Читать книгу The Autonomous City - Alexander Vasudevan - Страница 8

It’s a fine free country, this is, where honest folks can’t build a little house to cover their heads on an old rock like this without having the very ground blowed away from under them.

‘A Visit to Shantytown’¹

Landlord, landlord,

My roof has sprung a leak.

Don’t you ’member I told you about it

Way last week?

Landlord, landlord,

These steps is broken down.

When you come up yourself

It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.

Ten Bucks you say I owe you?

Ten Bucks you say is due?

Well, that’s Ten Bucks more’n I’ll pay you

Till you fix this house up new.

What? You gonna get eviction orders?

You gonna cut off my heat?

You gonna take my furniture and

Throw it in the street?

Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.

Talk on-till you get through.

You ain’t gonna be able to say a word

If I land my fist on you.

Langston Hughes, ‘Ballad of the Landlord’²

In 1970, a forty-two-minute black and white documentary depicting the struggles of a squatters’ rights movement in New York’s Upper West Side Renewal Area was released by Newsreel, an activist documentary film organisation that had emerged as part of the American New Left in the late 1960s. The film Rompiendo puertas (Break and Entry) portrays the efforts of over 150 predominantly Puerto Rican families to secure safe and affordable housing against a backdrop of intense inequality, pervasive discrimination and persistent dislocation.

Formed in New York in December 1967 by a group of underground filmmakers, Newsreel was a ‘radical news service’ that had been initially established to chronicle the various identities, alliances and strategies that characterised the New Left in the United States. It drew particular inspiration, in this respect, from activists rooted in a range of anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Rompiendo puertas was one of a series of films it produced between 1969 and 1972 that focused on New York’s communities of colour.³

Taking its name from the police shorthand for house burglary, Rompiendo puertas details the actions adopted by a group of Latino families who occupied and repaired a series of abandoned buildings on the Upper West Side in the spring and summer of 1970. The families were all part of Operation Move-In, a local anti-poverty and squatters’ rights group. The group had been installing low-income families into sound vacant buildings that had been slated for demolition by the city as part of its urban renewal programme. They used crowbars to pry off the tin seals covering doors and windows while helping families to carry their belongings and furniture.⁴

The film combines documentary footage of clashes between the squatters and the police with voice-over analysis exploring the causes of New York’s housing shortage. Many of the original organisers of Operation Move-In were old leftists and mavericks of Lyndon Johnson’s signature War on Poverty campaign, as well as a group of radical young activists from the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican organisation.⁵ They were led by William Price, a former UN correspondent, journalist and Communist who was fired in 1955 from the New York Daily News in the wake of his appearance before the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Price became a housing activist on New York’s West Side with loose connections to the Metropolitan Council on Housing (hereafter Met Council), one of the city’s most important tenants’ rights organisations. As Rompiendo puertas, however, shows, this was ultimately a squatters’ rights movement that was largely organised and executed by working-class Puerto Rican women. It was their voices and actions that are the main subject of the film.

The film documents the challenges that its predominantly Latino protagonists faced in securing a home in a city where many residents lived in inadequate or unsafe housing while others faced ‘removal’ to the outer boroughs as part of the city’s urban redevelopment plans. As one activist in the film noted, ‘wherever the city sets up urban renewal programs, it removes working people and poor people and removes them from their homes and replaces them with rich people and big business’. In one scene, we watch a group of families moving their possessions out of an apartment in sacks and papers bags while a voice-over proclaims that ‘hundreds of working people like us are being evicted and forced into the streets’. ‘Housing,’ another activist concludes, ‘is a necessity. Why should we pay for a necessity?’⁶

As Rompiendo puertas shows, it was the death of a neighbourhood teen that served as the catalyst for the emergence of Operation Move-In and the seizure of empty vacant buildings across the Upper West Side. The teen had died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a first-floor apartment on West 106th Street. The film follows the funeral march held for the teen as well as the occupation that took place in its immediate aftermath. A day later, another nine buildings around Columbus Avenue and the West 80s were squatted by dozens of families who moved in during the night.⁷

The film places particular emphasis on the actions undertaken by the squatters while foregrounding the role played by middle-aged and elderly Puerto Rican women as leaders of the ‘movement’. It depicts the collective formed to organise and undertake building repairs. The squatters created a system to pool their money and labour as part of the effort to renovate apartments. The film also draws attention to the wider infrastructure and network of co-operative services they created within the local neighbourhood (day cares, communal kitchens, apartment registries). In the words of one recent commentator, ‘by defining the city as a space built by and thus in a fundamental sense for poor people, by asserting that the seizure of abandoned apartments is a morally justifiable and politically legitimate form of activism … Rompiendo puertas depicts a radical politics of place that challenges the economic and political forces shaping the postwar urban city’.⁸

The squatters were able to secure some modest concessions from the city while salvaging some of the city’s low-rent housing stock. These victories were, however, partial and short-lived, and the activism they ultimately depended on was unable to halt the gradual and wholesale gentrification of New York’s West Side in the decades that followed. At the same time, the film remains an important document within a rich and expansive history of squatting and tenant-based activism in New York. This is, moreover, a history that challenged traditional social fault lines around class, race and gender. The actions instigated by the squatters of Operation Move-In drew, after all, on a long and varied tradition of resistance rooted in a struggle for a more just and equal urbanism and in opposition to an equally protracted history of destruction, displacement and destitution.

In the end, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse remind us, movements for housing have always assumed a number of different forms. They exhibit ‘enormous variety in terms of tactics, strategies, goals, alliances, political calculations, compromises, and ideologies’.⁹ New York is no different in this respect, and it is hardly surprising that the city encompassed a vast living archive of alternative knowledges, materials and resources that, in the eyes of squatters, tenants and other housing activists, served as a basis for developing a different vision of the city.

This is admittedly a history with a much longer narrative arc, whose origins can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch resettlement of what is now the state of New York. It is also a history that highlights the exemplary significance of New York’s housing politics and their relationship to national patterns and trends. For historians and radical urbanists alike, New York’s lessons derive less from their typicality than their ability to illuminate and speak to developments in other American cities. ‘In its tenant history, New York is,’ according to the historian Roberta Gold, ‘both representative and atypical at different times.’ On the one hand, it was largely of a piece with developments in a number of other industrial centres in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, on the other hand, it departed from the suburban homeownership model that prevailed nationally. While this led to the destruction of mass movements for affordable housing in most major American cities, activists in New York were able to forge and sustain a tenant infrastructure that supported – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so – many of the city’s poorest residents.¹⁰

If squatting came to occupy an important position within the post-war struggle for decent housing in New York, its relatively recent revival as a radical social movement ultimately belies its place within a more expansive history of occupation, settlement and resistance. Illegal occupations of land and struggles over property were central to what has been described as the ‘unjust usurpation of the continent by white settlers’.¹¹ In the United States, squatting was closely intertwined with the predations of settler colonialism and, on a shifting frontier, it often represented a form of violent displacement through which indigenous communities were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods.

At the same time, frontier settlers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, in most cases, compelled to become squatters as the distribution of land was largely controlled by speculators and land-grabbers (also known as ‘land-jobbers’), and many settlers were simply too poor to enter into credit-debt arrangements. Illegal settlements were vigorously proscribed by Congress, however, though squatters were quick to organise and form ‘settler’ or ‘squatter’ associations that lobbied politicians while adopting a range of direct-action tactics. The squatters were, in this way, successful in pushing legislative change through state-level adverse possession statutes as well as a series of pre-emption acts from 1815 to 1841. In 1862, the federal Homestead Act was passed which allowed settlers to acquire federal land after living on it for five years and demonstrating that they had ‘improved’ it.¹²

In the state of New York, the history of land tenure was closely connected to its resettlement by the Dutch in the seventeenth century and the formation of a patroon system that bestowed feudal manorial rights rooted in Dutch property law to large landowners. It was English common law, however, which formed the basis for property law in the United States, and while the Quia Emptores statute had long-since abolished subinfeudation in England, it was never fully incorporated in the United States, though the 1787 Act Concerning Tenures banned feudal properties and established all real estate as allodial – that is, owned absolutely and independently of a lord. Such legal quiddities helped shape the development of New York in the wake of independence and were responsible for the emergence of an Anti-Rent movement in the Hudson Valley in the 1840s that challenged the legalities of manorial tenure. Most landlords chose to sell their interests to the rent-striking tenants, though it was left to returning soldiers from the American Civil War to quash the remnants of the movement and, in so doing, uphold forms of servitude that they had only recently fought against.¹³

In and around New York City, large property-owners had, unlike their upstate counterparts, adopted a system of lease holding in which land was subdivided into small lots that were rented out to workers and artisans. By 1811, a new land-use plan had transformed Manhattan into a rectilinear grid of twelve avenues which ran the length of the island and dozens of streets spanning its width. Property lines were narrowly drawn within city blocks to carve out small parcels of land, twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep. Alleyways, courtyards and rear access streets were left out of the plan. As the city expanded during the first half of the nineteenth century, lease holding allowed landowners to promote urban expansion and realise large profits without selling their land. A complex web of owners, landlords, sub-landlords, tenant managers, lessees, building operators and speculators soon emerged, however, especially in the Lower East Side were tenement structures were designed and constructed to maximise returns on the twenty-five by one hundred foot lots.¹⁴

Rapid industrialisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a new influx of immigrants who crowded into poorly built tenements that had been hastily erected and were packed to capacity. By 1861, 50 per cent or 401,376 inhabitants of the city lived in 12,374 tenements. Tens of thousands more lived in ‘rookeries’, shacks and informal squatter settlements on pockets of ground that were either too rocky or too swampy for commercial development.¹⁵ An 1867 report by the Citizen’s Association Council of Hygiene pointed out that, in 1865, the East Side of Manhattan north of 40th Street contained approximately 1,016 squatter shacks, and that ‘the tenant-houses of the city as a whole’ were becoming ‘rapidly and perilously aggregated’.¹⁶ Another 1867 article in the New York Times reported that ‘from the Hudson to the East River one can behold at least twenty-five different settlements, some located blocks apart from others, but each bearing a striking resemblance to the sister colony in point of dirt’. The largest was ‘Dutch Hill’, ‘a conglomeration of hovels’ that clustered around 41st Street near the East River. There were similar settlements dotted between Fourth and Tenth Avenues as well on the west side of town between 55th and 62nd Streets. As early as 1825, an African American settlement known as ‘Seneca Village’ had been established on purchased land that stretched from 81st to 89th Street. The only community of African American property owners in nineteenth-century Manhattan, the settlement was finally cleared in the 1850s to make way for Central Park.¹⁷

Beyond Manhattan, there were also a series of ‘shantytowns’ in Brooklyn. Many were located on the wasteland and mudflats adjacent to the docks, including a ‘desolate’ settlement at Red Hook near the Gowanus Canal on ‘an open space of land sunken so far below the city level that all attempts at sewerage have failed’.¹⁸ Others were located nearby including ‘Tinkersville’, ‘Phoenix Park’, ‘Slab City’, ‘Smokey Hollow’ and ‘Darby’s Patch’.¹⁹

While New York’s ‘shanty dwellers’ were widely impugned as ‘squatters’, they often paid some form of ground rent for their land. The majority were poor migrants employed as manual labourers and factory workers. In Brooklyn, a group of German labourers were living in a ‘row of shanties’ along Van Brunt Street as early as 1846. Another group of African American workers set up an informal settlement in Brooklyn known as ‘Crow Hill’. Many commuted to Manhattan where they worked as domestic servants and in the Fulton and Washington Markets.²⁰ Other shantytown residents worked within a wider informal economy. Some residents maintained gardens and raised livestock for sale. Offal boiling and piggeries were also popular businesses. As a retrospective history of squatting in the New York Times published in 1880 concluded, the early population of the city’s shantytowns was made up of ‘rag-pickers, pea-nut vendors, street-peddlers, knife-grinders, labourers, idlers, and vagrants’.²¹

The shantytown and squatter settlements of mid-nineteenth-century New York were nevertheless seen as an obstacle to the further development of the city as a modern metropolis. For city officials, they posed a threat to public health and safety as sites of poverty, pestilence and criminality. In the eyes of the mainstream press, they represented a precarious form of urban existence – a primitive anachronism – that hovered on the edges of ‘civilised modern life’. Shantytowns were unsurprisingly portrayed as ‘plague-spots’ and their residents as ‘strangers’: foreign, un-American and, in many cases, inhuman.²²

Such nativist characterisations provided a justification for the repossession of land occupied by squatters and the demolition of their homes. Shanty dwellers were not the dangerous and degenerate characters portrayed in the mainstream press, however. They were, in most cases, labourers and entrepreneurs who ‘took possession of the urban landscape and molded it to their needs’.²³ The self-built (and often informal) communities they created spoke to a ‘kind of independent life’: makeshift and precarious on the one hand; resilient and resourceful on the other.²⁴ These were complex and extended communities, a ‘landscape of schoolhouses and chapels, work sites and fenced-in yards, pasturage and piggeries’.²⁵

And yet, these communities were anathema to the gridded regularity of the nineteenth-century American city. ‘The opening of thoroughfares up town,’ one reporter concluded,

Will raze the squatter’s huts, and destroy that somewhat unenviable individuality which distinguishes the tenants. By seeking a shelter in tenement houses, the squatter will lose, it is true, the privilege of considering himself the monarch of all he [sic] surveys, but his descendants will be afforded some insight in the customs of civilised humanity, and the health and appearance of the metropolis will be benefitted.²⁶

Despite fierce resistance, the majority were finally forced out as they gave way to a rapidly expanding city in the 1880s and 1890s. As they disappeared, the everyday experiences of their occupants – the popular working-class culture they produced and nurtured, the experiences of displacement and migration they brought with them – found a new home on New York’s musical theatre stage. One of the most popular plays of the 1880s was Edward Harrigan’s Squatter Sovereignty, a full-length musical comedy which premiered in 1882 at the Theatre Comique on Broadway and ran for over 160 performances.²⁷

If mid-nineteenth-century shantytowns were a source of fear and anxiety for New York’s middle class, they also brought the city’s poor system of tenement housing into sharper focus. Lawmakers were unwilling to legitimise the feudal model that had been practised in the Hudson Valley. They readily transferred, however, the legal aspects of landlord-tenant obligation to New York’s growing urban environment. This was, primarily, a possession–rent relationship in which a landlord turned over ‘possession’ in exchange for rent.²⁸ The contractual aspects of this relationship were nevertheless overlooked, at the expense of tenants who had little legal redress when faced with poor living conditions, especially as landlords were not required to maintain the interiors of their apartments. As one expert on the subject therefore concluded, ‘for landlords to be held liable there had to be statutes regulating tenement housing, and between 1867 and 1900, these laws either did not exist, or they were weak, unenforced, and largely ignored by landlords, inspectors and the courts alike’.²⁹

By the late nineteenth century, New York’s weak landlordtenant laws had combined with an emerging system of leasing and subleasing to produce the severe overcrowding and dangerously unsafe living conditions that was documented by a group of pioneering photographers that included Jacob Riis.³⁰ These developments were challenged by housing advocates and progressive reformers, though there was little sustained opposition from tenants until the early twentieth century. It was working class immigrant (and mainly Jewish) housewives on the city’s Lower East Side who overturned decades of acquiescence and passivity and were ultimately responsible for the city’s first large-scale tenant mobilisation. Following a successful boycott of local kosher butchers in 1902, a series of strikes were organised in 1904 by East Side women in protest against crippling rent hikes. The women transformed their own neighbourhood into a staging ground for the emergence of ‘tenant unions’ (including the New York Rent Protective Association, or NYRPA) that withheld rents and blocked evictions and provided small sums of money to recently displaced tenants. They also formed alliances with neighbourhood socialists who soon seized the reins of the protest.³¹

Despite their efforts, Lower East Side residents were unsuccessful in assembling an infrastructure and institutional base from which they could organise future strikes and other tenant-based activism. While threatened evictions may have failed to materialise and, in some cases, landlords were even forced to roll back rent to pre-strike levels, the fissures within tenant groups prevented them from building on their victories and, if anything, contributed to their rapid dissolution.³² Within a year landlords were once again raising rents, and by the end of 1907 a new wave of rent strikes had erupted with tenants demanding that landlords ‘decrease 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 were able, however, to convince state lawmakers to extend rent control 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 of campaigners including Jesse Gray, a military veteran and Communist Party member who formed the Community Council on Housing.⁶³ They depended increasingly, 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 city responded to the squatters with threats of forced eviction. Maintenance 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.