It’s obvious this person isn’t just posting online telling people to stop paying their rent like you seem to be suggesting. On this very post they are encouraging people to contribute to a fundraiser to support the strike, and are knocking on doors to get people organized personally. I get where you’re coming from, I’ve organized tenants in Texas and rule #1 was never tell anyone to stop paying their rent for any reason because Texas has no real renter protections at all, regardless of how shit your landlord is. but if you could unite an entire apartment complex, or at least a significant majority of it, behind the idea of not paying back rent on payments they missed due to the outbreak that’s not an unrealistic or “ill conceived” idea, as most landlords would be hard pressed to evict an entire complex after missing out on rent payments for who knows how many months. My guess would be that they would be desperate enough to get some income flowing that if enough people got on board they might just cave. When this sort of thing gets dangerous is, like what was said above, when only a small number of tenants in a complex decide to try something like this, because then it’s easy for a landlord to evict them and move on with their life. I’d also like to point out a serious flaw in your logic that I’ve seen from a lot of well meaning leftists. You criticize OP for being the kind of person that is supposedly well-off enough that they can risk being evicted, and through their organizing are putting low-income people that can’t afford to shoulder the repercussions of taking part this kind of strike at risk, just to satisfy their own vanity or sense of idealism. But what you’ve failed to consider are the repercussions of not organizing. In apartment complexes and rented housing throughout the country, and the world, right now their are people who have lost their jobs and, while the hold on evictions is keeping them in place for now, will simply not be able to pay the back rent and will be evicted when the time does come to pay up. Those are the people this is for. For these people standing up to their landlords isn’t a risk that they are foolish are wealthy enough to take, its their only chance to have a roof over their heads in a month or two. The entire point of left-wing political organizing is that we aren’t just going to watch that sort of thing happen and just throw our hands up in the air and say “well it sucks that your homeless but doing something about it would have been too risky”. The point is that we are going to do this, organize these people, and their neighbors because none of us represent enough power to accomplish change on our own, to take direct action to hit the powers that being where it hurts, their wallets, to force them to do what’s best for us instead of what’s best for their bottom line. And their are safe and intelligent ways to do this. The most important is to ensure that no one is taking a leap of faith here. Just because this group is organizing doesn’t mean every complex is actually going to participate. If help people get their fingers on the pulse of their communities they’ll know if they have to support to actually pull something like this off, or if they won’t have enough of their neighbors’ support to keep themselves safe. It’s also worth noting that while we should always be practicing mutual aid directed at those without housing, a campaign like this especially should not be planning to just leave people high and dry if something goes wrong, because that would be irresponsible. Their needs to be some consideration in regards to the strike fundraising and planning as to what will be done to support people displaced by the wave of evictions sure to come after the end of the eviction hold, especially considering that possibility that some of those evictions may include people standing in solidarity with neighbors as part of this action. What I’m saying is that you are right in thinking that a rent strike like this is a drastic action that comes with serious risks that need to be accounted for. But the correct response is to act while ensuring that we are accounting for these risks as best we can, rather than just allowing our neighbors to lose their homes because we didn’t think their well-being was worth the risk of fighting for it. Now I don’t know if this particular campaign is bring accounting for those risks, although their seems to be some for of higher organization beyond what you’ve assumed about it, and I absolutely will be scrutinizing this and any other similarly drastic action to ensure that it meets my personal standards of necessity and organizational rigor. I would encourage you to do the same, instead of just dismissing any tenant organizing off hand, simply because you may never have experienced a situation in which standing up to your landlord was your only option.
Edit: TL;DR To say that doing this is bad because of the people who may lose their housing because we did something is ignoring the people who may lose their housing because we did nothing. Both kinds of people matter and should have their needs taken into consideration before deciding one group is more important than the other.