Red Youth Rising

Tenant Organizing

The Youth and Housing:

What makes the issue of housing, and subsequently the strategy of tenant organizing, so vital to the youth movement? Housing is of course something which all sections of the working class often struggle to acquire and maintain access to, especially in the U.S., as the value of the average house has increased by 6-7% every year over the last 10 years (almost doubling median housing prices since 2014), and rents have similarly increased by over 36% in the last decade while wages have remained stagnant.

When looking at the demographic data surrounding housing, it is clear that working-class youth are disproportionately affected by the increased costs associated with housing.

A gap has always existed between older and young adults in terms of home ownership, but since the 1960s this gap has grown dramatically. In 1960 there was a 25% gap between young adult home owners and older generations, while in 2017 there was a 44% disparity, and the situation has only worsened since.

What this means is that over the last several decades an increasing percentage of the American youth population has been forced into renting or homelessness as housing costs have increased. For working-class youth an increasing portion of our wages has necessarily had to go towards paying rent, which is also increasing, and which prevents us from saving our income.

This leaves young people in particular in a precarious situation, as our access to housing can be essentially revoked without any compensation if we become unable to afford the rent, as opposed to being able to sell a house when a mortgage is no longer affordable, and thus we are even more dependent on our employment to maintain our housing. These conditions place the youth at a far higher risk of homelessness, can prevent us from escaping situations of extreme poverty, make us dependent on highly exploitative forms of employment, and can even cause long-term physical harm due to the prevalence of health risks associated with a lack of adequate housing. 

This difficult housing situation which we find ourselves in today is not random, a result of a simple policy error, or the fault of a single malicious actor. It is the result of the system of capitalist exploitation.

As capitalism continues to develop, the owning class extracts increasing amounts of surplus value from the working class, and in recent decades the owners –the capitalists– have used commodified housing as one of their primary methods for this extraction.

In the capitalist mode of production, capitalists exploit workers by paying wages below the value which we produce for their businesses; they also own the homes we rent and further exploit us by taking significant portions of our already low wages.

Increasing the cost of housing subsequently forces more of the population into renting, and at the same time increasing rents enables the capitalists invested in housing (landlords) to extract even further surplus value from the working class. At this stage of capitalist development in the U.S., young people are much less able to attain homeownership than previous generations. Thus, the threat to the youth in housing is clear: the capitalist system itself is unsustainable to the working masses.

The working youth are not defenseless in the face of capitalism’s exploitative advance in the housing industry. The working class has always had the power to struggle against capital through organization and solidarity, and in housing the situation is no different.

The organization of renters into tenants’ unions allows for us to struggle against the onslaught of capitalist landlords, as collectively we are able to threaten the profits of landlords through rent strikes and political pressure.

In essence, while one tenant alone is replaceable, organized tenants collectively can prevent any profit from being realized at all.

Since 2020 in particular, tenants’ unions and organizations have won key battles for renters by preventing rent increases, winning improved conditions for residents, and pushing for progressive housing legislation on local levels as a harm reduction strategy.

However, to make tenants’ unions effective, they need to include the largest numbers of tenants possible, and to do this the youth as a whole need to get organized.

As we leave our parents’ and caregivers’ homes and are forced to confront the exploitative housing situation caused by capitalism, getting organized immediately can help prevent a whole generation of young adults from being exploited by slumlord capitalists while we navigate independent living.

Additionally, if a generation of youth are organized from an early age into tenants’ unions, capitalist landlords will have an increasingly difficult time replacing us in their rentals, subsequently strengthening the demands of organized tenants even more.

Red Youth Rising is committed to strengthening the tenants’ union movement and getting young renters organized to stand up to our landlords. Join your local tenants’ union and Red Youth Rising today!

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