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Abolish Rent: A Discussion With The LA Tenants' Union
260 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of The Beautiful Idea, we speak with Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two tenant organizers in Los Angeles, CA, involved in the Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU), and co-authors of the new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.
From the publisher:
"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. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.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. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home."
During our discussion, we cover the growing crisis around rent and housing and how landlords and politicians have attempted to shift the discussion onto attacks on migrants and the houseless. We cover how the Los Angeles Tenant Union and the wider Autonomous Tenant Union Network have grown to build a grassroots, tenant led autonomous movement, aimed at building power on a neighborhood level.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Beautiful Idea Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to the Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
00:00:25
Speaker
Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Interview with Leonardo and Tracy on 'Abolish Rent'
00:00:43
Speaker
You're listening to The Beautiful Idea. on today's episode, we speak with Leonardo and Tracy, two authors behind the new book, Abolish Rent, How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.
00:00:54
Speaker
And we speak about the growing autonomous tenant movement in the U.S. During our discussion, we talk about the L.A. Tenants Union, which Tracy and Leonardo are involved in, and the wider autonomous tenant union network.
00:01:06
Speaker
And we unpack how tenants can fight back against the forces of commodified housing as rents continue to skyrocket. Let's get into it.
Authors Share Their Background and Book Inspiration
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm Tracy Rosenthal. I'm a writer and a tenant organizer. one of the co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenant Union, and I'm now on rent strike in New York City. I'm Leonardo. I'm an organizer of the L.A. Tenants Union. I'm a founder of the Union de Vecinos Eastside Local, which predates the L.A. Tenants Union in 1996.
00:01:37
Speaker
Just talk about what inspired the book. How did it come about? Why write this? One of the things that we describe in the book is the tenant union as a school and thinking about a union as a place where we come together and and organize. But that organizing process is in many ways a process of reflection. It's a process of reflection on our living conditions, a process of reflection on the constraints that shape our lives as tenants.
00:02:08
Speaker
And it's a process of reflection on the strategies that we can take to intervene in those against those constraints. And so whether that's sharing information across generations, like from the struggle against the demolition of public housing that predates the Los Angeles Tenant Union to like the current struggles of tenant associations,
00:02:36
Speaker
fighting against their landlords and their buildings, of neighborhood committees, strategizing to take over public space, and the broader challenge of expanding and growing our movement to really like defeat the power of real estate in our cities such that we have more control over where and how we live.
00:02:56
Speaker
And so thinking about that, process of reflection is also, you know, how the book is, how the book came to be a moment to think about our nearly 10 years of organizing together to write it down as a way to both bring in new people to and to deepen our practice And so, again, the the book is really the book is really shaped by what organized members of the Los Angeles Tenant Union made possible.
Challenges in Tenant Organizing and Institutional Systems
00:03:29
Speaker
And we really like wrote it in their wake in the hopes in the hopes that their strategies can spread.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, and and and the other thing is, that i mean, the struggle of tenants has existed for a long, long time, but in ah in a lot of ways through ah institutionalization of procedures and systems and and and structures within the government, a lot of this was kind of disappeared. So a lot of tenants in a lot of ways were trapped with institutional responses to the housing crisis. to the In terms of the housing repairs and housing conditions, there are some all mechanisms that can be solved.
00:04:02
Speaker
There is the court system. There is the tenant's rights that exist. But the reality is that housing conditions haven't changed for anybody in a long, long time. And that people were not paying attention. Basically, the response for people is like, oh, we need to produce more housing.
00:04:15
Speaker
We have to have better laws. We have to have more rights. And that's going to happen. But nothing. There was no talk about how do we organize tenants, have tenants come together to join their own struggle instead of ah people advocating for them or representing them.
00:04:27
Speaker
creating new laws for them. It was helping the tenants organize themselves. And in that in a time where labor is moving away from from industry and from other spaces and and moving into their homes and to their communities, it's also very important to understand the role that they never placed into really in in politics and the transformation of
California Rent Control Defeat and Tenant Power
00:04:45
Speaker
the state.
00:04:45
Speaker
What is your all take on rent control in California, again, being defeated at the ballot box? I mean, that seems to happen quite often. And The landlord lobby and has ton of money, but I want to hear your response to that.
00:04:59
Speaker
This goes to the question of politics that we that I was talking about. Basically, we're ah under a Democrat dictatorship in California, right? The whole state is mostly Democrat and and our cities are mostly Democrat.
00:05:11
Speaker
and And we can elect the good guys, if you want to say so. And still, the the politics and the policies don't change. It's a question of power. So when it comes to to this defeat, yes, we expect that defeat in the in the ballot box.
00:05:25
Speaker
The tenants should organize. We have to build themselves as as a larger, powerful force that really, regardless of what are the laws or regardless of what the decisions are, who makes the decisions, we're able to force the state and the cities to to protect the tenants.
00:05:37
Speaker
written control I mean, in this moment of ah speculation and and when ah and the survival of of the democratic government, they have to negotiate with the most powerful capitalists, speculators and people. So if it was, even if it passed, there would have been lots of things that would happen in the cities that would have blocked The point for me is basically...
00:05:59
Speaker
Power is not just about the elections. Power is not about just initiatives. Power is the power that the tenants have to hold on to the property. And we need to build that up to change those conditions. Once we change those conditions, we may be able to also have an influence in the policies.
00:06:12
Speaker
But but at this moment, yes, it shows our weakness. I guess just to add to that, I think that, you know, like the law that was passed in 1995 by the real estate lobby to prevent rent control from basically to prevent cities that are governed by tenants from to pass rent control over their own jurisdictions uses the same technology that like the United States has of defending like since the constitution of defending the property from the property list. And that's by creating these like vast electoral districts such that the power of people without property is consistently diluted and overwritten by property owners.
00:06:57
Speaker
And that is the same technology that they used in 1995 that we're trapped in now. And I think that this is really just part of you know what we talk about as this long war on tenants, that the structures of representation that are on offer to us.
00:07:15
Speaker
like exist in these confines of a state captured by real estate. And just to say one more thing, you know, one of the most frustrating things about the defeat of rent control in California this time around was not only right, that it was part of this broad right wing backlash, like,
00:07:34
Speaker
Minimum wage did not pass. A repeal of slavery did not pass. Mass incarceration was expanded. But also it was the result of a hundred million dollar disinformation campaign about rent control that is funded by our rents.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so one ah it's about when we think about building power to intervene in in in policy, we're talking about building networks and infrastructures of tenants that are capable of organizing to make those concessions. But we're also talking about organizing tenants to withhold the financial resources that are now the engine of the landlord lobby, that our w rent checks actually fund the lobbyists who use that, those resources and their power to defeat whatever policies would protect us or and and decrease their profits. So I think, you know, thinking about it both in terms of building our own authority
00:08:35
Speaker
and our own capacity to make demands of the state, but also in terms of withholding the financial resources that make up the landlord lobby arsenal.
Building Tenant Power Through Local Associations
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to kind of jump on that and and ask a little bit more specifically, like, what does this organizing look like on the ground, right? where We understand that the LA Tenants Union has thousands of members, right? How does it work?
00:08:58
Speaker
How do you organize with so many different members and so many different locals? And I think understanding a little bit of the practical steps of, OK, how do we build this power? Actually, what does that look like in the day to day? we have We have different first perspectives we give because we work in different kind of locals. But basically, in Los Angeles, the Tenants Union is organized around different locals that exist in 16 states.
00:09:18
Speaker
every local more or less is organised around TAs, tenant associations around buildings. And in some contexts, like in our neighborhood in Boyle Heights, we also have neighborhood committees. So basically, TAs are organized together within inside their building, and within the block, they organize as neighborhood committees.
00:09:36
Speaker
And the tenants are not just working on the issues in their own building and what's happening in their building, housing conditions, confronting the landlord and and management and all these things. They also are dealing with the larger agencies like the housing department, who is really not doing enforcement and is not doing the kind of like rigging.
00:09:52
Speaker
Enforcing the repairs that are needed for the tenants and also on the issues that affect the city, you know, like dealing with the stoplights, the traffic and issues like that. The whole idea in the long term is ah for tenants to take control of their neighborhoods, to be able to build a power and a force in the neighborhoods and the places where the TA6 is to be places with resources are available to tenants to organize themselves.
00:10:14
Speaker
The locals come together on a regular basis with representations of the different tenant associations where they find common trends, come on common issues that they want to work on. And then the different locals launch different campaigns. So in some locals, you have campaigns that are launched against abusive landlords where the tenants organize and mobilize to confront the landlords and their places where they live.
00:10:35
Speaker
In other places, there is tenants that are organizing with each other to learn from each other how to deal with the courts and how to represent themselves in courts. In other places, they're working on on issues like, well, right now, there's a tenants association that is actually talking about the war on tenants when it comes to rent control, how rent control is being undermined by different actions and policies by the different players in in this process. So,
00:10:58
Speaker
The different locals have different forms of organizing and different kinds of issues in their neighborhood. And at the same time, the different locals come together to identify common trends that we have to work on and so on and so forth. But they and this is part of what I was going to talk about we're talking about the politics.
00:11:14
Speaker
This is part of a long term project to build democracy. within our neighborhoods. And this part of a long-term project to organize power in the places where we live to really have an impact. And within the larger national changes that are happening, it's important to build power at the local level so we can then have influence at the larger levels. But it's all sorts of things that affect tenants. A tenant is ah is a tenant who lives in the neighborhood, who is a worker, who goes to school, who does different things. So tenants can have an impact in organizing everywhere else that they're engaged in.
00:11:44
Speaker
I want to follow up on that. i think we're we're seeing a historic rent strike happening in Spain right now. Right. I don't know if you all have been following that at all.
Scaling Up Rent Strikes: Community and Solidarity
00:11:53
Speaker
But I'm wondering with this new election, if you see something like that happening in mass in the U.S. and what.
00:12:00
Speaker
I guess what needs to happen or like how the conversation around rent and tenant union organizing has historically been framed and how you want to challenge that with some of those stuff that you've been talking about in your book.
00:12:10
Speaker
I mean, I think that, you know, we, you know, the Los Angeles tenant union was one of the first, I think the first organization in the United States to call for red strike in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:12:25
Speaker
I think, unfortunately, tenants are organized by their misery more than they are on the defense, more than they are organized offensively. And part a part of that is, I think, this depoliticization of the role of tenants by their, you know, the idea that we will solve our problems you know, through the help of social services as individuals in the context of the courts as individuals and like in states of emergency when we have to show up in court to defend our housing and in the context of like making our political opinions known every four years with a vote.
00:13:02
Speaker
And I think that we can see like in this last election, what was on offer from, you know, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party on the one side, there was subsidizing,
00:13:13
Speaker
Real estate developers and private property owners. And on the other side, there was mass deportations to increase the supply of housing. And I think both of those things like that constraints of the but both the political landscape broadly and also in terms of how tenants themselves relate to, you know, their identity as tenants, that part of what the project that we're engaged in through organizing is about producing a political subject, is producing the tenant as a political subject who is capable of organizing with their neighbors to intervene directly in the constraints that shape their lives. And I think that that what makes a rent strike possible, I think we have to start with, you know, like
00:14:03
Speaker
the the context that we've seen, what what makes a rent strike possible in you know at the local level that we have organized many buildings on rent strike now. My building in New York City is currently on rent strike. And the the ingredients that make that possible are precisely the ingredients that we would need to scale up If we want to see something like the kind of coordination that we have in Spain and, you know, those ingredients, right, are material, are human relationships, right? Is our sense of community, is our sense of solidarity with each other, is the connection to our neighborhoods, connection to our communities?
00:14:46
Speaker
And the faith that if we act together, we have the power to like we have the power to transform our living conditions. I think that's one really key ingredient. The other ingredient is that the action of withholding rent, you know, to move from the incredible fear that tenants experience like in having to pay rent, right? like we describe in our book, we have to pay rent at the peril of our need and at the barrel of the gun.
00:15:17
Speaker
What does that mean? It means that we pay rent because we have to have housing, right? It is a human need to have housing. And we pay rent because if we don't do so, the agents of state violence will come And physically throw us out of our homes onto the streets.
00:15:36
Speaker
And if we find ourselves outside, we can be arrested by those same agents because it is effectively a crime to be homeless. It is a crime not to be exploited by a landlord.
00:15:48
Speaker
And the amount of fear those agents is consistently drilled into tenants in having to pay this monthly tribute is such an incredible, you know, it is incredible block on our capacity to organize. And yet at the same time, right, like we know the experience of organizing tenants to go on rent strike, that there already is defiance against landlords that like Everyone knows that something is rotten when you have to pay this tribute every month and you're living in housing with like and the conditions of your housing is deteriorating. And yet you have to pay more and more.
00:16:28
Speaker
And so it's about creating spaces for reflection on that reality such that people feel less isolated, such that is possible to socialize risk in communities that are built of like built around trust and solidarity.
00:16:46
Speaker
So people can take that risk, can respect their own defiance, can cultivate each other's defiance and support each other in in like, you know, that economic sanction of withholding rent. And I think that, you know, like starting from how it works at the individual building level with those materials, like with like,
00:17:09
Speaker
cultivating spaces of like ritual and community and building trust and solidarity. And then like that is the way that we can understand our rents as a material that we can use, like as a as a source of power rather than as a as like the tribute that we have to pay, like at the barrel of a gun every month.
Tenant Union's Unique Approach and Historical Context
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, and at the center of that is the tenant. I mean, the tenant is an organized entity. And this is very important because ah just looking from the perspective of Los Angeles, and this is this is the problem.
00:17:44
Speaker
When you have a department where things are in really, really bad conditions and the tenants are ready to to to withhold rent, the first advice that the lawyer says, oh, no, no, let's try to talk to the landlord first, because the lawyer doesn't want to fight it in court when the tenant lives under slump conditions.
00:18:00
Speaker
the The organizations that are around housing conditions that supposedly organize tenants are really organizations that are funded by large foundations that basically are more committed to the development of more housing than to the development of tenant organizations.
00:18:15
Speaker
And even when they exist as nonprofits, really the people who have the power and make the decisions are they but the board of directors of those nonprofits, which are not always on the same line as the tenants themselves.
00:18:27
Speaker
When the Union de Vecinos, the site local Paul Heights, decided to fight against consider the demolition of public housing, there was a vote in the board of directors of the nonprofit that was working with those tenants. where two-thirds of the members of the board voted in favor of demolition.
00:18:42
Speaker
These were the people who didn't live in the housing project. When it comes to organizing larger masses of tenants across different and buildings and different ah with a collective owner, the they organizations, the nonprofits say, well, do we have the The capacity, do we have the money, do we have the resources?
00:18:59
Speaker
And they don't do that. When there is ah an organiz organizing and and against the lack of inspections in the city against landlords, the tenants associations have to ask themselves, well, is this going to put us into conflict with the Democrat who's in office in our city council?
00:19:14
Speaker
And so on and so forth. so When the tenants decide to do something, when the tenants take leadership to do something and their organizations themselves limit the but what they can do, you have a problem.
00:19:26
Speaker
And then ah the other side, for example, you have since COVID, we have a huge expansion of tenant rights. There's all sorts of non-profit organizations and housing groups and stuff like that that have expanded the rights of tenants.
00:19:38
Speaker
But the only problem is that to fight your rights for tenants is you have to do it under an eviction. So the idea is to build preemptively the power of the tenants to make their own decisions, to take action themselves and to defend themselves from all this stuff. So the Tenants Union is a different kind of organization.
00:19:55
Speaker
It's an organization led by the tenants where the tenants make the decisions, where the tenants act on their own behalf and where the tenants organize with each other in their neighborhood or across the city when they need that kind of support.
00:20:06
Speaker
And yes, it's part of a longterm long a part of a long project, and but it has a lot to do with also changing our notions of politics. It's not just about lobbying. It's not just about getting the city agency to do the work for you. It's about the tenants themselves take power of their own hands and do everything that Tracy just described.
00:20:24
Speaker
I think, too, just to add to that, right, like one of the purposes of the book, you know, I think is that to add to that process of reflection of our own past,
00:20:34
Speaker
in the tenant movement, right? Like every single right that we have as tenants, we have organized tenant rebellion to thank for that. But that knowledge is totally suppressed.
00:20:45
Speaker
And it's because of, you know, like, It's only because of the historic power of the labor movement that something like, you know, UAW putting 2028 on the map for contract renegotiations that, you know, as a hint of a general strike, like there's only the historic power of the movement that makes something like that possible. And so I think that part of what our task is, is rebuilding that common sense around
00:21:16
Speaker
what our own capacities are as tenants, what are the tools that we have, you know, and politicizing our relationships to our communities, our rent checks as like weapons that we can use if we collectivize and, you know, our own bodies. Like when we stay in the houses where we live and refuse to pay rent, when we occupy our housing rent,
00:21:43
Speaker
go against the landlord's plans for how that housing will be used. I think that all of these, you know, like recognizing these as, you know, like part of the Paulo Fieri line, which I return to all the time, what can we do today such that tomorrow we cannot do what we can do today.
00:22:03
Speaker
And that is really, you know, we are very much starting from ah history of defeats and co-optation, and we are rebuilding that capacity from the ground up. And it really starts in our buildings and the places that we're in right now. And so turning our attention to those places and growing our capacity there is is the only road, even if it's a long road, to which there is no shortcut, right? Like that's the road to rebuilding that capacity of the working class exercising their power as tenants.
00:22:41
Speaker
On that note, um I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the wins that you've seen, both historically and more recently with the L.A. Tenants Union. Leah, do you want to talk about the most recent rent strike?
00:22:54
Speaker
Well, mean, very recently, one of the things that has happened is with all this push, I mean, so since 2008, you know, people have moved from owning their homes to become renters. And then they the low income tenants have been pushed out into the streets or into different kinds of housing.
00:23:08
Speaker
One of the things that we've has happened a lot in our neighborhood is that people are moving, whole families are moving from living in ah one, two or three bedroom apartments into ah one bedroom. and into one bedroom, a single bedroom, a whole family living together.
00:23:21
Speaker
And in our neighborhood, for example, there's these buildings that are look like Airbnb buildings, where basically there's like eight rooms to ah to and ah to an apartment with one kitchen and two bathrooms. And in each one of these bedrooms, there is one family.
00:23:34
Speaker
So we have a building where tenants, we're organizing we're dealing with lots of problems. One of the tenants was evicted illegally. So our our neighbors that knew about this building started organizing and coming together to support this tenant.
00:23:45
Speaker
In the process, we learned about 60 families. That we're living under those conditions. Every family in one single room, sharing one or two kitchens with with ah with within a different buildings ah across different parts of the city.
00:23:57
Speaker
And the tenants are organizing, they start withholding the rent. And about for six months, it it was almost half a million dollars in in and rent that they were not paying. And the manager manager was harassing them, sexually harassing them, abusing them, increasing the rent whenever they want to.
00:24:12
Speaker
And at some point in one of the meetings where the tenants were having to organize themselves, the manager mazed one of the tenants and then they organized. Basically, the the manager ended up in jail. Well, to To make a long story short, half a million later and sixty six ah six months later and half a million dollars later, the tenants finally were able to sit down with the landlord and negotiate a contract where the landlord basically forgave the half a million dollars in rent and started doing all the repairs.
00:24:38
Speaker
All this because tenants from different parts of the city started coming together, negotiating, pushing back, withholding rent, and really, really aggressively defended their whole position. In Boyle Heights, also ah a place where there was a lot of demolitions to build these kind of buildings, we started also putting pressure on our council member. We brought together all the tenants whose buildings were under threat of demolition, and we got we got a moratorium on demolitions in our own neighborhood district, which is also very important, which talks about the power of the the local politics.
00:25:07
Speaker
but right ten We could not organize the whole city, but in our own neighborhood with our school district, we were able to create an exemption. So a moratorium on demolitions, ah forgiveness of rent for tenants that have been abused and harassed for six months. Victories like that are happening every day.
00:25:22
Speaker
Also tenants also doing their own construction and a building where there's this woman who is handicapped as a senior citizen who's been living in really bad conditions. The tenants kept asking for a ramp for their own building and they didn't put the lander wasn't putting up the ramp.
00:25:36
Speaker
The tenants eventually built their own ramp. and and took it out of the rent for the landlord.
Critique of Affordable Housing and Alternative Solutions
00:25:41
Speaker
And in the process, as they came together to build this ramp, they started organizing put pressure on the housing department to start doing more, to enforce the housing conditions in the building.
00:25:50
Speaker
And right now, this senior your citizen, handicapped senior citizen whose floor was crumbling, and now is having her old apartment being rebuilt. These are just local local kind of struggles.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, maybe i'll tell I'll tell two stories, right, that there are tenants who are using the crisis of their building to create a crisis for the state to change the, like,
00:26:17
Speaker
to change the way that the state intervenes in our housing. one of that One of those associations is the Hillside Via Tenant Association, which is organizing in quote-unquote affordable housing. And importantly, this is a so-called solution to the housing crisis that was Developed by the Reagan administration and then popularized by Clinton as a replacement strategy for public housing that rather than publicly owned housing, the state would.
00:26:51
Speaker
publicly subsidized, privately owned housing that would eventually become market rate. And so the tenants in Hillside Via that are organizing are doing so, first of all, in three languages, like absolutely heroic levels of organizing to build solidarity and community across three different languages in that building. one to defend their housing against the supposed solution that these tenants who lived in their building for like 10, 20, sometimes 30 years were about to be evicted by the affordable housing system.
00:27:32
Speaker
And so not only have these tenants organized to withhold rent from their landlord, not only have they like built the capacities to sustain that strike long term, They've also directed that crisis specifically at the city to popularize the demand that the city should use the power of eminent domain, the power that it has historically used to to displace poor and working class people of color. In this case, their demand is that the city use that power to remove the housing from the landlord's hands, to give it back to the tenants so that they can have affordable housing long term. I think that that building and then also, as Leo was describing, the Mohawk Tenant Association, which has changed the
00:28:19
Speaker
changed the capacity for landlords to evict people from rent-stabilized housing through a renovviction through like a renovation loophole. And they, because of their organizing, closed that loophole and made it possible for more tenants across Los Angeles to stay in their homes. So I think in both of these cases, you know, it it really speaks to the, like, it in the one hand, it speaks to, you know,
00:28:49
Speaker
these tenants coming back to the same tools over and over their solidarity, their connection with their neighbors, their connection with the broader movement and the power of their rent and like using the power of collectivizing and withholding their rent to enter, to like bring their landlord to the negotiating table, to bring the city to the negotiating table, to create the crisis that changes the balance of power such that we such that tenants have access to those tables.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah, one one more I think is also very, very important is connected to this whole notion of affordable housing. Los Angeles was a city where the politicians and the nonprofit developers used to mobilize tenants a lot around the idea of building more affordable housing. and That is no longer the case. i wonder they may One of the main reasons why is that is because affordable housing is not affordable to the poor.
00:29:45
Speaker
Basically, in most of the affordable buildings that have been built, ah reci building buildings that are demolishing rent-controlled housing, displacing very low-income people without giving them the right to return or to live under the same conditions that they were living.
00:29:57
Speaker
They usually are like higher rents and basically targeting people with higher income. So we're talking about people are making $25, $30.
00:30:05
Speaker
$35,000 a year, been ah fighting and struggling for affordable housing for people who are making $80,000 a year to $100,000 a year. So in Los Angeles, now it's very rare for tenant organizations and tenant groups to really support the notion of affordable housing. and And that's a big, big change because affordable housing is just a big, big scam that was being used to remodel, gentrify and displace tenants from their own communities.
00:30:31
Speaker
And now it's something that is very, very tentative and people have to do very, very carefully. Now, we haven't stopped the construction of those buildings, but now it's very hard to to get the support from tenants across the city to but for for their own displacement. And that's a big, important change that I think we have at the ideological level.
00:30:51
Speaker
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00:31:44
Speaker
Now that I have been injected with the anti-fascist super soldier serum, I renown all my rubbish beliefs
00:31:59
Speaker
So that's 12 rules for what? Any podcast about the far right? Get it anyway if you get your podcasts. 12 rules. Where did you get this?
00:32:11
Speaker
Your friendly neighborhood anarchist.
00:32:17
Speaker
more of an anarchist militant people involved in social yeah i wanted to ask if we can talk a little more about that because that's something you know i've spoken with andrew lee about this in the past too but Just this idea of affordable housing that's posited by both parties and and developers as the solution. Like we're going to fix this essentially by doing more of the same.
00:32:52
Speaker
And of course, your book is about decommodifying housing, of course. So to talk a little bit about that. How do we push back against that narrative? i mean I mean, I think for us, it's really about situating it both in the context where it emerged, recognizing what it actually does to communities, like what the terms actually are such that, you know, like the entire branding of the policy affordable housing skates by.
00:33:17
Speaker
on its name alone, right? So, so much of our work is just about demystifying affordable housing trademark from the housing that tenants can actually afford, right? We know in Los Angeles, a person making $70,000 a year, like double, more than double the amount of minimum wage is qualifies for an affordable apartment,
00:33:42
Speaker
Who is that affordable for? We know that after 35 years, affordable housing like becomes market rate. The covenants expire. It converts back to it goes back to the landlord who has then no restraints in perpetuity to charge market rate rents. Right. So the public.
00:34:01
Speaker
that like the for the sake of a public benefit that only has a limited impact, landlords receive the benefit of like public land, public subsidies, and then market rate rents in perpetuity. We know that because affordable housing draws in like higher income tenants to historically, you abandoned neighborhoods, that that actually changes the property values of entire neighborhoods. And we know that for every 5% increase it in rents in Los Angeles, 2000 people become homeless, right? So like,
00:34:38
Speaker
recognizing this system that affordable housing is part of is part of a long-term project of the state collaborating with real estate to raise property values for the sake of real estate investors and property owners and against tenants' human needs.
00:34:57
Speaker
You know, we had, like, I come back to this all the time, that our former mayor, Eric Garcetti, once said, in a good economy, homelessness goes up. That is the economy that is structured around the raising of property values such that at this moment in history, owning a home makes more money than working the average job.
00:35:22
Speaker
That is the economic system that is that our politicians are participating in producing that is about and that is inherently immiserating more and more people. And so I think that when we situate affordable housing as a scheme to continue the unending growth of property values, to continue putting pride public land and public money in the hands of private landlords, it helps us understand like,
00:35:53
Speaker
what is the purpose of this system, right? The purpose of a system is what it does. What does our housing system do? It puts trillions of dollars into the hands of landlords and real estate developers, right? Our landlords make $500 billion dollars a year and it ejects tenants into the streets.
00:36:12
Speaker
There are now like more than 650,000 people who live outdoors. And there are four times as many who are only housed like on couches and in cars.
00:36:25
Speaker
And this is the housing system that, you know, like we need to name if we're a if we want to organize tenants to beat back against the fundamental issue of the system, and which is the use of our housing as a place to extract profit and rent and not as a home, not as the you know provision of a fundamental human need.
00:36:49
Speaker
Well, you brought up homelessness. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. I mean, that's been, again, something that's been pushed more and more. What role does the tenant movement have in politicians, developers, wealthy people attacking the houseless?
00:37:04
Speaker
I mean, I think, you know, we really go out of our, you know, we define tenant as anyone who doesn't control their own housing, and that includes people who live outside.
Including Houseless Individuals in Tenant Movements
00:37:13
Speaker
And one of the organizing projects that we describe in the book, Echo Park Rise Up, I think in many ways, we understand as pointing us to the vanguard of the movement and the tenants in Echo Park, who, you know, 150 people who in the context of the pandemic organized to claim public space to solve the problem of a lack of an an impossibility of affordable housing to redistribute.
00:37:45
Speaker
survival supplies, food, to build a garden, to engage in harm reduction, to draw in community resources so that they built showers and had a jobs program for themselves, that this community that was built, that community ah created the ah authority and capacity to share and draw in resources in in like the most abandoned and, you know, difficult circumstances, I think really show us, you know, the
00:38:19
Speaker
the power of the movement to occupy space and to share and redistribute resources as the kind of basis for tenant power. And I think too about, i don't know, Leo, if you want to talk a little about ah about the Roslyn tenants also, but I think for us, it's really been a process of relating to tenants that that all tenants, right, who are who pay rent, who live outside,
00:38:47
Speaker
as equally subject to this housing regime that is bent on immiserating all of us and building those solidarities across housed and unhoused, you know, as as a single movement.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yes, and and also important to the the question of building bridges is very, very important, because when you look again, I want to point to the fact that Los Angeles is a city run by Democrats. And this and and this ah is the homeless capital of the world. And this is where the most criminalizing, abusive kind of policies are being developed.
00:39:19
Speaker
and And those with all this with the whole idea that basically ah threatening homeless people into carceral housing. So basically, the work is not is not happening the way that they say it's happening. Basically, people are not being housed, people are not receiving services.
00:39:33
Speaker
It's just a small group of tenants are receiving these services that are being recycled through the whole system, going in and out of the system and receiving these services. So part of the thing, and how does that operate?
00:39:44
Speaker
is by driving a wage between people who are housed and people who are not housed, right? They talk about safety. They talk about protecting the tenants and the communities and children from schools and churches and stuff like that.
00:39:55
Speaker
But basically with the excuse to divide tenants from the unhoused. And the idea then is to build those bridges of solidarity, right? And in Echo Park, that was very visible. Basically, when the land when the council member realized that there was citywide support for the people in Echo Park, he started going to the wealthy tenants and to the real estate developers and mobilize them to act against the people in Echo Park.
00:40:17
Speaker
It wasn't the tenants and the neighbors who were mobilizing against Echo Park. Anyway, so our our job is to build solidarity and build an understanding that that everybody is affected by the same system. So in the Resoling Hotel, which is ah an SRO building, single-room occupancy ten housing, which is basically for tenants who used to be homeless or were at risk of becoming homeless, they've been organizing in that building, and we're building a base that in in downtown that now is focusing on the homeless. So we're moving from the SRO buildings into the homeless encampments and trying to figure out how we're going to start building bridges across the sea ah across the neighborhood so we can actually building
00:40:54
Speaker
demystifying all these policies that supposedly are helping the homeless. We're talking about the fact that people are not getting the services, the fact that police is persecuting them, the fact that the business in an improvement districts are they basically places where from which tenants have been criminalized.
00:41:10
Speaker
And very recently, we're actually planning ah an event in the neighborhood where the tenants in the building are coming together to organize a picnic and and ah start organizing meetings with the homeless people who live in the different encampments.
00:41:22
Speaker
Last week, we were passing out flyers all across the different encampments in the Skid Road District. And we hope to have a big ah bigger ah meeting where we're going to start talking about how can we start changing the conditions in downtown where people.
00:41:33
Speaker
gentrification, speculation, and developments, quote-unquote development, is really threatening the life of of the tenants themselves who live in these buildings and the tenants who live on the sidewalk. So that's part of the stuff that we're trying to do.
00:41:45
Speaker
But it's important to to build that bridge. I actually want to come back to something you just said about living in cities run
Building Tenant Power Against Neoliberalism and Gentrification
00:41:53
Speaker
by Democrats. I mean, I think this seems to be kind of a central issue for a lot of people on the left right now with the recent election. Because, I mean, so much of what we heard over the years is, you know, push the Democrats to the left, which I think is so interesting about the L.A. Tenants Union, like you said, is more about building power from below.
00:42:11
Speaker
how do we make that a wider project, I guess? Because it it feels like so much of what is giving Trump and the Republicans energy right now is them understanding that neoliberalism is this project that so many people are displaced and attacked by and they're feeding off of that.
00:42:28
Speaker
No, for sure. And I think that we can see this, you know, like that. In fact, when you look at the districts that like tacked right, like most of them had faced like the largest cost of it living increase.
00:42:41
Speaker
which we know is is like so much of that is like rising property values and rents. And I think that the failure of democrats democratic policy to address the cost of living because they refuse to intervene in the profit motives and the like,
00:43:03
Speaker
And the power of landlords and real estate developers like is real and and people's frustration with it is real. And instead of addressing it, what we see in California is that like, you know, politicians like Gavin Newsom are rebranding fascism.
00:43:23
Speaker
ads like with a smiley face so that he can collaborate with the right wing, like just looking at the way that there would be no grants passed, the Supreme Court decision that made it illegal, that basically effectively make it made it illegal to live outdoors across the country. There would be no ruling of that without the organizing of Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. And so I think who has been, you know, part of a broad right wing
00:43:56
Speaker
revanchist project to help basically helping to recruit people to the right against against homeless people by dehumanizing people who live outdoors. And I think that, you know, if we are going to push back against that project where we on like we recognize that what there's no reason to vote for a diet Republican when you can vote for the real thing.
00:44:21
Speaker
Right. That it's ah for us, I think that the only way to beat back that the space where fascism creeps in is, you know, the space of people's.
00:44:33
Speaker
feeling like they've lost control over their lives. So how do we build institutions that people have control over and in their buildings, in their neighborhood and citywide?
00:44:45
Speaker
That that experience of control that we get to like that we have through organizing is really like and how do we rebuild the bonds that like gentrification is? And, you know, like the capitalist alienation, like how do we rebuild those bonds? And we can do that in our organizations, in our neighborhoods. And I think for me, like that has to be the like that that is the strategy that is the intervention and that is the strategy.
00:45:15
Speaker
OK, so I have a question that's a little bit of a diversion, maybe from what we've been speaking about. But i wanted to ask you, you all have been talking a lot about the importance of people living living on the edge of housing precarity, organizing themselves to withhold rent and people living on the edge of the poverty line or below the poverty line.
00:45:34
Speaker
I'm wondering if you could also speak to the middle class, to people living in homes owned by single families or by single landlords. I'm thinking about yuppies, right? Like young adult professionals that are living in cities that are often looked at as the gentrifiers of the cities.
00:45:51
Speaker
think I said there's people living with their own landlords, right? What are some of the ways that people in this category realistically challenge gentrification or support tenant rights organizing in their own lives? What are some of the kind of maybe creative or out of the box ways that you see people in that group?
00:46:08
Speaker
Yeah. Challenging, escalating rent. I mean, i I think I'm going to say two things first, like we should detach the idea that like middle class or upper middle class people live in particular kinds of housing, right? Like actually like,
00:46:23
Speaker
Well, first, it's only like 9% of tenants who live in those kind in like quote unquote mom and pop housing, which like gets a lot of play from the landlord lobby. So I would hate to like repeat an idea that they love, which is that like that kind of housing is less exploitative. And we, we know from our experience that mom and pop landlords are among the most violent because when they don't have access to deep pockets and the legal system, they use like malignant neglect
00:46:55
Speaker
and like direct violence more than a large landlord would. But then just to go back to your question about like organizing across class differences and that I think, you know, we can see that like the two constituencies that make up tenants right now are like represented on this call, right? It's historically people of color, black and Latinx people, the majority of them are tenants and the majority of people under 35 are tenants.
00:47:27
Speaker
So millennials and people of color are the sort of mainstay constituencies of tenants and of tenants and of tenant majorities in cities. I think that it's really important for us that we have a politics that's driven by the most vulnerable amongst us, because in order because we know that the what ah what will solve the crisis for the most vulnerable will affect all of the rest will benefit all of the rest of us But what benefits
00:48:02
Speaker
higher, like what benefits middle and upper middle class people does not necessarily benefit the poorest. So I think that we do, it is important for us to have an orientation around the most vulnerable, but that is an orientation that is about the production of solidarity rather than its impossibility.
00:48:23
Speaker
And I think that by participating, by joining a tenant we're by participating in a tenant association, by sacrificing our by sacrificing your time,
00:48:35
Speaker
your resources And some of your imagination of what your life is supposed to look like, right? That these are this sort of what's required of those of us who want to participate in the movement to change the world.
00:48:51
Speaker
And I think that, you know, there are, you know, i I'm sure Leo has a lot to say about the kind of like recruitment of this broad constituency, but like that's who's here that's That's who's already here. And it's up to us to orient a politics that is that will actually defeat the constraints that shape.
00:49:15
Speaker
I think that the project that. builds that solidarity, right, is not necessarily changing our minds and then joining the movement. It's about joining and being changed through the process of participation. And so I i think that the the best thing to do is simply to, like, get involved and reflect.
00:49:38
Speaker
And through that process, like, allow allow that process and the and participating in that process to, like, drive the commitment that to drive the commitment to the broader movement?
00:49:52
Speaker
I think Tracy pretty much said everything, but a couple of things that also are also important to understand. I don't know what it looks like in other parts of the country, but for example, in Los Angeles, there used to be a time when you could separate those people according to where they live in their neighborhood, and and you could have that kind of situation, but now ah The whole situation, the whole problematic is right next to each other.
00:50:14
Speaker
So it's not like people can act as if nothing is happening in the city. It's not as if people can act as if your neighbors are not being displaced or evicted or as your neighbors are not being put into jail because they live on the streets.
00:50:26
Speaker
This is actually something and that is very, very visible to people. and And this is a time of of choice, right? Are you going to choose to let these things happen Or are you going to develop a solidarity? And solidarity is very, very key.
00:50:39
Speaker
But in solidarity, not just and only in the sense of the work together, it's because the most poor, the most the people who are most risk are the ones who are the most ready to do more.
00:50:49
Speaker
The homelessness People in Echo Park taking over the park and turning into a neighborhood of protection in the middle of COVID showed us what we can do in our own neighborhoods. We can create our own neighborhoods and and create our own relationships to protect and and and support each other.
00:51:04
Speaker
ah Not just in in times of sickness and pandemics, but in times of evictions and displacement, in times of of of harassment, in times of police abuse. and And at the same time, as we build this relationship, we build the political power to change the conditions in the city.
00:51:19
Speaker
And that's why also going back to the conversation about ah about the Democrats, this is not a question now of electing the the the best people or the people who are going to be on our side. This a question of building the power that is going to challenge the common sense.
00:51:32
Speaker
Common sense used to tell you that if you pay your rent on time, ah your housing was going to be in good conditions, you're not going to have any kind of risk. But the reality is that even if will you pay your rent on time, the landlord is going to turn your house into a slum and is going to find any way they can to push you out.
00:51:49
Speaker
Common sense used to tell you that there used to be social services agencies for the homeless and the unhoused that were going to help them find places. But the reality is that the whole system has broken down. And there is nothing else that that that that that these organizations can do or provide for anybody.
00:52:04
Speaker
So it's a question of, in this relationship, break away from the common sense that tells us that everything is okay in America. Everything is corrupt in the United States. And it is because we are in the dictatorship of a system that is ruled by two parties that take turns to govern, and where people are every four years go and vote and elect the best option that they can have.
00:52:25
Speaker
The options are no longer existent. We need to build the social power in our communities and our neighborhoods to transform the relationships that are needed. i mean, to build organizations that are needed, to have the power that is needed to force the parties to listen.
00:52:40
Speaker
And if the parties don't listen, to find a different kind of structure. But really, it shouldn't matter who is it in the government. What matters is how much power we have to make those in the government do what we want them to do. And this is what we trying to build.
00:52:52
Speaker
Building by building, block by block, local by local, union by union. It's a long protracted process. It means changing those relationships across class. It means changing the common sense of the people when it comes to politics.
00:53:05
Speaker
And it means developing a vision, moving away from getting used to the way things are, ah having a vision of the way things should be and acting on it all together. You know, I wanted to ask you all if you have any thoughts about, you know, Trump coming in, especially as housing during the campaign was used as something Where you know they were basically positing that migrants and asylum seekers were the ones that were causing rents to go up and taking all the housing and stuff like that.
Strategies Against Political Fear-Mongering and Immigrant Threats
00:53:37
Speaker
don't know if you have any thoughts about you know what's coming and just things that people can expect or how people should move. but but We may have different answers here on this one, but I am more concerned of the fear-mongering that is happening by the progressive side of this movement that says we must be in fear and run to the Democrats and run for safety somewhere else.
00:53:59
Speaker
This is a time to organize harder, to fight harder, and to push back, because whatever we build, it doesn't matter who's going to be in power, but but what matters is what are we able to build during this time. I think these next four years are a time...
00:54:14
Speaker
of building the kind of structures that we want to have so we can have more power. So when we talk about fear, when we talk about they they they the notion that, oh, my God, you know, everybody's going to be prosecuted, everybody's going to be deported, we're actually creating a situation of powerlessness.
00:54:29
Speaker
We have a long history, at least within the immigrant rights movement, we have a long history of defending ourselves and protecting ourselves and organizing ourselves. Immigrants exist everywhere. They're in the school districts.
00:54:40
Speaker
They're in the churches. They're everywhere. And they're growing in different parts of the city. Solidarity is what matters here. And the question is, are people going to be standing right next to their neighbors and pushing back and organizing and building power?
00:54:54
Speaker
Yes, theres we need to be concerned, but we should not be so scared that we're paralyzed. So it's just a question of fighting harder, organizing more and pushing back. We have the institutions, we have the mechanisms, we have the history.
00:55:07
Speaker
this is This is not the end of the world. i mean, I can't. I mean, mostly what I you know what i have to add about that is is really, as Leo said, that part of the fear-mongering that is used to get people to accept the guilt Democrats who like destroy the infrastructures that then allow the right to move, right? That like build the wall that Trump established, that deported more people than, like that the Biden and administration deported more people, that the Biden administration is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian people, right? That I think that for us, you know, thinking about the structures that we have,
00:55:53
Speaker
um and the complicities that we're a part of, like to turn the conversation that way, you know, that the that are rent checks, and our housing system is implicated in so many aspects of our lives and in, and in the financialized global economy, it's also implicated in the genocide in Gaza.
00:56:13
Speaker
And so I think that like, In the same way that the institutions of tenant associations can be the infrastructure for community defense against immigrant against raids and deportations against police violence, those same institutions defense against police violence.
00:56:31
Speaker
can be what we look to when we want to intervene in our direct material complicity in the ongoing genocide. And so I think that, you know, like an institution like a tenant union and like a tenant association is a mechanism for us to take control over we how we over where we live and over the resources that are stolen from us as rent and, know,
00:56:59
Speaker
to take control of where we live is also to refuse ICE agents and police from stealing our community, like from stealing our neighbors and from harming our neighbors. And it is also to invest in the long-term project of refusing American imperialism, of refusing our participation in the ongoing genocide. So I think that i think that that's not like I think that tenant associations are really robust and deeply important institutions that we can think about right now. And so to support Leo in rather than turning towards our fear that oftentimes is a way of rehearsing our powerlessness, I want to state the possibilities.
00:57:50
Speaker
And and the possibilities of what we can do with those institutions are actually a lot greater than than a lot greater than we even really think. Just to give you an example, during the pandemic, there was a major fear of people getting evicted illegally. And and actually, there was many times when landlords tried to evict tenants illegally.
00:58:11
Speaker
And the tenant associations came together and organized to push back against the landlords and bring back those tenants who were being illegally evicted into their homes, ah breaking the chains, breaking the locks, blocking the the the police.
00:58:23
Speaker
And and and they they did everything all together to keep tenants in their own homes. And this was the tenant association, it was the neighbors, it was the they the the other locals coming in in solidarity.
00:58:35
Speaker
So the the same energy that you can take to protect the tenant from being pushed out of their home can be used to taking a fascist authority from taking people out of their city, out of their neighborhoods.
00:58:48
Speaker
and And I just need to build build it more, build it bigger, build it across. but we have to We're going to use the same tools that we've been using for protect tenants to protect our local neighbors and the people who live in our communities.
Growth and Challenges of the Autonomous Tenant Union Network
00:59:00
Speaker
Well, I wanted to ask about the Autonomous Tenant Union Network. There's a lot of locals. There's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening nationally. I know there's a rent strike right now in Kansas City. There's a big struggle that just erupted in Florida around mobile home tenants there. that They've been protesting nonstop.
00:59:19
Speaker
I just wanted to get your thoughts on the state of the Autonomous Tenant Union Network right now and just the tenant movement in general and stuff that you're excited about. i mean, I think one of the things that I'm really excited about is the capacity for this movement to spread. I think that, you know, like.
00:59:39
Speaker
I think that hatred of landlords is a deep and abiding part of the rent relation. And I think that as more and more people take these political risks and as those risks bred across the media, more and more people feel empowered to participate. And the institutions like the Autonomous Tenant Union Network, like the Tenant Union Federation, exist to channel that capacity, that rage, that spirit into strategic organizing. And I think that, you know, like one of, I have been lucky on this, you know, to be talking about the book with tenant associations across the country. i was in Kansas City.
01:00:26
Speaker
i was in Louisville. We were in Oakland. I'm going to Providence. And these are all places that are investing in the local structures of where they live, that are thinking about, ah that are organizing tenants as political subjects, and that are all participants in this broad movement. to the ah in this broad movement I think that one of the ah main challenges that we have as a movement is, you know, stems from something I said before, that the legal structures for our housing system are so variegated, depending on our geographies, that there are vast inequalities in what
01:01:10
Speaker
Tenants have access to based on the historic differences in the tenant movement that the bastion of the historic tenant movement in New York and Los Angeles and Oakland have given a platform and a platform and a place to build from that tenants across the country do not have like access to basic of Eviction protections like a law, a lengthier eviction process.
01:01:37
Speaker
There are even three states that did not in the 1970s win the warranty of habitability, like the basic right for us to live in habitable housing that we can rely on in you know, in the rest of the states across the country to make some kind of demand that if we pay for housing, it should be habitable.
01:01:59
Speaker
um And so I think part of our challenge as a movement is to deal with those very intense differences. At the same time, we are training each other around taking similar risks, using the same tools,
01:02:17
Speaker
And committing to the same process. And I think, you know, one of the things that we know is that landlords are consolidating, that one of the things that they do with our rent checks is buy up more housing such that they hoard more of the places where human beings can live.
01:02:36
Speaker
And like take it away from other like take it away from us, take it away from even small landlords. And as our landlords consolidate, it means that we need to build larger networks of solidarity such that we have the power to use those same tools with to make the interventions that we want to make. And so I think that, you know, like looking across the movement, I see so many people.
01:03:05
Speaker
people who are, you know, doing like heroic organizing on the ground. And I think what is called for is really like is further investment in our unity, further investment in these strategies and, you know, a deeper commitment to the long term process and the long term like and how much work we have to do to make the impact that we're going to want to make.
01:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, every tenant's union is an invitation for tenants to organize and to fight back. And the more tenant's union we form across the country, the the better. But it's an invitation.
01:03:45
Speaker
Tenants know how corrupt things are. Tenants know how bad their housing is. Tenants know how powerful the landlords are. And the tenant's union offers an answer to this thing in their TAs, in their locals, and in the larger tenant's union. So we only hope and we're pushing forward for tenants to know about the struggles and to join in the struggles.
01:04:03
Speaker
and and to And to see the results, because things are changing in the neighborhoods where we're organizing. Is there anything else that you all want to comment on or or bring listeners attention to before we we close?
01:04:14
Speaker
No, but I just go back to the question about Trump. You know, in these times, in these times of crisis, as as people are understand it, these are also times of organizing. And things are very would rather than looking in fear at this whole situation,
01:04:27
Speaker
This is a time to put our hopes together and build the type of organizations that we need to have true democracy in the United States. And the reason why we're where we are is because democracy is not functioning the way we think it should be functioning.
01:04:40
Speaker
And local people in their own neighborhoods coming together to deciding what's important for them. is really the root of a democracy. And the Tenants Union offers that space. And I just think that is very, very important.
Conclusion and Call to Action for Tenant Organizing
01:04:51
Speaker
Rather than to run away scared, come together with your neighbors in your buildings and your neighborhood, join your local and push back. The Tenants Union is not just about your housing conditions. It's about the quality of the cities that we live in and making the cities for us and not for the corporate the speculators that are trying to rob us of our places and our communities.
01:05:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea. News and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.