however, on the work of young mothers, including Inocencia Flores whose ‘Diary of a Rent Striker – Life Amidst Rats and Junkies’ was serialised in the Herald Tribune.64 They also found support in a growing, ever-radicalising civil rights movement. The strikers increasingly eschewed the pragmatic reformism of earlier tenant struggles favouring, in its place, a more ambitious and militant approach. While they extended existing alliances with predominantly white liberal activists and organisations, they also articulated a new language of black and Latino empowerment. As these political vectors overlapped, an emboldened commitment to community autonomy and self-reliance, and an assertion of a right to do so on its own terms, slowly took hold.
As in the case of countless earlier housing struggles in New York, the protests were only able, however, to eke out a series of minor improvements for striking residents. When a group of striking Harlem tenants appeared in court on charges of rent non-payment, they argued that they were withholding rent in protest again their buildings’ combined 129 building violations. They drew attention to ‘dark and littered’ hallways, ‘crumbly ceilings’, a lack of water, electricity and heat, and produced three dead rats as evidence of the ‘subhuman’ living conditions that they faced.65 While the rats were inadmissible as evidence, the tenants scored a victory in the courts as Judge Guy Gilbert Ribaudo legalised the rent strike and ‘upheld the right of 13 tenants to refuse to pay to a landlord for apartments where hazardous violations exist’. The judge directed the tenants to deposit their rent ‘to the court’.66 A few days later, at a hearing in Brooklyn, Judge Fred Moritt went even further, ruling that ‘tenants could live rent-free for as long as landlords failed to correct housing evils that menaced health or safety’. ‘Some of the buildings,’ Moritt added, ‘aren’t fit for pigs to live in. If it takes the landlord two years to make the repairs, he gets no rent for two years. Period.’67 In the end, despite securing some modest repairs, little effort was made by the city to systematically rehabilitate low-income housing. If anything, citywide inaction served to further radicalise activists who, in the wake of riots in 1964 and an ongoing crisis in schooling, gravitated towards a more contentious repertoire of practices and tactics.
New radical impulses were, of course, shaped by the contours of local political geographies. In Harlem, the influence of Black Power – housing was part of their ten-point programme – encouraged activists to recast the neighbourhood as the ‘property’ of African Americans. A Harlem chapter of the Black Panthers was set up in the summer of 1968 offering the kind of free breakfast programmes and health clinics popularised by the group on the West Coast.68 New neighbourhood initiatives also drew on a range of occupation-based practices (squatting, street actions, takeovers, etc.) as a means of ‘decolonising’ the ‘ghetto’ and reclaiming tenant territory. At the same time, other forms of radical proprietorship were mobilised in neighbourhoods such as Morningside Heights, where multiracial tenant coalitions turned to direct action and community control. Activists drew particular attention to the process of ‘warehousing’, as landlords (individual or otherwise) left apartments deliberately vacant with a view to their eventual and profitable redevelopment.69
As the 1970s began, the tactics adopted by housing activists became increasingly militant. It was in the spring of 1970 that a new squatter movement sprung up, spontaneously so it seemed, across the City of New York. It was called Operation Move-In, and by the summer of 1970 it had successfully placed 150 working-class families in new homes, most of whom were African American or Latino with long experiences of housing insecurity. ‘We knew what we were getting into’, one of the new occupiers explained to a reporter with the New York Times. ‘But we’ve been living,’ she continued, ‘in horrible places with horrible people for a year. This is nice because it’s a nice community and you know the people can’t mess over you like they mess over you in other places.’ In the last year, she, her husband and their two children were forced to move from the Lower East Side to a hotel, and finally to three rooms on 84th street. ‘It was horrible’, she added. ‘There was rats, the plaster was bad, holes in the floor … I hated that place.’70 Another large Puerto Rican family, the Marcanos, described how they had been forced to stay with relatives for over seven years as they could not find a landlord who would accept them. Operation Move-In installed them in a twelve-room walk-up, which they painstakingly restored as the plumbing and wiring had been wrecked by city crews in an attempt to drive away would-be occupants. Several large holes in the roof were repaired by Mr Marcano. ‘I knew it was illegal,’ his wife explained, ‘but I felt something right would come out of it.’ ‘Operation Move-In,’ she added, ‘is negotiating with the city to let us stay. We won’t have to leave.’71
Operation Move-In had its origins in longstanding struggles over housing on the Upper West Side. It was the establishment of the West Side Urban Renewal Area (WSURA) in 1959 that became a major source of grassroots organising by local tenants and housing groups. Activists drew particular attention to the lack of provision in the WSURA plan for the renovation of salvageable, abandoned buildings as an alternative and legitimate source of housing for low-income tenants. The plan focused, in contrast, on the redevelopment of the neighbourhood through the demolition of thousands of housing units and the construction of subsidised high-rise apartments for upper- and middle-income families paying income-adjusted rents. While 30 per cent of the new units were ‘officially’ reserved for low-income residents, the experience of previous Title I clearances on the West Side cast doubt on the city’s commitment to rehouse displaced tenants, the majority of whom were unable to afford the rents in the newly constructed apartments. The renewal plans were thus received as a form of ‘urban removal’ that not only reinforced existing local grievances surrounding poor, inadequate housing and unresponsive slumlords, but also exacerbated racial and class divisions as long-time tenants were forced out of salvageable buildings and ‘decanted’ to the city’s outer boroughs. Those who remained were, more often than not, left to live in overcrowded, unsafe tenements and saw little hope in the city’s redevelopment plans.72
It is in this context that groups of West Side residents began to seize, occupy and claim empty buildings in the neighbourhood. The first actions were largely spontaneous, though after the death of a local boy from carbon monoxide poisoning they escalated in size and scale and were increasingly part of a planned strategy. What became known as Operation Move-In soon spread to other parts of New York as activists took up the cause and orchestrated a series of similar occupations across the city. Jane Benedict, a veteran housing activist and member of the Met Council, set up a ‘We Won’t Move’ committee to support tenants resisting eviction. The Met Council Office was also used to help connect squatters with ‘holdout tenants’ in half-empty buildings across the city.73 In Chelsea, a vacant building on West 15th Street was briefly squatted in July, while a number of buildings were occupied in the Lower East Side with the help of Frances Goldin, another key member of the Met Council. A few blocks further north, another four families of squatters moved into two buildings on East 19th Street only to be evicted by the police. One of the organisers later described how there were ‘as many as 20 policemen [sic] in one of the squatters’ apartments’ and that the corridors in his building were ‘lined with police elbow to elbow’.74
The relative success of the new squatter movement played a decisive role in fostering new solidarities with militant groups of colour including the Black Panthers, the Young Lords and I Wor Kuen, a radical youth organisation based in Chinatown which began to place squatters in recently vacated buildings in the neighbourhood.75
Operation Move-In thus spoke to a conspicuously multiracial form of direct action that, in New York, was shaped by an array of increasingly radical organisations that gave ‘practical expression to several strands of late sixties liberatory thought’.76 Tenant activism also helped to promote interest in housing-related issues among young, predominantly white women who were involved in the women’s liberation movement. Such ‘squatter-sister interactions’, as the historian Roberta Gold has argued, were instrumental in connecting the city’s tenant struggles with a new tide of feminist organising.77
The
