crews, as depicted in the 1970 documentary film, Rompiendo puertas, were dispatched to other vacant apartments across the city where they proceeded to smash fixtures, remove stoves and sinks, and wreck the plumbing and wiring. These actions only served to strengthen the resolve of the squatter movement which, if anything, gained momentum over the course of the summer. The city was forced to reverse course. It allowed the squatters to stay, though officials insisted that any further actions would not be tolerated. This did little, however, to stop the squatters, and on 25 July 1970, fifty-four families including 120 children occupied two condemned buildings in Morningside Heights at the corner of West 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.78 The action was coordinated by activists from Operation Move-In and a group of young Latinos who had earlier squatted a storefront on 588 Columbia Avenue and West 88th Street and were now called El Comité.79 They were also supported by Latino students in the ‘Urban Brigade’, who were based at Columbia and Barnard College as well as forty-seven citywide community organisations.80
The two occupied buildings as well as other four others on the same street were owned by the Episcopal Church. They were slated for demolition in order to make way for a luxury nursing home to be built by a non-profit subsidiary of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, which stood directly across the street from the buildings. The church officially denounced the new occupants, though many of its parishioners supported the action.81 The squatters quickly became a cause célèbre across the city. They also undertook extensive repairs on the buildings and created an elected council to represent their demands. The squatters’ public relations campaign culminated in December 1970 with the Housing Crimes Trial, a People’s Court tribunal that brought a new wave of young radicals together alongside an older generation of housing activists from a range of citywide groups that included the Met Council, the Cooper Square Committee and ARCH (Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem), a civil rights organisation formed by a group of radical architects based in Harlem.82
The Housing Crimes Trial was presided over by a judicial panel made up of Jane Benedict of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, Durie Bethea from the Black Panthers and Iris Morales of the Young Lords. Representatives from two other Puerto Rican organisations and from I Wor Kuen also joined Benedict, Bethea and Morales on the bench. A small group of seasoned housing campaigners served as prosecutors while the named defendants – Mayor Lindsay, city housing officials and bank executives – were conspicuously absent and held in contempt. The trial took place before an audience of over 1,500 spectators in Columbia University’s Wollmann Auditorium. The panel heard testimony from a number of squatters and tenants as well as several housing professionals who, according to the New Yorker, provided ‘stories of crumbling ceilings, broken fixtures, injuries, lack of hot water and illness caused by heatless winters’. There were also reports of rat bites, lead poisoning and beatings dished out by landlords and their hired thugs. Given the sheer weight of evidence, the defendants were found guilty of ‘criminal neglect, racism and harassment’. Judge Benedict read out the sentence to an approving audience: ‘all rental housing in the city should pass into public ownership under tenant control’.83
The Housing Crimes Trial was, in the end, much more than a carefully calibrated theatre of protest. On the one hand, it pointed to a long and unresolved history of housing struggles in New York and the various actors, alliances and strategies that it encompassed. But the trial also played a constructive role in the emergence and development of new ways of thinking about and inhabiting the city as a space of political action and self-organisation. Racial inclusiveness and cross-generational collaboration and solidarity were, after all, key features of the trial and Operation Move-In, more generally. These were, moreover, features that pointed to an arena of struggle where local living conditions combined with increasingly militant tactics and an existing infrastructure of tenant-based activism to produce some genuine gains. While many squatters across New York were evicted by the police in a matter of days, the Episcopal Church decided, in the wake of the occupations, to scale back its plans allowing over 400 residents to remain.84 A further 200 families on the city’s West Side were able to secure major concessions more than a year after the start of Operation Move-In. City officials conceded that they could stay as long as they paid rent, while a further 946 low-income housing income units were added to the original WSURA plan.85 Some squatters in the Lower East Side were also able to reach agreements with their landlords, though the occupants of properties owned by individuals, hospitals and schools were, more often than not, quickly and forcibly cleared.
The story behind the Housing Crimes Trial and Operation Move-In thus brings together a number of themes that are central to the history of the housing movement in New York: the longstanding importance of squatting, and of the occupation of empty buildings and land, to the wide repertoire of practices taken up by local residents, activists, students and workers in the struggle for affordable housing; the recognition of uneven development and urban renewal as an enduring source of political mobilisation; the formation of new identities and intimacies and the cultivation of solidarities that cut across class, race and gender lines; and finally, the widespread desire to reimagine and live the city differently and to reclaim an alternative ‘right to a city’. For Richard Sennett, writing in The Uses of Disorder, published in the same year as the Housing Crimes Trial and Operation Move-In, it was indeed the dense, disorderly and overwhelming nature of American inner cities out of which, in his view, a radically ‘new social space’ would ultimately emerge.86
The ‘social space’ Sennett imagined never materialised. While housing activists were able to connect the ‘housing question’ to larger struggles around race, class and inequality, their successes, however real and substantive, were short-lived and concessionary. Residential abandonment continued unabated. Public housing and rent control received little support. ‘In the end’, as the historian Joel Schwartz, has argued, ‘it was hundreds of thousands of low-income tenants who found themselves out in the cold’.87
In the decades that followed, housing insecurity and neighbourhood gentrification only intensified as the city ‘yielded to a neoliberal growth model’.88 Still, the tactics adopted by squatters and other radical housing activists had some constructive and lasting effects. Low-income housing was saved, new networks were established and a broad albeit fragile infrastructure of tenant activism survived. It was this infrastructure and the fierce opposition from squatters, in particular, that paved the way for a new wave of protests in the 1980s and 1990s and a new generation of activists who were ready to protect and seize their right to housing.
‘Who are the Squatters?’: London’s Hidden History
Asses, swine, have litter spread,
And with fitting food are fed,
All things have a home but one,
Thou, Oh Englishman hast none!
Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’1
I was homeless, pissed off, had nowhere to stay
Half of fucking London tinned up and grey
It was then that I noticed every flat in the block
Had a squatters legal warning and a newly fitted lock.
Goodbye bed and breakfast, farewell rent
Why not force a window and take up residence.
Squatters’ song2
In 1994, the artist and photographer Tom Hunter began to construct a model of the street in Hackney that had been
