US activist urges British tenants to withhold rents and resist 'despotic landlords'

Radical renting campaigners have written a new book that aims to inspire the end of UK landlords’ “despotic control” over tenants.

The blurb for Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis explains that it’s for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, 'complicit' politicians, and real estate 'greed', and shows how tenants can organise successful collective actions, particularly by withholding rent.

London Renters Union is supporting the book launch at an event in London tomorrow where  one of the authors, US activist Tracey Rosenthal, co-founder of the USA’s largest tenants’ union - LA Tenants Union – will be speaking about how to resist landlordism, the fight for rent controls and winning a world without rent or landlords.

Predation

“The book looks at the housing questions not from the perspective of governments (who see it as problem to be managed) nor of developers and landlords (who see it as an opportunity for predation) but of tenants whose lives are constrained and destroyed but also enabled and enriched by where we live,” according to an excerpt.

“Everyone deserves a safe and stable home…simply by virtue of being alive. You are born with this right, you should not have to earn it, you should not have to work for it.

"We remain stuck in this degraded world by means of exploitation and domination, by an economic system that enriches landlords by extracting wealth from tenants…we can contest the despotic control landlords have over our access to a home.”

In interviews, the authors have explained how withholding rent has helped tenants in the US win a reprieve from rent increases.

Says Rosenthal: “We can collectively wield our rent checks, the money that we pay every month, as an economic sanction on our landlords to make them come to the bargaining table, reverse the relationship of dependence, and demonstrate that it’s actually our landlord who is dependent on us.”