Michael Pensack is sitting in the kitchen, planning his strategy. To hear him tell it, we are at war, the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the land barons, the have-nots their tenants.
Dinner with Pensack is unlike any other dining experience you’re likely to have. There’s no talk about movies; he rarely gets out to movies. He also doesn’t read newspapers, so he’s not up on anything in “Sneed” or “Inc.” Instead he reads a lot of books, and he can tap into his encyclopedic mind on virtually any subject. He once told a friend that as a hobby he memorized the People’s Almanac.
Because they filed first, Pensack lost the name he’d been using for his group. So he’s starting anew. But these are mere annoyances to him, matters that just have to be resolved before he can concentrate on organizing Chicago-area tenants and starting his own version of rent control.
When Pensack talks about Sweden, the intensity of his voice says that he wishes he could live where tenants’ rights are taken seriously. Significantly, the International Union of Tenants, made up mostly of western European tenant groups, is headed by Swedes: its general secretary is always a Swede because the Swedish National Tenants Union pays his salary.
A visionary: one whose ideas or projects are impractical, a dreamer. The dictionary definition seems made for Pensack, a person with a crazy idea, one that can’t possibly work. Unless, perhaps, the person has the intensity of a Michael Pensack.
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“Landlords, for political reasons, frequently don’t tell the truth in public about rents because they’re deathly afraid of things like rent control, and they don’t want to talk about profiteering as the reason rents are so high.”
