Image by Wesley Tingey.
The Chinese Revolution focused its wrath—rather famously, or infamously—on the landlord class. Mao Zedong viewed agrarian land reform as a crucial jewel in the crown of his new China. Nobody should applaud the bloody excesses of the land reform program, which in an overly literal interpretation of the expression “abolish the landlord class” led to the deaths of many thousands of people accused of being landlords. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in today’s world just as surely as in the semifeudal China of the semi-recent past, there is something fundamentally broken about the housing system.
The terms “landlord” and “tenant” literally hearken back to feudalism, subservience, and servitude; they were coined during the Norman rule of England and date back to at least the 1300s, if not earlier. But the fact that we still use these terms today is no accident, nor is it a relic of an antiquated past. The word “landlord” in particular underscores the way in which many owners of homes and apartment complexes continue to operate as lords today: high-handed and largely unconstrained by law, whether they are large corporations like Blackstone and Wall Street banks or individual, unscrupulous human beings intent on extracting maximum value from their investment properties.
Regrettably, as with most tenants, I have had two personal experiences which illustrate the abusive nature of the landlord-tenant relationship. When I first moved to Cambridge, MA, during the height of the pandemic, I rented an apartment for about four months. The apartment itself was reasonably well-furnished and in a decent location. But when it came time to leave the apartment, the landlord attempted to withhold $200 from my security deposit, laughably citing a discoloration of the paint on the kitchen windowsill as the reason she needed to retain such a sum.
Foolishly, she then sent me a photo of the discoloration in question, giving me all the documentation I would need to contest it in small claims court. I scrupulously researched Massachusetts state tenant law and discovered that she was supposed to have put my security deposit in an interest-bearing account and notified me of that account within thirty days of beginning our contract—something which she did not do. I also discovered that any amount withheld from a security deposit must be justified with documentation of the landlord’s expenses. I waited until thirty days had elapsed, the period stipulated by Massachusetts state law for a landlord to provide justificatory receipts for any amount withheld from a security deposit, and then sent her an email enumerating the reasons I would not be meekly accepting her shameless attempt to steal my $200. I pointed out that no reasonable judge or human being would believe that a layer of ordinary white paint would cost $200 and demanded that she return the money immediately or face legal action. Within two hours, without a single word of protest, she Venmoed me my money.
In this case, Massachusetts state law worked precisely as intended, protecting my rights as a tenant. Sadly, many states and countries are not as tenant-friendly. And unfortunately, many people would have made a different calculus and accepted defeat without disputing her transparent mendacity. I had the benefit of being well-educated, a stickler for the law, and stubborn, sufficiently endowed with free time to research the law and sufficiently self-empowered to unabashedly advocate for my rights; not everybody enjoys those privileges. I imagine that I was not the first tenant this landlord attempted to trick—and regrettably, she likely succeeded with other tenants who were too busy working or too disempowered to protest.
Currently, I am living in Mexico City, where I have the misfortune of renting from an abusive landlord. He did not perform basic due diligence on my apartment, which had a gas leak and no functioning hot water when I moved in, a fact which his administrator attempts to gaslight me on by repeatedly claiming in text messages that the apartment was delivered in good condition. The landlord paid for a plumber to come during the 30-day window for repairs, but when I said that the hot water still wasn’t working properly even after the boiler was ostensibly fixed, he denied my request for further investigation. The landlord is likewise too stingy to pay for major maintenance on his apartment’s boiler, which recently broke and required the replacement of various electrical valves.
Both Mexican federal law and Mexico City’s civil code stipulate clearly that, as property owners, landlords are obligated to deliver apartments in a habitable state and are legally responsible for performing maintenance and repairs of major structural components of apartments. My contract with my landlord stipulates that I am responsible only for minor repairs and problems which are caused through my misuse. My landlord and his administrator are very happy to ignore the law insofar as it obligates them to outlay money for repairs that in any reasonable interpretation of the law would be their responsibility. But when I proposed that we subtract the money that I paid to contract a plumber from my rent, in a peculiar magic trick, suddenly the administrator became a student of the law, citing the clause in our contract forbidding withholding rent, saying that any repairs or maintenance work had to be preapproved by the landlord (despite having ignored my message about the boiler being broken for four days), and beseeching me to adhere to the letter of the contract—which the landlord had already broken in his lordly disregard for my cleanliness and living conditions (and in his likely tax evasion, given that I am paying the entirety of my rent in cash).
In this case, I am at a disadvantage. I am a foreigner, and the Mexican legal system is slow and often ineffectual. The cost of hiring a lawyer and going to court would outweigh the cost of the plumber. When I told my Mexican friends about the situation, they were sympathetic but fatalistic. They cited their own stories of abusive landlords, lamenting that it was an extremely common situation in Mexico and further disclosing that, even though I’ve maintained the apartment assiduously, the chance that I receive my security deposit back is approximately zero. Beyond the sting of the unjust treatment, part of what has been bizarre about this ongoing saga has been the gaslighting and admixture of intimate human contact and inhuman legalism, the casual and the official, the legal and the interpersonal. Landlords and their representatives frequently exploit this inconsistency, playing upon tenants’ humanity and politeness, exploiting the natural desire to be a team player and to not make too much trouble.
There is a special kind of violence to this type of abuse by landlords, just as there is a dual character to everything under capitalism. Labor is a potential site of self-expression, joy, and socially useful work—and in an ideal world, it would always be so, just as it occasionally is even under capitalism. But most of the time, in the actual world we live in, labor is a site of exploitation, dehumanization, suffering, and socially useless extraction of surplus value. Likewise, the relationship between a boss and a subordinate, even in a setting where the human aspect of the relationship is generally cordial, is always tainted by hierarchy and the power imbalance which underpins the relation. In principle, housing is a universal human right; in practice, housing is yet another domain of profit-making and rampant financial speculation. A rented apartment exists simultaneously as a renter’s home, a place of refuge and security in the world, and as a site of precarity. The renter does not own their own home—it is alienated from them—and in many cases, the apartment can be ripped away with little to no warning and minimal cause. One can never truly feel secure in a place where one can at any point be evicted.
The broader point is that flagrant disregard for the law on the micro scale— between landlord and tenant—and rampant illegality on the macro scale among business and governmental elites are of a piece. Both are a function of a state of the world where power, control, and accountability are not distributed as they should be. Apocryphally, after hearing the Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that the federal government had to respect Cherokee sovereignty, Andrew Jackson declared, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” What’s undeniable is that Cherokee sovereignty was not respected; Georgia continued removing Cherokees unimpeded. The Supreme Court had no army to enforce its verdicts. During the First Gilded Age, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt is purported to have quipped, “Hain’t I got the power?” in response to someone telling him that an action he was going to undertake might break the law.
Legal protections aren’t worth the paper they’re printed in if there is no genuine mechanism for enforcement, or if enforcement is too difficult or costly for average people to pursue it, as is often the case with landlords’ abuses of their tenants. One can multiply past and present examples ad infinitum: Jim Crow’s long reign of terror despite the Constitution; ongoing police brutality and violence; the ineffectual enforcement of the Voting Rights Act; international law’s failure to prevent any number of genocides, including in Rwanda, with the Rohingya, and the present one in Gaza; international law’s similar failure to stop the bombing of civilian targets in Iran and Lebanon; international law’s inability to protect the rights of migrants in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as ICE and the Border Patrol trample on human decency and America’s legal obligations; the American legal system’s overall incapacity to force the Trump administration to obey the law. Liberalism’s inability to realize its professed values of liberty, equality, and justice is a direct consequence of its blindness to the importance of power and enforcement.
The persistent failure to unite rhetoric and reality, to fuse what’s written on paper and what’s enforced in reality, is dangerous. It causes people to become embittered and to no longer cherish and outright dismiss the values that are professed without being upheld. Talk of “protecting democracy” rings hollow when most people don’t experience democracy in their workplaces or in their rented apartments. Among the many factors in the rise of Trumpist neofascism must be the fact that many Americans no longer care about airy abstractions like democracy after having been confronted with brutal inequality and overt corruption since the 1980s: only 53% of 18–29-year-olds believe that democracy is the best form of government.
Happily, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York and one of the leading advocates of “pothole politics,” the 21st century version of “sewer socialism,” understands the importance of delivering for tenants and the working class, making the law work for ordinary people. In his recent 100-day address, he proudly declared, “We’re taking on the biggest driver of the affordability crisis in our city: housing. We’re going after the bad landlords who violate our laws and mistreat their tenants. Since January 1, we have won more than $34 million dollars in settlements, judgements, and repairs for tenants, delivered improvements to 6,070 apartments so far, and issued 195,829 violations. New York City will no longer tolerate exploitation as a business model. We have held rental ripoff hearings across the five boroughs — and heard from more than 1,600 New Yorkers — because the same tenants who have been overlooked by our politics will now be at the heart of our policies.”
Zohran is right. Enforcement is nine-tenths of the law. Winning concrete gains for people, not soaring yet empty rhetoric about “hope” and “change” à la Obama 2008, is among the best modes of political persuasion out there. We on the Left already take this as fundamental in our politics and analyses of power. And the sooner that liberals and centrists embrace this understanding too, the better for us all, in the US and beyond, in the ongoing, international struggle against fascism.
