rent strikes

Members of the Holgate Manor Tenant Union in Portland are now in the third month of their rent strike against Princeton Property Management and their California landlord, millionaire Fred Kleinbub, who have largely failed to meet the union’s demands.

Last weekend, striking tenants from the Stoney Creek Towers in Hamilton trekked to Ottawa with their supporters to confront the executives from InterRent, a Real Estate Investment Trust with an investment strategy based around displacing working-class tenants from their neighbourhoods.

This pamphlet poses a set of provocations to the contemporary tenants’ movement. The provocations are "Some Communist Theses for the Tenants' Movement" and "Abolish Rent, a note." As the pamphlet title declares, the provocation focuses on the proposition that “abolish rent” should be the slogan upon which militants promote a distinction in the movement between anarchists/communists and social democrats, toward the end of building a revolutionary tenants’ movement. (Not here, but to-be included in a future iteration, is an in-progress "Annotated Bibliography of Rent Abolitionist Tactics")

The following interview between residents involved in two different rent strikes was first published in This is Parkdale, newsletter of the group Parkdale Organize!