The Paletz Law Blog

The Abolition of Rent is Not Just a Marxian Fable, It’s a New Tale from Tenant Advocates

November 1st, 2024 | By: Matthew I. Paletz, Esq.

Tenant advocates have once again sought to dispossess private property owners of their constitutionally protected rights. If the rise in national rent control edicts hasn’t been enough, a new book is making the rounds demanding an end to the necessity of paying rent altogether.    

“The abolition of rent seems like an incredibly radical demand, but what we’re saying is that if something is a human need, you shouldn’t have to pay to access it. The fact that we have to pay rent to our landlords, the fact of a monthly tribute that we make to people who are already richer than us… this itself is the crisis,” said the founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis in their new book entitled: Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. 

This is not a new idea, but one that is suddenly gaining new momentum in the tenant rights community. In his communist manifesto, Karl Marx famously said:

“…the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Marx’s statement was made in 1848. But in the book Rosenthal and Vilchis released just a few weeks ago, they again opined that the typical landlord-property-owner scenario should be replaced by public housing to meet the needs of tenants.

“We have to press for public competition with private housing: permanent, unsurveilled, well resourced public housing, the kind that has never been allowed to exist,” they wrote. “….. Directing public resources to the public good, public housing addresses housing as infrastructure. Expanding public housing raises the floor for every tenant by blunting the force of market pressures across the sector – that’s why the real estate industry considers it such a threat.”

It’s pretty clear what the overall goals of these two and other organizations of their ilk are. What they’re really saying is that there should not be any private property and that the government should own all housing. To do so would mean that the government would seize all private property. 

In much of the book’s telling, the authors directly attack landlords as unnecessary and privileged entities that prey on renters.  

“Housing isn’t in crisis; tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction and displacement. Rent is a power relation that produces inequality, traps us in poverty and denies us the capacity to live as we choose. Rent is exploitation and domination,” they wrote. “Landlords don’t own our homes because they are better than us, smarter than us, or more hardworking than us. Our landlords own our homes because at some point in the past, they – or their parents, or their parents’ parents – had more money than us,” they wrote. “We also pay rent because landlords can use the threat of state violence to force us to pay. That is if we don’t own property and we don’t pay our rent, landlords can call on the cops to use physical force to throw us out of our homes. And if we end up outdoors after we’re evicted, the police can harass us, jail us, fine us, stick us in a cage. We have to pay rent — because it’s a crime not to pay it. In other words, it’s a crime not to be exploited by a landlord.”

There are several big flaws in their theory. First, where is the data showing that the majority of rental properties are inherited? Second, most landlords are not multi-conglomerate businesses. Many are hard-working mom-and-pop owners who had to sweat and save to own these rental properties. 

My main question though is where is the equity in all of this and where does it end? Should people have zero obligation to pay for their housing as well as being given houses, while the government abolishes all mortgages too? The premise of these headline-grabbing positions is that this is a complete and total attack on the concept of private property rights. And just as important as free speech is, private property rights are what separates the U.S. from the rest of the world.  

I just want to conclude by saying that while the ideas in this book, which frankly could have been written by Karl Marx himself, seem outlandish, these are very real threats to property ownership.

The Bottom Line: This debate over private property rights is not new. It didn’t work in the past, but if we aren’t consistently alert to this revitalized movement, it can be an issue we will have to confront in the very near future. This is why landlords and property owners need advocates like those at Paletz Law. We consistently follow these trends and speak out on them on behalf of our clients and it’s our honor to do so.