Tracy Rosenthal w/ Dean Spade, ABOLISH RENT

About the Book

takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

About the Authors

Tracy Rosenthal is a co-founder of the L.A. Tenants Union whose writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, LA Times, and other outlets. Rosenthal is now on rent strike in New York City.

Leonardo Vilchis has been organizing tenants in Boyle Heights for more than thirty years. Trained in liberation theology, he co-founded Union de Vecinos in 1996 and the L.A. Tenants Union in 2015. He lives in Los Angeles.

About the Interlocutor

Dean Spade is an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Dean has spent over two decades working in social movements working to end prisons, borders, poverty, and war and support people trying to survive right now. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. Alongside his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Dean's writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.

Pre-order your copy of Abolish Rent here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company