The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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