Join activists and authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis for a discussion of their new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket, 2024). In a conversation convened by Parsons Housing Justice Lab director Gabriela Rendón, Rosenthal and Vilchis will explore the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.
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. 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.
Presented by Public Seminar at The New School for Social Research.
Gabriela Rendón is an associate professor of Urban Planning and Community Development, the
co-coordinator of the Graduate Minor in Design and Urban Justice, and the Founding Director of the Parsons Housing Justice Lab at The New School. At the lab, she leads the Housing Justice Oral History Project, combining oral history, critical cartography, community organizing, and advocacy.
Tracy Rosenthal is a writer and co-founder of the LA Tenants Union. Their work has been published in the New Republic, the Nation and the Los Angeles Times. They serve on the advisory board of Housing the Third Reconstruction with UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. They are now on rent strike in New York City.
Leonardo Vilchis has been organizing tenants in Boyle Heights for more than 30 years. Trained in liberation theology, he co-founded Union de Vecinos in 1996 to stop the demolition of the Pico Aliso public housing projects, winning the right of return for 250. In 2015, he co-founded the LA Tenants Union to organize tenant power at a citywide scale. Vilchis was activist-in-
residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in 2020 and now serves on the advisory board of its Housing the Third Reconstruction research endeavor. He lives in Los
Angeles.
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