For all the far left’s rhetoric about predatory landlords and virtuous tenants, the truth is increasingly the opposite: it is tenant activists who have become the aggressors, casting property owners as enemies and mobilizing to intimidate, isolate, and expropriate them.
Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and allied far-left groups are now urging supporters to take the fight straight to property owners: organize rent strikes, disrupt landlords’ events, block evictions, and, above all, seize political power to put the full weight of government on their side, a goal at which they are conspicuously succeeding.
According to Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, much of the strategy deployed by left-wing tenant groups in New York City, Los Angeles, and other DSA-influenced cities traces back to the book "Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis," by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis.
The playbook outlined in the book includes issuing escalating demands to landlords, refusing to pay rent if those demands go unmet, weaponizing “repair-and-deduct” laws far beyond their intended scope to effectively redirect rent money into tenants’ hands, and directly confronting landlords at personal events. One author even recounts crashing a landlord’s daughter’s wedding and describes it as “really fun.”
Smith calls the book a “manifesto,” and its influence has gone mainstream. Rosenthal has been pictured alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is closely tied to Cea Weaver, director of the city’s Office to Protect Tenants, and helped pioneer these tactics through the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which she co-founded. Today, "Abolish Rent" is regularly recommended reading within DSA circles and other left-wing activist networks.
The woman circled in this photo is Tracy Rosenthal. She wrote a book on "abolish[ing] rent," once crashed a landlord's daughter's wedding to "protest" it, and endorses years-long rent "strikes" as a tactic.
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) August 4, 2026
So, uh, what is she doing with Zohran Mamdani?
Read… pic.twitter.com/FRRmIeWWKD
Smith cites several panel discussions where these far-left activist groups openly discuss employing the tactics. Nicolás Vargas, a moderator of one such event and a member of Central Brooklyn DSA and founding member of Brooklyn Eviction Defense, claimed that tenants in his building had been on rent strike for three of the past six years. Vargas was previously arrested following an altercation with a landlord; police later discovered he had an outstanding warrant tied to his refusal to vacate a leased property after his tenancy ended, marking him as an “unregulated tenant.”
Another panelist, Esteban Giron, a member of NYC-DSA’s Housing Working Group and the Crown Heights Tenant Union, told attendees he had been in housing court with his landlord for five and a half of the last 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.”
And these tactics are not outliers; they are regularly encouraged.
🚨 Radical, DSA-affiliated tenant activists push rent strikes, crash landlords’ family events, fight evictions in the streets, and use government jobs to move “toward revolution.”
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) August 3, 2026
Now, their allies now have influence inside Mamdani’s City Hall.
My latest for @CityJournal! pic.twitter.com/ZRezllnbmU
The issue here is stark, and it goes far beyond fighting landlords. It exposes a deeper contradiction: these activist renters want all the privileges of ownership without any of the responsibilities that come with it. They want the freedom to choose where and how they live, the stability of a long-term home, even the leverage to dictate terms to property owners, and yet without the saving, the hard work, or the accountability that owning property demands.
In effect, they’re asking for the benefits of equity without the risk, the security of tenure without the obligation to pay, and the power to shape housing policy without having to build, maintain, or invest in the stock itself. It’s a vision of housing where tenants hold all the cards and landlords hold all the blame, a world where rent is optional, contracts are suggestions, and the very concept of property rights bends to the will of organized protest.
It is mob rule and democratic socialism in the flesh.
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