Terrible landlords, bad plumbing, the rent being too damn high—New Yorkers have been here before. They have faced these conditions for more than a century. They’ve also had to put up with the same self-serving lies of the real-estate industry, which claims that only new construction, new development, new #HQ2s, can increase the housing supply and solve the housing crisis. But throughout the city’s history, only tenants have ever truly helped tenants. Through mutual aid, rent strikes, demonstrations, riots, and the ballot box, tenants helped create a public policy that for more than forty-six years has enabled working-class New Yorkers to claim their right to the city: rent control. Now, after recent decades during which real-estate interests and their political allies weakened these laws, a new wave of tenant mobilization promises to add a more hopeful chapter to this legislation’s history.
The roots of the rent-control movement in New York City lie in the struggles of radical working-class immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Eastern European Jews, many with experience in covert organizing and radical politics, organized tenants throughout the Lower East Side in the years preceding the First World War. Borrowing the tactics and even the language of the labor movement (hence the tenant “union” and the rent “strike”), these workers also drew support and coordination from the city’s nascent Socialist Party (SP), which had deep roots in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods. Women were at the center of these early struggles. While often denied formal leadership roles, they often ran the meetings, walked the picket lines, and ultimately organized the tenant unions that provided the major force behind rent control.
By 1919 workers had organized 25,000 apartment dwellers into the Greater New York Tenants League, which worked with the SP—which the year before had swept ten state assemblymen and seven local aldermen into office—to lead a rent strike of 500 buildings. This combination of social pressure and political representation helped secure the city’s first rent-control legislation at a time when record-low vacancies of 0.3 percent enabled landlords to charge extortionary rents to families only recently reunited after the war. In 1920 the state assembly passed the April Rent Laws, which provided tenants with a special court to defend themselves against evictions for nonpayment of “unjust, unreasonable and oppressive” levels of rent. While the wording was vague, the law nonetheless marked the first time in the city’s history that housing prices were subject to something other than market forces alone.