According to the National Multifamily Housing Council, 11 percent of tenants across the United States didn’t pay rent in April—a 4 percent jump from the same time period the previous year. While a widely circulated version of the survey conducted at the start of the month found that nearly a third of all renters hadn’t paid by April 1, more made either full or partial payments as the weeks stretched on.



The data still tells us something important, though: Millions of people can’t pay their rent every month, pandemic or not. And on the other side of that: Even as millions of people lost jobs and income due to the Covid-19 crisis, and even as many cities enacted eviction moratoriums, people found a way to pay. It’s scary not to, after all.

Rent is the “bill that people are most socialized to feel the responsibility to pay,” Tara Raghuveer, the director of KC Tenants, told me. “Unraveling that responsibility is a really complicated project.” She compared the pandemic to the 2008 financial crisis—a moment in which a whole new class of people have come to politicize themselves around issues of health care and housing—but said that mass collective action around rent strikes remains a heavy lift. “I wish I could paint a really rosy picture for you,” Raghuveer said. “There is a way forward, but in the absence of that ability to gather together in a meaningful, regular way, I just think that it’s all the more difficult to politicize people around their experience.”

But as material conditions worsen on the ground and a recession looms, more and more people will find themselves unable to pay—whether or not they experience that as a political problem. And so, much as with student debt, millions of people in this country have effectively been forced into a rent strike already. The challenge is in building a sense of solidarity across these de facto strikes of one and removing the shame and sense of isolation that hang over rent payments in this country. Early efforts to string together a nationwide rent strike are still getting off the ground, but the thing about rent is, you have to keep paying. It’s a constantly renewing opportunity to organize more people, push for legislative relief, and politicize the conditions under which we live. As Hannah Appel, a co-founder of the Debt Collective, told me in February when discussing how common it is to default on student loan payments, “We are already a collectivity; we just haven’t seen one another yet.”

People are renting in America at a rate the nation hasn’t seen in a half-century—as of 2017, the total was up to 75 million, per the Pew Research Center—and they’re paying more than ever to do it. On Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the price of vacant rental units more than doubled over the last 20 years, while Pew revealed that in the same time, the median American income grew only 5.4 percent. The strain caused by skyrocketing rents and stagnating wages exacerbated existing houselessness issues even before the coronavirus; with the pandemic in full swing and millions out of work, the simple fact is that paying the rent for many is steadily becoming an impossibility.