A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent en masse until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord. This can be a useful tactic of final resort for use against intransigent landlords, but carries the obvious risk of eviction in some cases.
Historically, rent strikes have often been used in response to problems such as high rents, poor conditions in the property, or unreasonable tenancy demands; however, there have been situations where wider issues have led to such action.
Another type of collective action concerning rental property is a landlords' strike, which is undertaken by a group of landlords. Such an action would be most likely to be undertaken when government tenancy policies (or enforcement thereof) are perceived to be patently unfair to the landlords. The most common means of action in this case would entail the landlords collectively refusing to rent out any vacant and soon-to-be-vacated properties, in hopes of provoking a massive housing shortage that would quickly compel the government to change the relevant policies.
Read more about Rent Strike: Examples of Rent Strikes
Famous quotes containing the words rent and/or strike:
“I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)