The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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