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Tenant Unions for the Future. By Hannah Black. Calls to rent strike have yet to cohere into a national political movement. But as the economic crisis deepens, tenants’ fates will ultimately be decided by their level of collective organization. “With the arrival of the pandemic, staying home became emergency work for a failing state. Amid disastrous negligence at every level of government, one of the most ordinary facts of life in capitalism—rent—suddenly appeared clearly as an affront. “One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth,” Marx wrote of landlords. In the early spring, with state-level and nationwide eviction moratoriums and tenant protections in place, it seemed like there had never been a better time to refuse these bad terms. Calls to rent strike brought grassroots tenant unions to the foreground. Through the spring, thousands of people turned to tenant organizing, many for the first time. The Los Angeles Tenants Union, for example, doubled its membership from 4,000 to 8,000 from March to mid-April. For some, the circumstances were intimidating; tenant solidarity often takes months or years to cohere. One of the first rent strikes during the lockdown in Brooklyn, at 1234 Pacific in Crown Heights, emerged early because tenants were already eighteen months deep into organizing efforts that originally centered around demands for repairs. Meanwhile, in some buildings, tenants who had barely ever spoken to their neighbors scrambled to make contact and build trust.” “Despite all of this activity, by May, the anticipated tsunami of rent nonpayment had not materialized, largely because of a combination of tenant resourcefulness and a hastily assembled government strategy aimed entirely at kicking the can down the road. Tenants scraped together rent using credit cards, stimulus checks, loans, and savings.” “ In New York, there are fears that empty houses will be scooped up by huge corporations, though, as Reynolds pointed out, so-called “mom and pop landlords” can be just as exploitative from the point of view of tenants. Dystopian as landlord monopolies would be, they would also offer a basis for traditional mass organization. If bourgeois flight from the cities during the pandemic becomes sustained capital flight, the current logic of urban rent could change. We could see conditions more like those experienced by the Harlem rent strikers of the early 1960s, when landlords abandoned unprofitable buildings and left whole blocks to rot.” We’re talking about home and the fullness of that, the messiness of that, the fucked-up-ness of that.” He views tenant organizing as part of a larger project to cultivate “neighborliness” as a mechanism for addressing the social atomization of capitalism. He points out that people often feel attached to the neighborhood in which they live, even if they are not deeply involved in its reproduction. This offers a potential starting point for organizing: “We always have to look to a horizon that leads back to where we are. How do we imagine that the autonomy of tenants within their everyday life includes not just their housing but also the possibility of cooperatively facilitated economics, shared child care, and cultural spaces within apartment buildings and neighborhoods?”
Tenant Unions for the Future. By Hannah Black. Calls to rent strike have yet to cohere into a national political movement. But as the economic crisis deepens, tenants’ fates will ultimately be decided by their level of collective organization. “With the arrival of the pandemic, staying home became emergency work for a failing state. Amid disastrous negligence at every level of government, one of the most ordinary facts of life in capitalism—rent—suddenly appeared clearly as an affront. “One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth,” Marx wrote of landlords. In the early spring, with state-level and nationwide eviction moratoriums and tenant protections in place, it seemed like there had never been a better time to refuse these bad terms. Calls to rent strike brought grassroots tenant unions to the foreground. Through the spring, thousands of people turned to tenant organizing, many for the first time. The Los Angeles Tenants Union, for example, doubled its membership from 4,000 to 8,000 from March to mid-April. For some, the circumstances were intimidating; tenant solidarity often takes months or years to cohere. One of the first rent strikes during the lockdown in Brooklyn, at 1234 Pacific in Crown Heights, emerged early because tenants were already eighteen months deep into organizing efforts that originally centered around demands for repairs. Meanwhile, in some buildings, tenants who had barely ever spoken to their neighbors scrambled to make contact and build trust.” “Despite all of this activity, by May, the anticipated tsunami of rent nonpayment had not materialized, largely because of a combination of tenant resourcefulness and a hastily assembled government strategy aimed entirely at kicking the can down the road. Tenants scraped together rent using credit cards, stimulus checks, loans, and savings.” “ In New York, there are fears that empty houses will be scooped up by huge corporations, though, as Reynolds pointed out, so-called “mom and pop landlords” can be just as exploitative from the point of view of tenants. Dystopian as landlord monopolies would be, they would also offer a basis for traditional mass organization. If bourgeois flight from the cities during the pandemic becomes sustained capital flight, the current logic of urban rent could change. We could see conditions more like those experienced by the Harlem rent strikers of the early 1960s, when landlords abandoned unprofitable buildings and left whole blocks to rot.” We’re talking about home and the fullness of that, the messiness of that, the fucked-up-ness of that.” He views tenant organizing as part of a larger project to cultivate “neighborliness” as a mechanism for addressing the social atomization of capitalism. He points out that people often feel attached to the neighborhood in which they live, even if they are not deeply involved in its reproduction. This offers a potential starting point for organizing: “We always have to look to a horizon that leads back to where we are. How do we imagine that the autonomy of tenants within their everyday life includes not just their housing but also the possibility of cooperatively facilitated economics, shared child care, and cultural spaces within apartment buildings and neighborhoods?”
"With the arrival of the pandemic, staying home became emergency work for a failing state. Amid disastrous negligence at every level of government, one of the most ordinary facts of life in capitalism—rent—suddenly appeared clearly as an affront. “One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth,” Marx wrote of landlords. In the early spring, with state-level and nationwide eviction moratoriums and tenant protections in place, it seemed like there had never been a better time to refuse these bad terms"
"With the arrival of the pandemic, staying home became emergency work for a failing state. Amid disastrous negligence at every level of government, one of the most ordinary facts of life in capitalism—rent—suddenly appeared clearly as an affront. “One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very right to live on the earth,” Marx wrote of landlords. In the early spring, with state-level and nationwide eviction moratoriums and tenant protections in place, it seemed like there had never been a better time to refuse these bad terms"
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