the rent immediately’.33 Unlike its predecessor, the 1907 strikes were organised and drew on the leadership, direction and organisational base of the Socialist Party. The political nature of the agitations alarmed many in the city. The strikers were widely criticised by the mainstream press and were, in the eyes of many wealthy New Yorkers, dangerous, unruly and ultimately responsible for fomenting a ‘war’ and ‘uprising’.34 Few tenants were able, however, to win any real concessions, while municipal court judges issued several thousand eviction notices.35
In the decade that followed, tenant action was sporadic at best and spoke to a patchwork of protest rooted in local neighbourhoods and increasingly sedimented histories of dissent. A second intense wave of rent strikes briefly erupted between 1917 and 1920 and was responsible for the ‘largest radical housing uprising in New York’s history’.36 Unlike the configuration of its predecessor, the movement had a broader base. It involved Jewish families as well as Italian and Irish tenants in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and the East and South Bronx, where socialist organising remained a source of direct political action and engagement.37 A series of tenant unions were set up across the city in Brownsville, Borough Park, Tremont, University Heights and Washington Heights. Most of the unions had strong ties to the Socialist Party, and the prospect of organised tenant power forced the city and state government to pass Emergency Rent laws. The laws imposed controls on rent and provided tenants with some additional protection against eviction.
Tenant militancy waxed and waned in the years that followed as unions fell prey to the Red Scare that swept through the country.38 It was soon revived, however, during the Depression, assuming forms that reflected the emergence of new organisational structures and tactics. The expiration of Emergency Rent laws in September 1920 provided the most immediate source of contention as controls on apartments renting for either fifteen dollars or ten dollars per month were scheduled to end in December 1928 and June 1929 respectively. In Harlem, where the black community faced rigid segregation, local Communists came together and formed the Harlem Tenants League to resist and agitate against impending rent hikes. The League became one of the most important early sites of black Communist activism in New York. It organised demonstrations and rent strikes, blocked evictions and demanded the enforcement of existing housing regulations. While the League worked locally, it also adopted a radically transnational outlook that linked housing insecurity to wider struggles against ‘global white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism’.39
The efforts of the Harlem Tenants League pointed to the many problems faced by blacks living in New York, where they remained barred from renting most apartments. As a radical housing movement, it also anticipated a new wave of activism in which Communists played a central role. With the onset of the Depression, New York tenants faced growing immiseration and unemployment and were forced to scramble to retain or find affordable housing. Hundreds of thousands moved, became lodgers or joined the growing ranks of the homeless that lived on the city’s streets.
Many others found shelter in squatted shanty towns known as Hoovervilles (after then President Herbert Hoover). The most notable encampments could be found on the Great Lawn at Central Park (‘Hoover Valley’), on Houston Street (‘Packing Box City’) and in Riverside Park (‘Camp Thomas Paine’) along the Hudson River at 72nd Street, though the largest Hooverville in New York was actually in the East Village on the East River between 8th and 10th Streets (‘Hard Luck Town’) on a site that later became the Jacob Riis public housing project.40 There were countless other Hoovervilles across the country, from Seattle to Washington, DC, where thousands of veterans erected a vast informal settlement along the Anacostia River and in full view of the Capitol.41
Tenant organisations active in early struggles were largely unresponsive to the new housing crisis. It was left to members of the Communist Party to fill the vacuum. They formed ‘unemployed councils’ that resisted evictions and organised rent strikes in Harlem, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and, in particular, the Bronx, where large protests inspired widespread neighbourhood militancy. Violent confrontations with the police were commonplace, though mass evictions and heavy-handed policing combined with legal injunctions against the ‘picketing of apartment houses in rent strike demonstrations’ prompted activists to shift tactics. City Home Relief Bureaus were soon occupied by tenants who refused to leave until they received funds to pay their rents. The occupations often proved successful, and the Daily Worker reported in May 1933 that:
half a dozen workers who refused to leave the Bureau … forced the Home Relief Bureau to pay the rent in spite of previous repeated refusals. In Coney Island, over 30 families secured their rent by similar actions. In Manhattan and the Bronx, the Home Relief Bureaus were forced to revoke the ‘no rent’ order in cases of workers participating in these militant actions.
A few weeks later, the Daily Worker claimed that ‘Rent checks [were] … being issued to nearly 500 unemployed families in the Bronx by the Home Relief Bureau … as a direct result of picketing, demonstrations, and anti-eviction fights led by the Unemployed Councils.’42
In the end, the most significant legacy of housing-based activism in New York during the 1930s and early 1940s was not the repertoire of contention that it produced but the wider politics of action and solidarity that it summoned into being. Depression politics fuelled new political alliances and networks that brought radicals into contact with liberals, progressives and professionals. In 1936, they formed the City-Wide Tenants Council which adopted a less confrontational approach to housing advocacy. The Council balanced political lobbying for public housing – the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was formed in 1934 – with direct action tactics (picketing and strikes) that were only adopted when more moderate appeals had failed.43 The Council was, in this way, able to provide a tenant ‘perspective’ to wider public deliberations on issues including low-income housing, rent controls and code enforcement. Where earlier tenant groups were largely tethered to local neighbourhoods, the Council chose a more scaled-up approach to its activism, sending tenant delegations to the city council, state legislature and US Congress. It also played a significant role as a member of the Citizen’s Housing Council, an alliance of New Deal progressives that was formed in 1937 and became a leading advocate for public housing and improved housing for African Americans.44
The tenant movement that emerged in the 1930s not only provided a much thicker web of organising than its predecessors, it also helped to shape the terrain of tenant struggle in the immediate post-war period. This was a framework with a complex interlocking infrastructure that combined building councils and leagues that thrived in highly politicised neighbourhoods with a broad mainstream labour-left alliance that supplied resources, professional expertise and ‘lobbying muscle’. Post-war tenants thus inherited a rich assemblage of ideas, institutions and tactics that were in many ways responsible for an exceptionalism that set New York apart from other American cities during a period where rapid suburbanisation and home ownership had acquired a new social and ideological legitimacy.45
While New York tenants were faced with a major housing shortage at the end of the Second World War, they were nevertheless able to draw on successful alliances and strategies developed in the years before and during the war. Economic exigencies during this period had created possibilities that were hitherto unforeseen and, as such, paved the way for new policies such as public housing and a rent cap which was implemented by the Federal Office of Price Administration (OPA) in November 1943. With the end of the war, these policies came under sharp attack across the country in a climate shaped by rising anti-Communist feelings, longstanding racial divisions and a pro-business and housing lobby unwilling to tolerate further regulations and controls. In response, tenant activists across New York turned to the networks and structures that they had only recently created, and were able to retain – even institutionalise – the ‘signal achievements of rent control and public housing’.46
These achievements came at a cost, as rent caps were withdrawn in May 1947 when the OPA was finally wound down.47 Post-war tenant groups in New York
