TIL about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. From Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Ich glaub die Downvotes kommen einfach, weil in dieser Community hier (auf lemmy.ml) die allermeisten Leute Englisch erwarten.

Besides what other people already answered here: Solidarity will also go a long way. Workers in the old days faced the same dilemma: When they go on strike, will they lose their job? A lot of them did. Solidarity saved them and made the movement work.

In the context of housing, solidarity can take the form of organized people in a town agreeing upfront: “If folks from one house get evicted, they can move in with us.” Of course this requires a lot of trust—just like the person in the article says. And whenever it should come to this, it will be costly and inconvenient, even burdensome, for everyone involved. Just like filling a strike fund from already low wages was. In the end it worked.

Without solidarity, we are defenseless.

One can of course always argue over what percentile makes you which class (and to to what degree percentiles are useful for this question in the first place).

As for the question of influence, Piketty for example, while calling the top 10% the “upper class”, calls the top 1% the “ruling class”, which seems like a decent way to undercore this point.