through the passing of new rent regulations in 1950.48 The new law was largely concessionary, though in national terms it represented a victory of sorts as New York tenants were able to secure rights and protections that had been largely obliterated across the country. In the wake of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, many of the same alliances were also mobilised to extend public housing provision in the city. In a country gripped by a wave of intense red-baiting, tensions erupted between leftists and liberals and were responsible for the fracturing of solidarities and the dissolution of countless public housing initiatives. In New York, however, the broad liberal consensus assembled in the 1930s was able to stay the course and, through the NYCHA, the city’s low-rent public housing stock actually grew and, by 1950, it was able to provide decent and affordable shelter for over 100,000 residents.49
The 1949 Housing Act was conceived as a response to postwar housing scarcity and clearly stated that the
health and living standards of [the Nation’s] … people require housing production and related community development sufficient to remedy the serious housing shortage, the elimination of substandard and other inadequate housing through the clearance of slums and blighted areas and the realisation … of a decent home and a suitable environment for every American family.50
In practical terms, the implementation of the Housing Act proved controversial, especially its Title I provision which provided federal funds for the redevelopment of so-called blighted urban neighbourhoods, a policy that came to be famously known as ‘urban renewal’. Despite new legislation in 1954 that expanded federal housing support to urban renewal projects, the Title 1 programme was predominantly used for ‘slum clearance’. This, unsurprisingly, had a significant impact on cities across the country, and New York in particular. As one historian of the subject concluded, ‘under New York’s urban-renewal program, federal money and local officials dramatically redrew the city’s map, razing and rebuilding neighbourhoods, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people, intensifying racial segregation, and galvanising the tenant movement in the process’.51
As Title I of the 1949 Housing Act took effect in the early 1950s, housing activists in New York were gearing up to challenge the city’s plans for slum clearance and urban renewal. The expansion of public housing also opened up a new arena in the struggle by New York’s black community against discrimination and segregation. Once again, it was a broad coalition of tenant organisations that challenged entrenched racial iniquities and, in the case of Stuyvesant Town, was able to overturn its strict segregation policy. The vast private complex of apartment towers on the East Side of Manhattan covered eighteen blocks along the East River and was built by the insurance company Metropolitan Life in the late 1940s as a whites-only ‘suburb in a city’.52 While the campaign against the project highlighted the development’s planned displacement of low-income tenants, it also found support from within the housing project itself as a group of residents mobilised to form a committee to end discrimination. The committee conducted a poll of 105 Stuyvesant Town residents, 62 per cent of whom favoured integration. The results were published in the local independent newspaper, Town and Village, who, in facing a torrent of abuse and outrage, published their own poll of 551 residents which showed a two-to-one majority in favour of admitting blacks.53 At the same time, residents tapped into the city’s nascent civil rights movement while linking up with other progressive housing activists to form the New York State Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NYSCDH) in 1948. The NYSCDH provided crucial support for two new landmark bills, the Wicks–Austin Bill (1950) and the Brown–Isaacs Bill (1951), which outlawed racial discrimination in all tax-subsidised housing.54
The struggle over Stuyvesant Town marked a significant moment in the history of tenant mobilisation in post-war New York. Not only was it responsible for the nation’s first fair-housing legislation, in the eyes of many activists it also represented a key touchstone in the fight for racial equality. As one activist later recalled, ‘integration [was] as important as affordability’.55 And yet, the movement’s gains were, more often than not, incremental, piecemeal and even pyrrhic in some cases. New statutes, on the one hand, lacked any real means of enforcement. On the other hand, initial liberal support and tolerance for slum clearance in Stuyvesant Town and elsewhere did little to forestall the eviction of thousands of working-class residents. The failure by local activists to generate any resistance to these displacements or seek public housing alternatives for low-income tenants was a key issue that underpinned later opposition to clearance projects which, in most cases, were obliged to organise from scratch.56 These were, in turn, challenges located within a political climate characterised by a virulent anti-Communism that placed immense pressure on alliances and solidarities that ranged across the progressive spectrum. Finally, in economic terms, this was a period of restructuring in the labour market in which the disparities between well-paid unionised employment in primary industries and precarious work in smaller secondary enterprises widened. These divergences only served to consolidate the recomposition of the city’s workforce while reinforcing existing class and racial divisions and their impact on local communities. While some workers were, in other words, able to afford new public housing, many others were quite literally (and paradoxically) displaced by it.
For many poor New Yorkers, the 1950s and 1960s were thus a time of profound social and physical dislocation as over 500,000 residents were displaced from mainly working-class neighbourhoods, all in the name of Title I slum clearances.57 And yet, dispossession also brought with it new forms of resistance. Tenants rediscovered idioms and patterns of working-class sociability in their neighbourhoods, which offered a vibrant alternative to the suburban society and home ownership model coursing ideologically through the 1949 Federal Housing Act. The fight against urban renewal, in particular, triggered a revival of an intense local model of tenant activism. Such new tenant mobilisations across New York (in Lincoln Square, Chelsea, Gramercy Park, the Lower East Side, etc.) also brought veteran organisers and old leftists together with a new generation of activists who were, in turn, supported by a number of critical urbanists including Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. In May 1959 they formed the Metropolitan Council on Housing, pledging to resist Title I clearances in a fight for ‘decent housing at rentals people can afford to pay’.58
The Met Council represented one of the most important citywide tenant organisations in a struggle which, by the early 1960s, combined well-honed tactics with increasingly radical political trajectories. While activists were, in this way, able to defend rent control and push for public housing, many of the new units were aimed at middle-income tenants. The challenges facing low-income residents, in contrast, reflected New York’s changing social and economic geography. As manufacturing and industry declined and shifted across the Hudson River, hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs disappeared and were replaced by a new service-based economy.59 These changes were also profoundly racialised, as white New Yorkers moved out of the city to the suburbs while hundreds of thousands of African Americans and Puerto Ricans moved in. The new residents faced bleak prospects in both the workplace and at home. Many were trapped in precarious, poorly paid service work, and Gotham’s low-income rental stock was ‘scarce, expensive and ill-maintained’. Ghettoisation became the common default experience for the city’s non-whites, 30 per cent of whom were, by 1960, living in dilapidated housing. Over half of all apartments in Central Harlem were unsound according to a 1964 report.60
Housing, unsurprisingly, became the site where radical political energies in 1960s New York converged, representing, in the words of one historian, a ‘local wave of the rising nationwide tide of civil-rights activity’.61 Facing deteriorating conditions, a series of small rent strikes and informal housing inspections in the late 1950s and early 1960s were organised by blacks and Puerto Ricans living in Harlem.62 These initiatives won minor concessions and paved the way for a major rent strike in the neighbourhood that erupted in August 1963 and later expanded to other parts of New York including Brooklyn, where the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality began supporting rent strikes in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Tenants in Red Hook also began to withhold their rent. The strikes drew on the expertise of veteran housing activists as well as a new generation
