Three Ideas For A Rent Strike
Following on from Ben’s call to action, here are some reflections on how to develop a genuinely effective rent strike, from Phil at Hackney Digs. If you’d like to share any thoughts on rent strikes, get in touch with rentstrikenow@gmail.com
1. The safety net needs to be put up before anyone has to step out on to the tightrope.
At the presentation of the fantastic film ‘Si se puede’ at the PEER gallery in March, one of the speakers described how he had faced eviction and gone to his first meeting of the PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca). He powerfully recounted how he had been given two promises by those he met there: 1. You will never be alone and 2. You will never have to sleep on the street.
Some kind of solidarity infrastructure needs to precede any actual striking, and people who will not be in the firing line during the first wave of striking, or people who may not need to strike at all, need to sign up as volunteers and make specific promises to house others who may be evicted, (“I can take two people for 6 weeks”) so that people can be paired up ahead of time and reassured that they will be supported if they need it.
2. Identify and mass against a specific enemy
It would be far more effective to identify a single rich landlord, (ideally a Tory MP who receives millions in Housing Benefit), and to attempt to network amongst his tenants and persuade as many of them as possible to strike at one time. Obviously, the set of people willing at present to take action as drastic as striking is likely to be small. The chance of finding people in this small set who also sharing a common landlord is not great. The intersection in the Venn diagram: ‘shares enemy’ and ‘shares motivation to strike’ may have only a few members. However, if such an overlap can be found, and momentum can be built around it, there is an enhanced chance of scoring a concrete win in the short term: it is much more likely to be feasible to force a specific landlord to cut his losses (court costs, bad publicity, cash flow crisis caused by immediate loss of income etc.) and take a rent reduction (see below), and as New Era showed, there is nothing that builds confidence and momentum like victory.
3. Every tenancy is a social tenancy
When the PAH take over and squat bank-owned buildings to rehouse people as part of their obra social (social work) programme they fix a social rent and ensure that the people moving into the blocks immediately begin paying it. Normally this is set at between 1/3 and ¼ of the person’s wages. Although complete non-payment in the short term may be effective to force the landlord to the negotiating table, I think a powerful generalisable demand that will gain resonance, is the insistence that housing costs should never exceed 1/3 of a household’s income.1 It links housing costs to wages, is inclusive of all tenants and amounts to bottom up direct action enforcement of a completely respectable and totally achievable rent-capping policy. Perhaps strikers could pay their social rent into a separate bank account, with an assurance to the landlord that he will get it all straightaway, the minute he caves in and agrees to fixing rents at this level henceforth.
1. Or 30%? Or 25% – This may require specifying more precisely. Data is provided at p.61 of the GLA Housing in London 2014 report, (albeit from 2011-12 that is probably now out of date), but points out that there are various ways of counting household income: “ Looking only at the income of the household reference person and their partner and excluding benefits, the typical private renter in London spends 46% of their income on housing costs, compared to 41% for social tenants and 16% for owner occupiers with mortgages. But many private renting households include more than two earners, and taking the income of all household members into accounts brings the figure for private renters down to 38%, while taking benefits into account lowers it
again to 36%.↩
