They Want to “Abolish Rent” By Any Means Necessary

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is clear about the Number One enemy of his administration: landlords. Whether it’s his legally dubious rent freeze, his attempts to seize buildings through legal wrangling, his Office of Mass Engagement’s plan to send volunteers to support tenant organizing efforts, or his appointment of DSA member and radical activist Cea Weaver as “tenant advocate,” the mayor has made anti-rent politics central to his agenda.

For those familiar with nationwide radical tenant efforts, that agenda is alarmingly familiar. The movement, which has sprung up in big cities across the country, frames eviction as a form of violence, paying rent as something done “at the barrel of a gun,” and property owners as a monolithically exploitative class. It’s also adopting increasingly confrontational tactics—such as rent strikes, nuisance litigation, and social-pressure campaigns—that threaten to turn ideology into potentially violent action.

That at least one of this movement’s most prominent leaders has been photographed with New York’s mayor—and is close with Weaver—raises questions about its influence on Mamdani’s administration. In any case, the radical tenant activists pose a real threat to landlords’ safety and sanity.

The best way to understand the tenant-organizing movement is through its most-influential manifesto, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis. The authors argue that tenants should become “the architects of a long-term project of expropriation through which that hoarded wealth becomes shared by us all,” by means of militant organizing, strategic litigation, and coordinated pressure campaigns. The book has gained widespread attention in activist circles, appearing on a Democratic Socialists of America recommendations list and serving as the focus of DSA’s Nationwide Abolish Rent Reading Group.

Rosenthal and Vilchis pioneered the escalatory tactics described in Abolish Rent with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which they co-founded. In their schema, tenants start by presenting demands to landlords. If those demands are refused, organizers increase pressure through rent “strikes” and protests, which can last months or years. They also encourage pushing repair-and-deduct laws beyond their traditional use as a narrow legal remedy for documented housing disrepairs and landlord inaction. Rosenthal reframes these laws not simply as a way for individual tenants to seek repairs, but as a means for tenants to redirect rent money and ask, “What if we control our rent ourselves?” She celebrates this practice as a first step toward collective control of rent, alongside other creative legal strategies.

The most effective arrow in the tenant-organizing quiver may be directly targeting landlords with disruptive tactics. Those can include camping out on the lawns of property owners, leaving negative reviews for their other businesses, or even disrupting private gatherings. For example, Rosenthal and her allies sought to punish a landlord by crashing his daughter’s wedding, turning a once-in-a-lifetime family celebration into a site of political confrontation and a “social sanction.” Rosenthal later described the action as “really fun.”

Notably, Rosenthal appeared alongside Mamdani in a public photo. She is also closely connected to Weaver, Mamdani’s tenant advocate and a key advisor on his campaign. In a 2020 feature, Teen Vogue framed Weaver and Rosenthal as tenant leaders in two of America’s largest housing markets. The pair also recently sat together for a joint interview with Jacobin’s podcast The Dig that highlighted their shared focus on tenant power. By 2026, they had become fixtures of the housing conference circuit, appearing at events such as the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board–Parsons Social Housing Conference and the Tenant Power and Policy Conference, where Weaver facilitated a panel featuring Rosenthal.

It’s not surprising, then, that Rosenthal’s tactics are discussed in the New York City activist community. Take, for example, a 2023 NYC–DSA Housing Working Group event held at the Manhattan-based People’s Forum, an organizing center with links to the Chinese Communist Party. There, organizers discussed the nitty-gritty of tenant activist tactics.

 The moderator, Nicolás Vargas, a member of Central Brooklyn DSA and a founding member of Brooklyn Eviction Defense, claimed that tenants in the buildings on his block had spent three of the previous six years on rent strike. Vargas has a penchant for theory-heavy discussion and framing tenants as the protagonists in a broader revolutionary struggle against landlords, capital, and the institutions that uphold them. Following one particularly strident confrontation with a landlord, Vargas was arrested. Police then discovered he had an outstanding warrant, apparently related to his refusal to vacate a leased property after his tenancy ended, making him an “unregulated tenant.”

Another panelist from TPF’s event, Esteban Giron, a member of NYC–DSA’s Housing Working Group and the Crown Heights Tenant Union, was candid about his contentious relationship with his landlord, explaining that they had been in housing court for “at least five-and-a-half” of the past seven years.

“I don’t even, like, pay my rent to my landlord anymore,” he said. “I just wait ’til we go to court, and then they tell me how much I’m gonna pay.” Giron cited Weaver, who came to his defense during an eviction proceeding, as the reason he joined the DSA.

Holden Taylor, another DSA member and organizer with Brooklyn Eviction Defense, described confronting the “henchmen” of landlords. He characterized his organization as “this really scrappy group of Communists running around Brooklyn fighting illegal evictions in the street, literally.” Taylor never explained precisely what the group considers an “illegal eviction,” but given their broader ideological framework, it could mean anything from actions that violate housing law to evictions that they merely believe are unjust and should therefore be resisted.

While Taylor, Giron, and Vargas worked from the streets, panelist Sabrina Bazile had just finished nearly five years working for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development. Bazile—an urban planner who describes her politics as rooted in decolonial, antiliberal, abolition, and even degrowth thought—said she saw it as her duty to move “toward revolution” from within the government. The panel’s moderator, elated, invoked Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” and added that people working “in the belly of the beast” have a duty “as a government worker to take that sh*t down.”

As tenant organizers adopt more confrontational tactics, lawmakers should consider reforms to protect landlords—especially owner-operators, the one class of landlords who live side-by-side with their tenants. Unlike institutional landlords, who can afford professional property-management teams and robust legal representation, owner-operators often face these conflicts personally. When disputes escalate into harassment, intimidation, or even physical violence, they have a harder time protecting themselves.

These are not hypothetical concerns. There have been several high-profile cases of tenants attacking or even killing their landlords in New York City. Davi Vidal, an illegal immigrant, pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 2023 strangling death of his landlady, Zoraida Leo, following a heated dispute over rent.

Sandra Coto Navarro was charged with second-degree murder in the January 2025 death of superintendent Jose Portillo, who was allegedly attempting to collect $24,000 in past-due rent.

In September 2025, Jose Antonio Tur, 99, was attacked and robbed by a former tenant, Domingo Vasquez Rodriguez, who allegedly owed Tur more than $30,000. Tur later died of complications from a stroke that he suffered the day after the attack. A month before the attack, Tur had offered Rodriguez $8,000 to move out. Tur’s grandson, Jose Miguel Tur, told the New York Post that “the system has shielded [Rodriguez] throughout his time as our tenant.”

These are just the cases that made headlines. Threats against landlords can include verbal or physical intimidation, harassment, and assaults. Available data suggest such encounters are more common than is often recognized: a 2024 survey by the National Apartment Association found that 22 percent of property managers identified aggressive or abusive tenants as their biggest workplace challenge.

As tenant activism shifts increasingly to “expropriation and redistribution,” lawmakers and courts need to be acutely aware of the ideology and tactics—including trespass, coercion, harassment, and conspiracy—driving these efforts. The risk that tenants will victimize their landlords is amplified by a movement that regards all landlords as inherently suspect—as Weaver has put it, “the power relationships between tenants and landlords, period, are bad.”

That idea is gaining currency. With radicals on the march against property owners, governments cannot afford to be complacent.