The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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