Chapter 4
The Rent Strike: Tenants' Most Powerful Weapon
For tenants, the first night of a rent strike reveals something profound: despite not paying rent, their home persists. The building doesn't collapse, their keys still work, the roof remains overhead. This simple revelation exposes the absurdity of rent itself. Before the strike, tenants often go to extraordinary lengths to make rent payments-forgoing food and medicine, taking payday loans, pawning valuables, working multiple jobs-all to avoid the feared consequences of non-payment.
No other experience so clearly demonstrates both the parasitic role of landlords and the power of collective action. Rent strikes assert housing as a human right, independent of ability to pay. Though temporary and risky, they're powerful: stopping cash flow to landlords reveals their dependence on tenants, suggesting the right to housing already exists and merely needs to be claimed.
For individual buildings, rent strikes are crucial tactical weapons that create leverage for poor and working-class tenants against wealthy landlords. This leverage works without requiring government intervention or legal changes. Building-wide strikes have won rent cancellations, reductions, direct payments, repairs, and restored amenities.
The story of Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights demonstrates this power. In January 2017, Alejandro Juarez received notice of a rent increase from $840 to $1,495 in his building near Mariachi Plaza, where he'd lived for over ten years. Discovering other neighbors faced similar increases, Juarez reached out to LA Tenants Union's Eastside chapter.
The tenants were galvanized by a Craigslist ad marketing their building as "Mariachi Crossing"-ironically using the neighborhood's cultural heritage while displacing the actual mariachis. They formed Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos and documented building violations, requesting a meeting with management. When this failed to stop the rent increases, they tracked down the landlord, Frank "BJ" Turner, whose investment materials revealed plans to attract "millennial tenants" willing to pay premium prices in a "rapidly gentrifying" area.
The tenants escalated their tactics-decorating their building with protest art, holding press conferences, and performing at the property manager's office. Unlike traditional legal aid approaches that treat tenants as victims awaiting help, the Mariachi tenants became political agents. They learned about their rights but ultimately chose to fight for what was right, not just what was legal. On June 1, 2017, they began a rent strike, with Francisco Gonzalez declaring, "At this point, there's nothing else we can lose."
By the time they reached the bargaining table, they had completely transformed the power balance. They had stalled eviction proceedings, publicly shamed their landlord at his home, won political and media support, and deprived Turner of nearly a year's rent. When unsatisfied with Turner's offers, they escalated by setting up tents outside his Rancho Park home, connecting their struggle to LA's homelessness crisis.
On February 12, 2018, after more than a year of struggle, they signed LA's first collective bargaining agreement of its kind. The contract canceled six months of withheld rent, reduced the original increase by over 75%, capped future increases at 5%, guaranteed repairs, and recognized their right to bargain collectively for all subsequent leases. Through direct action and community solidarity, they had essentially won rent control for their building.
Rent strikes are acts of collective defiance that transform individual inability to pay into collective leverage. Los Mariachis affirmed their role as producers of Boyle Heights' value and their right to share in that value. By refusing to accept displacement as inevitable, they erected a barrier against gentrification.
Chapter 5
Building Tenant Power Through Community Organization
The tenant movement must move beyond the limited framework of "renter's rights workshops." We need to broaden our understanding of who suffers under the rent system, recognize that mere resources for individuals are insufficient, and acknowledge that existing tenant rights are inadequate and difficult to enforce. The human right to housing requires a fundamentally different housing system, state, and world-and tenants unions are the vehicle to build that world now.
Building a tenants union requires five key strategies: building community, organizing units of power, reclaiming space, experimenting and learning, and keeping faith.
We must first establish relationships of trust and solidarity among neighbors. These relationships are then organized into associations, local chapters, and the citywide union-creating instruments of collective action that can change the power dynamic between tenants and landlords. The power of tenant organizing grows with scale: from one tenant's complaint (tapping one finger), to neighbors talking (two fingers), to a tenants association with bargaining power (three fingers), to a local chapter supporting multiple associations (four fingers), to the full tenants union with citywide reach and solidarity (all five fingers clapping).
Building community means transforming isolated neighbors into defensive and offensive communities through intentional processes and long-term commitments. The union helps tenants overcome shame, identify patterns of neglect, and collectivize risk. It strengthens existing practices of mutual care-from watching each other's children to distributing food-weaponizing everyday life against displacement.
The Flower Drive Tenants Association demonstrates how building community becomes a powerful strategy against displacement. When investment firm Ventus Group acquired their rent-stabilized buildings and attempted to demolish them, resident Ines Alcazar and others realized that isolation was their weakness. Their landlord had given different information to each tenant, offered varying buyout amounts while claiming each was the maximum, and spread lies to turn neighbors against each other.
Through nearly four years of sharing space and strategizing, the association transformed casual "good day" relationships into a united front with collective power. As Alcazar explains, "Working together as a community, it makes you feel you have this power in you. Like nobody is going to take it away." When confronting the owner at a meeting, they spoke as one: "We're not leaving, we want to stay here and we want to fight for it."
For Alcazar, this process transformed her understanding of "communism" from something controlling to something about having control: "Communist to me is community. Community working together... My dream is that one day not only Flower Drive but all these tenants unions become communist-communist as working together, for one purpose, getting a house for everybody."
Chapter 6
Reclaiming Space and Building Collective Knowledge
Tenant power grows through physical reclamation of shared spaces. The Esperanza Neighborhood Committee's transformation of a dangerous alley in Boyle Heights demonstrates this approach. After a mugging, neighbors organized weekly cleanups, turning a dumping ground into community space through persistent collective effort. They eventually hosted movie nights, craft markets, and created murals-converting a feared space into a community asset.
Their organizing expanded to address broader neighborhood neglect-filling potholes, painting crosswalks, and creating DIY speed bumps. While demanding government resources, they simultaneously built autonomous solutions, adopting the philosophy "It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission." Their direct action created the authority to make demands, not requests, eventually securing streetlights and infrastructure improvements.
Physical presence becomes political power when tenants occupy and transform spaces. By emphasizing social and cultural fabric over real estate value, tenant unions establish "beachheads" for building power. This approach counters the gentrification cycle where community improvements lead to displacement. When tenants become agents of neighborhood improvement, they ensure they remain its beneficiaries.
The union's work also addresses safety without police, creating infrastructure where "our safety comes from neighbors knowing each other, helping each other, and protecting each other." By reclaiming disinvested spaces and making them useful, tenant organizing demonstrates that "a safe space is an inhabited space."
Tenant unions also function as learning organizations where strategies travel between associations, with each building building upon previous experiences rather than starting from scratch. Alma Angel, a Spanish-speaking mother who refused buyout offers up to $100,000 to leave her home of 23 years, pioneered resistance tactics by gathering neighbors to confront renovation workers and demand they replace her moldy carpet-forcing repairs after decades of neglect.
As Sam Trinh explains, "We can just recycle... Alma invented a strategy, now that's how we know how to get things done." Her testimonial now appears in LATU's citywide "cash-for-keys" educational materials. The council creates a culture of experimentation where political risks become learning opportunities.
The spiritual dimension of tenant organizing manifests in creative actions like the Vermont y Beverly chapter's Posada at the LA Housing Department, where members dressed as biblical figures seeking shelter to highlight how officials were rubber-stamping relocation requests that sent tenants to nonexistent locations-even a cemetery. This remix of Mexican religious tradition leveraged spiritual righteousness for political protest.
Against the individualism, shame and depression of gentrification, the union cultivates dignity, mutuality, and solidarity. When faced with the tension between housing emergencies and the slow work of organizing, faith in collective action sustains members.
Chapter 7
From Housing Struggle to Land Sovereignty
Isabel Garcia has lived in her Boyle Heights apartment for nearly sixty years. Despite facing relentless harassment from her landlord Bruce Terani-including frivolous eviction notices, removal of amenities, and targeting her son with nuisance complaints-Garcia has fought to remain in her home while battling multiple health conditions. Her total rent payments likely equal the cost of the entire building, yet she still faces housing insecurity.
Garcia's building has become a center of community organizing. The trees she planted now provide fruit for neighbors and shade for tenant association meetings and food distribution events. When the landlord attempted to sabotage the garden by installing spiky cacti and poisonous plants with a barrier fence, it revealed how communal spaces threaten landlord control.
Tenant struggles are fundamentally about collective sovereignty over land. When tenants organize to control shared spaces, they challenge private property as the sole governing force. Two case studies demonstrate this revolutionary horizon: Hillside Villa tenants in Chinatown and unhoused tenants of Echo Park Lake-both forms of "tenant occupations" that challenge landlords' power to collect rent and evict, while confronting both state policy and police power.
The Hillside Villa struggle began when tenants organized against rent increases after their building's affordability covenant expired. Their first collective letter demanded a meeting with landlord Tom Botz, protesting both rent increases and attacks on communal life-children forbidden from common areas and armed security harassing residents.
Though legal challenges bought them time, the tenants escalated by demanding the city purchase the building and sell it back to them. After months of pressure, their councilmember Gil Cedillo offered Botz $12.7 million to extend rent caps, but the landlord denied making any deal, comparing government protection for tenants to being in "Cuba or Venezuela."
Facing eviction, tenants launched a rent strike in October 2020, eventually growing to include the entire association. They staged actions targeting the city budget, highlighting tax breaks for developers and the LAPD's massive funding while housing remained precarious. In May 2022, the City Council voted to purchase the building but refused to commit to using eminent domain if Botz wouldn't sell.
The landlord retaliated by destroying the garden in their courtyard-a communal space that had become central to their organizing. Tenants formed a picket line that successfully blocked contractors from continuing the destruction. As Botz complained, "the tenants really had no intention of ever leaving. They wanted to stay there for life."
Chapter 8
Autonomous Communities vs. Carceral Housing
Gustavo Otzoy and other unhoused residents at Echo Park Lake created a community that contrasted sharply with the city's carceral housing options. While Project Roomkey hotel rooms imposed prison-like restrictions (7:00 p.m. curfews, bans on guests and pets, limited possessions), the park offered stability and autonomy during the pandemic.
Under CDC guidance that halted sweeps, residents built impressive infrastructure: 24-hour bathroom access, a communal pantry, phone charging stations, showers, a vegetable garden, and solar-powered lighting. They established a jobs program paying residents $10/hour for roles like security and donation management, and implemented harm reduction practices including Narcan distribution. Their banner proclaimed "Healing happens here."
Weekly meetings fostered democratic decision-making about resources and defense strategies. Three basic rules governed the community: don't steal from others, keep your area clean, and use drugs only inside tents. As resident Cecelia Acho explained, they were "figuring out how to solve these problems that come about due to the lack of affordable housing."
The encampment threatened the city's gentrification agenda that had already displaced a third of Echo Park's immigrant population between 2000-2014. Officials deliberately undermined the community by denying hygiene services and cutting electricity, then used these manufactured conditions to justify removal.
In March 2021, the city deployed 400 riot police to evict residents, erecting a mile-long fence that remained for over two years. The LAPD's 101-page report revealed their concern about the residents' "claims of ownership over the public space." Despite promises of housing, only 7% of residents were placed in permanent housing a year later; half were missing and nine had died.
Following the eviction, Otzoy and others formed Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing (UTACH), winning improvements in temporary housing conditions before eventually joining LATU. Their resistance demonstrated that unhoused people are key political subjects in the struggle for housing liberation.
Chapter 9
Convivir: Creating Another Way of Life
While it's easier to identify rent's harms than to envision a future without it, our movement's actions serve a dual prophetic function: denouncing the profit-driven housing system while announcing an alternative way of living. Though our struggles remain partial and victories can be reversed, the everyday resistance of poor and working-class tenants points toward a new horizon-transforming individual ownership into collective stewardship.
Tenants must both defend their housing through associations and make demands of the state that produce budgetary and legitimacy crises. As Hillside Villa shows, rather than merely demanding new social housing, we must socialize housing itself. Meanwhile, Echo Park Rise Up demonstrated how we can reclaim space directly, building autonomous capacity in opposition to the state by treating land as a social good that belongs to all people.
The Second Street Tenants Association embodies the movement's spirit through their collective resistance and community building. When Isabel Garcia joined, she was drawn to the opportunity to "convivir"-to live together, hang out, and get close to others. This sense of connection sustained them through landlord harassment and pandemic hardship, leading to their rent strike under the banner "Food Not Rent."
Their garden, communal gatherings, and mutual support demonstrate that the means and ends of the tenant movement are one: creating another way of life. Now researching how to buy their building as a cooperative, they aim not just to stabilize their housing but to anchor the movement in their neighborhood. As Garcia said about life without landlords: all tenants could "convivir"-live together, interact, and engage with each other.
Like the spiritual they often sing, "Like a tree planted by the water, we shall not be moved."
