Rent Strikes, New York City

RENT STRIKES, NEW YORK CITY. One of the most important political expressions of women radicals and of interracial activism, rent strikes have intermittently provided the Left with a firm neighborhood base of popular support. Protests against miserable conditions and high rents extend back, at least, to mobilization on the Lower East Side against the sudden increase of rents by 20 to 30 percent in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1904 several hundred residents announced their refusal to pay, convoked mass meetings, and picketed homes of landlords. Working from the principles of labor solidarity, they formed tenant unions building to building and developed an intense agitation in the immediate neighborhoods. Soon, the male leadership of the United Hebrew Trades, Workmen’s Circle, and other organizations formed the New York Rent Protective Association, which soon failed because of internal political differences. Nevertheless, tenants obtained considerable redress and a sense of empowerment. A 1908 rent strike, directly coordinated by a branch of the Socialist Party, spread from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Harlem, and Newark, as Jewish teamsters refused to move tenants forcibly from their apartments. Once more, however, no organization remained in place to defend gains made. Attacked in the commercial press for leading the second strike, the Socialists failed to incorporate a tenant strategy into their political arsenal.

During the war years, a slowdown in construction and a growing demand for apartments once more provoked a crisis in which socialists and predominantly Jewish unions helped build widespread organizations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, forcing minor improvements or rescinded rent increases. Socialist efforts reached an especially high level in the Bronx and in Brownsville, both already radicalized by labor militance and by news from abroad. The Socialist Call provided much coverage, and the party offered not only its halls for rent-strike activity, but also some of its finest lawyers for fighting individual cases. Widespread hatred of “rent profiteers” raising their prices increased sympathy, if not necessarily voting totals, for the Socialists. The “Red Scare,” the split and disintegration of the Socialist movement, and the legislative approval of rudimentary rent-control laws ultimately detached Socialist influence and dampened the mass activity required to bring effective laws and enforcement. Preoccupied with internal and shop struggles, the young Communist movement made little effort to recoup Socialist neighborhood losses.

Rent-strike activity returned with fervor, and became a specifically Communist issue, with the Great Depression. As early as 1928, Black Communists had begun to protest the effects of the impending disappearance of legal protection for the residents of Harlem. The Harlem Tenants League, with Communist Richard Moore as president, conducted intense protests, accompanied by a series of journalistic exposés of real conditions in the Daily Worker. Handicapped by a shortage of Harlem members, Communists failed to pull off the Harlem-wide rent strike they hailed, but their agitation nevertheless stirred residents to consider the possibilities.

The economic crash introduced an element of desperation that Communists almost immediately seized upon as harbinger of revolutionary sentiment. The Left-led Unemployed Councils encouraged eviction resistance with wide success, helping hundreds of families in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere to move furniture back into apartments. Rent strikes, demanding more neighborhood discipline and entailing greater risks, at first began slowly. The Great Rent Strike War of 1932, opening in the Bronx near the Left-inhabited Allerton Avenue “Co-ops,” pitted police against crowds of tenants seeking broad reductions in rent. Women, reputedly the most militant, led the hand-to-hand resistance against officers and horses, and more important, directed the apartment-by-apartment organization of renters. Landlords combined to crush these strikes, but the movement for rent reductions spread to Brownsville, Williamsburg, Borough Park, and other locations where East European Jews had gathered.

By late 1932 and 1933, a much-matured Communist cadre made rent strikes a component of the wider unemployed struggle. Here, most notably in Crotona Park, women’s self-mobilization reached new levels and wide victories over landlords were scored. Major legal decisions made rent-resistance more dangerous, with even picketing ruled unlawful. Communists shifted the target, in part, to the home relief bureaus, where impoverished tenants sat-in until they received action (with actual redress made possible by federal funds to local government).

A movement of greater sophistication and less open Communist leadership engaged Harlem and Knickerbocker Village in the middle 1930s, and a citywide tenants council formed in 1936. Clearly a Popular Front mechanism, the council worked comfortably with liberals and abandoned revolutionary rhetoric. Adding affiliates, gaining sophisticated legal assistance, and carefully coordinating legal protest, the organization was held together mostly by unemployed professionals (and Communist militants) rather than slum dwellers. It successfully urged a limited rent-control law, which passed in 1939, but lacking financial resources, did not succeed in establishing a stable infrastructure for itself.

During World War II, tenant organizing gave way to war work and, for male cadre, to military service. Replaced by a United Tenants League, the citywide experiment nevertheless led to successfully pressuring the Office of Price Administration (OPA) into declaring wartime rent controls across New York. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., popular minister with Communist leanings, organized a People’s Committee with wide support in Harlem to this end.

American Labor Party (ALP) clubs in many neighborhoods, following Vito Marcantonio’s East Harlem Club example, created tenant clinics, generally staffed by women, for the same purpose. Ironically, OPA rulings badly weakened the United Tenants League by removing the center of action from the neighborhood as such to courts and government offices.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, with labor conflict abounding, neighborhood actions frequently led by ALP clubs focused on the need to retain OPA guidelines. The Republican Congress, over considerable national protest, abolished most OPA ceilings and rent mobilizations proliferated, generally in such traditional Left-influenced neighborhoods as Williamsburg but especially in the Bronx. Marcantonio and the ALP, by embracing the issue and making it their own, also in many ways weakened its independent status—a matter of decisive importance when the Left turned its full attention to the 1948 Progressive Party campaign.

By 1949, both the Left and rent-agitation lost substantial ground. Prosperity and suburbanization removed cadre and eased the housing crisis. Communists already faced with McCarthyism and political demoralization lost their crucial roots in the Lower East Side and other working-class Jewish districts, a strength not made up in new black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where cadre remained relatively few. Flagging ALP clubs emphasized community service, and Communists still in the field urged antidiscrimination legislation and a Save Our Homes committee (directed by longtime Communist housing activist Elizabeth Barker), as liberals from the American Jewish Committee and other groups created their own, notably anticommunist, open-housing lobby.

The collapse of the existing Left did not diminish protest entirely. Neighborhood committees pitted themselves against Robert Moses’s redevelopment plans (such as a four-lane highway through Washington Square), with the partial support of liberal housing experts such as Jane Jacobs, the Village Voice, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Radicalism resurfaced in such sites as Cooper Union, led in part by erstwhile social worker Staughton Lynd, and the Met Council, led by 1930s–1940s activist Jane Benedict.

Civil rights activity established a new political context for the Left. Former ALP Harlem activist Jesse Gray, master of the dramatic publicity event, organized a Harlem Tenants Council and Committee Council on Housing, with a dramatic strike (with little lasting organizational influence) in 1963. Gray sparked the Congress of Racial Equality and a series of radical-led neighborhood committees in various organizing drives. The overpowering strength of landlords—willing to abandon or torch their property rather than lose profits—proved insurmountable, and various government agencies operated to fill the gaps. As in other cities, subsequent efforts at tenants’ unions had only limited success and offered little visibility for a badly declining Left. Perhaps the desperation of rioters in the Lower East Side of 1988, their placards showing upended cocktail glasses (“The Party’s Over”—for yuppie neighborhood in-migrants), marked the latest phase of radicalism, militant but disorganized.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, as the economy collapsed and forced many New Yorkers into the ranks of the unemployed, mobilizations for rent strikes spread across the boroughs. Groups such as Housing Justice for All and New York Communities for Change aspired to organize one million residents to implore Governor Andrew M. Coumo to cancel rent payments for at least the spring months. The governor ordered a ninety-day moratorium on evictions, but acceded that the rent would eventually come due. Campaigns for housing justice became a growing staple of progressive and Left politics as a result.

Lawson, Ronald, ed. The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.