journalist at the time. I came to this at the point of one of the privatization struggles in a Mitchell-Lama co-op being lost and felt that something significant was happening. These privatization fights were bubbling up across the city at other co-ops. Some of what I was seeing reported was: “Of course, these people who cooperatively own this housing are going to make this decision to profit on it to however large a degree they can.” When you dig into it, though, there are many people working hard to preserve it as a public good, as infrastructure for future generations. They’re doing that for their own well-being, but also for folks that they don’t know, who are sitting on the waiting list. I saw it as a story that ran counter to so many assumptions about how people make decisions contrary to ideas of what is “rational.”

This is the social housing we already have, and it works. It has its challenges, but these are rich communities, and people have super deep ties. And, as you write about in your book, we need to socialize our existing housing, not just build new social housing. If we’re going to do that, we need to embed some of the learnings about how to maintain the social housing we already have.

I was interested in how people made these decisions. Speaking to folks on many different sides reveals very quickly how people think about ownership. People intent on privatizing often believe that ownership is only real when you can profit from what you own, which is not a textbook definition but certainly a felt one for many in the States; one that I think few of the people making policy decisions to maintain social housing were actually paying attention to.

There is one quote that you and I both use in our books, from David Madden and Peter Marcuse’s In Defense of Housing: “All housing is public housing.” The intervention that we’re both making is about the vast public resources that it takes to underwrite the system of private homeownership and property. All that infrastructure, from the plumbing to the laws that make up contracts to the subsidies and tax breaks that we give to the so-called “private sphere,” is propped up by the state. Of course, only some housing looks like, or in many ways is stigmatized as, “public.”

Another interesting overlap in what you and I describe is the social maintenance taken up by the people who live in their buildings that produces a new kind of ownership more like stewardship; that has less to do with the borders of our apartments and more to do with our embeddedness in our communities. At this moment, I’ve been reflecting so much — because of the massive catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires — about how this system of publicly subsidized private homeownership is a failure. Climate change is revealing it even more as the failure that it is. And so, I think describing those different perceptions that people have about what it means to own something, what it means to be in a place, is important.

One of the stories that we tell in our book is about one tenant who, through organizing her building in South Central, came to have a completely different understanding of her politics. For her, it was a communist awakening. Before she started organizing, she had believed that communism was about being controlled. But after, she said, it’s about having control; if we have everything in common, then we get to control it. She basically articulated this desire for every tenant union and every tenant to become communist, to win collective control over the places where we live. I think her story shows how we can transform our relationship to ownership through organizing and the practice of living together.

Do you want to talk about how different views of ownership collide in social housing, specifically Mitchell-Lama?

One thing that you’re making me think of is there are so many generations of families that have lived in these co-ops; in part because they’re great places to live, in part because of the processes by which a family member might be able to get an apartment earlier than someone else on the waitlist, etc. That means there have been many different experiences of what these co-ops look like over time within a single family. I’ve spoken with many people who had three generations living in a building. Some of those people moved in when the building was brand-new in the ’60s or ’70s. And to speak briefly to that question of ritual or norms over time those people described — I remember looking back at a manual for one of these buildings: “The trash goes in the incinerator; don’t talk in the hallway after this hour.” But early on, those manuals had real, if brief, mentions of the foundational ideas of social housing: “This is the purpose of this housing; this housing is for us and for folks like us, and it’s supposed to be permanently affordable.” And implied within that: “We are the stewards of that.” Over time, that gets weeded out. If future generations are getting that message, it’s usually through a family member or a close family friend, but it’s not within the co-op environment itself. And so the purpose of this whole mini democracy — the whole governance of the co-op — fades away along with those norms and rituals.

That spoke to me so strongly about the importance of, not just more overt political education, but how those norms are instilled, whether it’s a party where we hang out together, or the community garden, or what have you. Those traditions and how they build norms are not part of the “policy” conversation. The policy conversation is: “Well, we can give these co-ops X amount of money to keep them in the program for 15 more years.” That leads to very different ways of residents thinking about what their housing is for. It spurs on the process of commodifying this “decommodified” housing.

To your question about how these differing ideas of ownership show up — some residents are such good mouthpieces of the social messaging of the US for the last 100 plus years, where ownership is deeply tied to citizenship. In the case of these co-ops, most of these folks would consider themselves middle-class. There are definitely lower-income folks as well. Race is obviously a huge factor here. Multiple residents of one of the co-ops, St. James Towers (a predominantly Black co-op in a historically Black neighborhood), tie the idea of themselves being citizens and having self-determination in the US to their ownership of housing. Because they cannot profit from it, they do not consider this true ownership. Therefore, they aspire — very rightfully — to full self-determination. They have been screwed however many ways by this existing system and do not trust any messaging they are getting, that they should maintain this. It feels like another raw deal in a history of many raw deals. I wanted to bring that up because it’s an important distinction about how different kinds of people experience the idea of ownership.

Of course, there’s also, in the same co-op, other Black middle-class residents who are looking at the same issue and saying: “I know this system is rigged against us. I know that this co-op is insulating me and others like me from that. It is allowing me more control and ownership of my community. It’s allowing me to stay here and be embedded in this place when other more profit-driven models of housing would not allow me to do that.” Their vision of ownership is: “I own this place because I am maintaining this as social housing. I’m stewarding this place, and therefore, that is what constitutes my ownership.”

One of the things I really tried to do in the book — and this is deeply embedded in some of the oral history background I have — was to empathize with anyone in these situations who is being asked to make difficult decisions that I think they should not have to make. Even if I deeply disagree with the idea that someone might vote to privatize this housing because they want to profit from what I see as a public good, they exist in this ecosystem where they’re forced to think through instrumentalizing their housing to pay for elder care or their own healthcare.

Yeah, that brings up a bunch of different questions. As much as your book gives voice to the ideology that is expressed by the American Dream, and allows its defenders to offer animated (and indeed, persuasive) incarnations of those ideologies, you don’t hide the fact you’re a partisan of social housing. For me, writing as an organizer, something that I often come back to is the fantasy of journalistic objectivity, that is so many times foisted on writers to delegitimize them for having a partisan relationship to their subject.

The broader accountability I have in my writing is to the tenant movement and, therefore, of the righteous cause of humanity. I wondered in writing your book, did you make an explicit decision to present it as partisan of social housing?

It’s a very good question. My initial engagement with the topic was as a journalist. I then did interviews and research about this more from an academic perspective. I’ve seen the system very close and participated in it. I worked on housing choice voucher policy, and I’ve done affordable housing development for CDCs. I wanted to write the book from the standpoint of all these different parts of myself, as a writer and as a practitioner.

And of course, I wanted to faithfully represent the perspectives of the residents. That was me doing what I considered my duty, whether it was as a writer, a journalist, or an oral historian. I wanted those folks who I spoke with at length, if they were to read this and see their words, they’d be like, “Yeah, that is absolutely my perspective.”

The whole question of what is “objective” or what is “ideological” is central in my book. Even residents who strongly believed in preserving social housing as a public good would often stay away from making arguments that had any moral or ethical dimension because they would quickly be branded as ideological by their peers. That would be a death knell to their argument. That was something I thought about in writing the book; taking the lessons of the activists’ strategic moves within their campaigns. To hide my own sense of what is “just” or “right” would certainly not have served me or the book. It would have only served what is considered “the norm.”

You make that point so well, that nothing isn’t ideological. The fact that something is a norm is in fact, deeply ideological. What is a mortgage besides rent stabilization over 30 years, right? If the bank owns your building, the bank is your landlord. Sure, you have more decision-making capacity, but financially, it is a similar relationship to renting. You do such a good job of expressing that. In fighting for our housing on the terrain of individual financial losses and gains, we lose that dual sense of the public: public meaning “owned by the public,” but also meaning “what is in the public’s good.” Part of the thing that makes our books such good objects to be in conversation with each other is this idea. If housing is going to distribute life opportunities and resources, there is no housing that is not political.

I appreciated that Abolish Rent was almost rhythmic in its consistency; the political site, the residents seeing themselves as a political subject. I was curious about the choice to state “Abolish Rent” versus “Abolish Landlords,” or something along those lines.

Partly why we came to “rent” rather than “landlord” has to do with our vision of a tenant as anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, and particularly foregrounding unhoused people in that analysis. However, you can absolutely figure the landlord of unhoused people as the state. The state deprives unhoused people of bathrooms. The state deprives unhoused people of showers. The state deprives unhoused people of kitchens.

And penalizes them.

Exactly. I was interested in writing in an idiom that was approachable and accessible on the terms that people live their lives, and to try to do that in a provocative and antagonistic, and therefore agitational way. In many ways, the title was low-hanging fruit. No one had gotten to it first, but it did orient the book.

Another reason to focus on rent was also about thinking through what power tenants have over the economic and political situations they find themselves trapped in. Thinking about rent as a source of power for a tenants association, and the rent strike as a powerful weapon in their arsenal, helped us shape the book around that specific relationship. One thing I was committed to in writing about the political and economic relationship of being stuck paying rent was the violence that underwrites that system. To use the word “abolition” is to invoke a tradition of emancipation from state violence. You don’t just pay rent because you need to have housing; you pay rent because if you don’t, there are agents of state violence who will throw you out of your homes and then, if you find yourself outdoors, put you in jail simply for the crime of not being able to afford rent. Meeting the demands of the title meant taking the violence that underwrites those relationships seriously, taking racialized dynamics of violence seriously, and then, thinking about how, when we’re organized, our rent checks can be a source of economic power for tenants.

Your framing of rent as a relationship was very generative for me. For many people coming to the book, rent is a check. But I love that you reorient us: “No, rent is a relationship.” And, as you’re saying, all these relationships with other entities who are enforcing or upholding that dynamic. I love shining the light on the mutual dependency piece.

I was interested in how you think about homeowners, or, if you have a mortgage, “bank tenants,” in relationship to the larger work of tenant organizing?

Historically, one of the functions of homeownership has been to divide the working class (into the middle class and the poor, and increasingly the upper class and the poor). The state, in knowing collaboration with real estate agents, has produced systems for subsidizing the homeownership of primarily white people. Over time, one key axis on which homeownership has disorganized people is through race. I think that this is an important question because “tenant” does not necessarily map onto a class category.

One of the political interventions that we make in the book is about producing a political subject out of tenancy; challenging the relationships of “ownership” to which tenants are assumed to aspire. For the people who are often the leaders of our struggle, that aspiration is already assumed. And it is assumed it will never happen. The majority of people in Los Angeles pay rent to secure their housing, as they do in most cities in this country. That is a political power bloc that is not yet organized according to its relationship to housing, it is disorganized by aspirations toward homeownership.

Technically speaking, homeowners can be members of the LA Tenants Union — they just can’t vote. The category of “tenant” doesn’t necessarily sit easily with class. However, when we think about how most people of color are tenants and pay rent to secure their housing, and the overrepresentation of people of color in people who live outdoors, it is a way to orient our politics around the most vulnerable people, grounding a class analysis and animating solidarity across race.

Your book teases out the way that homeownership is a presumed entitlement. One of the things I was most struck by when the Southbridge tenants defend their desire for privatization, is that what they’re defending is their entitlement to upward mobility. They measure that against the poor, particularly Black people and people of color. They measure it against public housing, which they want to be completely removed from.

What are the differences between Mitchell-Lama and public housing, and how does the specter of public housing hang over all the characters that are engaged in this struggle?

Both co-ops I focus on in the book exist in close proximity to New York City Housing Authority properties. That juxtaposition is both physical and very much in the minds of the residents. In some respect, these Mitchell-Lama co-ops are private. They are corporations owned by their shareholders, which are the residents. They receive public tax breaks like any single-family homeowner in this country, but on a spectrum of private to public, they’re closer to the public housing end for a number of reasons. One is the means-testing: residents had to have below a certain income when they were moving in. And there are architectural dimensions: the co-ops look distinct from your row house or luxury building. For some people, there is this great fear of being mistaken for being a public housing development. For some of the folks at Southbridge, who are particularly adamant about privatizing, that fear is racialized. For some of the Black co-operators at St. James, it was about, “I want to be in control of my own housing, and I don’t have that if I’m a public housing tenant.” It’s the idea of any regulation at all being a taking.

One of the things that you describe is this clash of “value” — also “values,” the beliefs and ideologies that we bring to our everyday activity. Some of the tenants in our book articulate the work that they’ve put into their communities as a sense of ownership. That work, to create community, safety, etc. is something they have the right to benefit from; and that right, to them, is exercised in their demand to stay in their housing, to afford the place where they live, to live with decent conditions. What you describe, too, is that labor of being in community, of being in a neighborhood, which then gets run through the frame of: “Well, does that mean it can be bought and sold? Do I have a right to exploit this place for profit?” Reading your book, I reflected on the ways those two things are related.

Thinking about the right to stay and the right to return is an animating thread throughout the stories that we tell in Abolish Rent. The fear of displacement turns people to strategies that they never thought possible. I think it’s interesting, the way the subjects that you describe are talking about risk only in financial terms.

I wanted to talk about the way that the co-op residents perceived outsiders. The idea of the “outside agitator” emerges so intensely in the privatization debates.

The insularity of some of these communities was always something I focused on. The more insular the community was, the more resistant they were to any support from the outside. There are many folks who say, “This is a Southbridge issue, and this is our decision,” which is true. It is their decision — but on behalf of whom? And if this is indeed the public good that it is, they’re the decision-makers in their “mini democracy,” but they are making decisions about goods that are related to folks across the city: future beneficiaries, neighbors. I think that broader idea of solidarity is actually very hard for certain people in these co-ops to access. For others, it was completely self-evident, in part because, well, their neighbor across the street had been displaced from the neighborhood. They were no longer seeing people who looked like them, people who they knew, or family members in their neighborhood. They were able to stay because of their type of housing. That built a sense of connection to a broader whole — whether that’s across the city or neighborhood-based.

In some cases, there’s an architectural, neighborhood-design aspect to it. If you’re a middle-income cooperative like Southbridge in the middle of the Financial District, and all your neighbors are basically banks, public housing, and now, new luxury towers? They have a very different relationship to their broader neighborhood, versus St. James that was deeply embedded in a very strong neighborhood with a deep sense of community and history. At Southbridge, they have experienced an atomizing of relationships and put blinders on about questions like: “Who does this matter to? Who are we making decisions on behalf of?”

It shows us that the need of the moment is not necessarily a new form or policy. It is a political organization that exceeds whatever policy or form people find themselves in at the time. There’s one building that we describe where people are living in three tenancy regimes in the same building: LIHTC affordable housing, Section 8, and market rent. That building is one instance, but it is true across the union that is organizing tenants in public housing, tenants who live outdoors, tenants with rent stabilization and without. Finding those solidarities through our values and our connections to each other is the rallying cry of the book. When these struggles work for the public good, it’s about exceeding the constraints that are put on us, that separate us by what rights and forms of stability we have access to. It helps me situate what it would mean to organize people across a city. In many ways, you have no choice but to produce solidarity across those divides.

For me, Mitchell-Lama sits at this odd place with the state, because it is for the public good but not owned by the public. That dynamic really forces our hand on the question of the role of the state. And, as you describe, it is true: Every New York mayor has promised another Mitchell-Lama. I even heard Timothée Chalamet talking about it.

If you’re out there, Timothée, let’s grab a coffee.

Exactly. In many ways, your book describes the state as a regulator, capable of disciplining entities like landlords or co-ops through debt and other forms of intervention. You also describe the state as like a bad babysitter who’s watching TV while the stove’s on in the other room. And as a fallible agency that, in taking what seems like an apolitical stance, actually makes a political one.

There are many different levels of the state. At the local level, New York State and New York City essentially oversee the public purpose of Mitchell-Lama and ensure that the regulations in place for the co-ops’ administration are enforced. What was common to the experience in both co-ops was that state and city agencies stepped away from defending the public purpose of things explicitly and tried to do so exclusively through financing.

It’s funny to juxtapose that approach to the rhetoric around Mitchell-Lama in the campaign sphere, where it is held up as a program with public values, with a moral dimension, and this idea of accessibility. Embedded in how Mitchell-Lama is talked about by many politicians is a belief that people should have a right to housing. But when you get into the actual administration of the program, it’s very instrumentalized: “How can we lock these buildings in?” One of the reasons behind that is the atrophying of the state. I have real sympathy for an organization that, in many cases, has to fight for its own right to exist.

Especially on the local level, the state does end up taking a side. It took a side by allowing privatization when it should not even exist as a possibility. Now, there’s something called Article 2 to Article 11 conversions, which is a way that Mitchell-Lama limited-equity co-ops can become a different kind of co-op. Among advocates, it is considered a path to privatization. In an endeavor to ensure that there is funding for these housing streams, the state often loses the public values piece.

It’s so important that you name the fact that the state is not one thing. We saw this particularly during Covid-19. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped all evictions, under its auspices to protect health. And then what happened? In 2020, that eviction moratorium was challenged through another wing of the state: the judiciary, in the courts. And then through the CARES Act, the legislative process emerged with these subsidies to landlords that trickled down to tenants. We should never really be describing the state as a single entity.

When we think about the state in our book, oftentimes we’re describing a real estate speculator: offering public land to private developers, courting investment. We’re also thinking about the state as a slumlord of its public housing tenants, because it refuses to adequately fund the housing it owns; and a slumlord of the half-million people who live outdoors all the time. We’re also thinking about the state as the sheriff, like, when we say you pay rent at the barrel of a gun, the state is the one holding the gun.

It seems like both our books are ultimately engaged in the project of revealing what is in fact not inevitable, and what is not natural about the housing system that we have. The state has the power to back and originate loans, and it could put way more stringent terms on debt. It also can literally issue price controls, as it does through rent stabilization, and as it has on a federal level multiple times in our country’s history. It can be a literal provider of housing: it can own housing. It could also be a steward.

For me, thinking about the state as not one thing, thinking that it has multiple capacities, is also important for thinking about how tenants can engage with the state: by coming together to democratically determine their own needs, and in so doing — through economic sanction, through disruptions, through scaling their organizing — create crises for the state. It’s tenants, the people who live in this housing and who live in this city, who are going to make those changes possible.