Abstract
In New York, where the landlords and tenants have battled over affordable housing since the early-nineteenth century, rising rents have reemerged as a central political issue. Since 1994, the weakening of rent control laws established after World War II has allowed New York landlords to implement massive rent hikes. Since 2000, median rents have risen by 75 percent. Even in a city of 8.5 million, where jaded residents are accustomed to paying some of the highest average rents in the nation, the increases seemed exorbitant. Over the years, the city’s politicians took notice. For example, Democratic mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio made skyrocketing rents the centerpiece of his 2013 campaign. “New York City is becoming a Tale of Two Cities,” he declared: The number of millionaires and . . . penthouses has soared . . . Working people face a different story. Nearly half of the city is living at, or dangerously close, to poverty. A third of New Yorkers spend at least half of their income on rent and . . . affordable housing has become scarcer.
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Once elected, de Blasio fulfilled his pledge to relieve beleaguered tenants by implementing a two-year rent freeze affecting nearly a million tenants. While the policy proved popular and probably contributed to de Blasio’s easy reelection victory in 2017, it had little impact on the underlying cause of the crisis: New York’s chronic shortage of affordable housing. To address the disparity, the mayor launched a massive initiative to construct or preserve two hundred thousand units of subsidized housing by 2024. The mayor proudly declared that by the end of his first term, his plan produced 77,651 units of affordable housing. Critics of the mayor charged that these impressive numbers are misleading and that his administration’s policies made the housing crisis worse. To encourage new construction, the mayor offered private developers changes to zoning laws and tax incentives in exchange for a fixed percentage of all new units set aside as affordable housing. De Blasio’s reforms resulted in a surge of new high-rise, luxury apartment buildings in several low-income, black and Latino neighborhoods. Since nearly 80 percent of all the units in new buildings are luxury apartments, the influx of wealthy residents accelerated the displacement of local residents by driving up the rents of neighboring buildings. Despite de Blasio’s housing reforms, the demand for affordable housing continues to outpace the supply of new units. 2
Robert Fogelson’s The Great Rent Wars and Roberta Gold’s When Tenants Claimed the City remind us that New York’s current housing crisis is not its worst historically. Fogelson begins with a housing shortage after World War I so severe that emboldened landlords raised rents by 140 percent in 1920. Gold begins with the housing crisis after World War II. Residential construction, which had slowed during the Great Depression, came to a standstill during the War years while vacancy rates reached a historic low of 0.08 percent in 1950 (compared with a 3% vacancy rate today) and made it virtually impossible for returning veterans to find affordable housing.
Both works add to our understanding of the cyclical nature of New York’s housing crises and show how assertive tenant movements arose in two distinct eras after social and economic conditions generated massive shortages of affordable housing for poor, working- and middle-class renters. Each book employs a different interpretive framework to explore the meaning of tenant resistance and its impact on housing in New York. Fogelson takes for granted the boom to bust cycles of real estate speculation and focuses on the interplay between tenants, landlords, politicians, lawyers, and judges in shaping New York’s response to the post–World War I housing crisis. Gold largely neglects the real estate economics of city’s post–World War II housing shortage and focuses instead on how tenants and housing activists advocated for an expansion of rent control laws and policies that preserved racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. Both perspectives are valuable to understanding New York’s frenetic housing history. 3
Fogelson’s The Great Rent Wars is monographic in form, but sweeping in scope. He discusses the efforts of Socialists and other radicals responsible for organizing the post–World War I rent strikes, but goes into greater depth when analyzing the activities of the leading lawyers, judges, reformers, and politicians involved in legal battles over rent control regulations. According to Fogelson, there was rarely a time in the city’s history when the supply of affordable housing kept pace with demand. The high costs of land, construction materials, and labor that limited profits for private developers unless they catered to the luxury market contributed to the city’s first housing crisis in 1820 and persisted into the twentieth century.
By 1900, rapid population growth fed by immigration exacerbated the chronic housing shortage forcing more wage earners into high-rent, overcrowded, and unsanitary tenements. New York’s tentative first steps toward government regulation of housing construction, the Tenement Housing Act of 1901, mandated that all apartments constructed after 1901 be designed to provide tenants access to light, ventilation, and other health and safety measures. Real estate developers opposed the law, arguing that the regulations would suppress new construction and result in a housing shortage. What followed instead was a building boom rivaling any other in New York’s history or the history of “any other city of the world.” Between 1903 and 1916, nearly half of the city’s apartments—twenty-seven thousand apartment housing containing four hundred thousand units—were constructed. High vacancy rate ensured reasonable rents for New York families who, Fogelson relates, now moved out of old law tenements into apartments “with plenty of light and air.” Low-income families threatened to move out of their apartments if not offered free repairs, decorations, and painting. To attract new tenants, landlords offered to pay moving fees and “free rent for a month or two” (p. 18).
This brief golden age for New York renters was short-lived. By 1917, the construction boom had ended. U.S. entry into World War I led to government restrictions on building materials and labor scarcities that brought new construction to a halt. By the armistice, these conditions triggered a massive housing shortage. “Out of the city’s nearly one million apartments,” Fogelson recounts, “only 3,500 were vacant” (p. 29). Instead of offering incentives to keep tenants, landlords raised rents. It was common for landlords to raise rents by 70 to 90 percent, expel less affluent tenants, and replace them with high-income renters. Tenants had thirty days to pay the rent increases before landlords could start the eviction process. Mining obscure documents from state, federal, and municipal court proceedings, Fogelson exposes the human costs of rising rents on the working-class. Facing eviction, thousands of families faced hard choices. When told by a landlord that she could afford the rent increase by feeding her children less, one housewife responded, “Why should we be asked to take bread out of our children’s mouths so that we can give more money to the landlord?” (p. 42).
As landlords city-wide “jacked up” rents, some tenants moved to cheaper apartments; those refusing to pay called for rent strikes. The 1904 and 1907 strikes in the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, Brownsville and Harlem succeeded in getting some landlords to rescind rent hikes, but failed to permanently change tenant–landlord relations. “If postwar rent strikes had a lesson for New York’s tenants in the postwar,” Fogelson argues, it was not that not hundreds or thousands, but tens and even hundreds of thousands would have to go on strike. The strikers . . . would have to include not just Jews, but also Italians, Irish, Germans and Poles . . . working class, but also middle and upper classes. (p. 61)
From 1919 to 1920, as thousands of rent strikes spread throughout the city, landlords responded with mass evictions. Municipal courts, jammed with eviction proceedings, appeared on the verge of collapse. “What in God’s name are we to do [with] the men and women and children, thousands of them,” declared Judge Harry Robitzek whose Bronx courtroom heard 1,400 cases in the fall of 1919 (p. 100). The Brooklyn Eagle reported that in Brownsville and other working-class Brooklyn neighborhoods, it was common to see parents and children sleeping in the hallways or basements of buildings from which they were evicted. Fogelson, however, withholds judgment and complicates the tenant versus landlord dichotomy. Many landlords took advantage of the housing shortage and fit tenants’ description as “profiteers” by raising rents to unreasonable levels, while others, Fogelson reminds us, refused to evict and carried families who could not pay the increase. Landlords justified some rent hikes as necessary to defray increasing maintenance and heating costs or to make up for the “lean years” after the construction boom when surplus apartments lowered rents to levels below cost. City officials and the courts intervened in thousands of rent disputes and, in the majority of cases, negotiated compromises between landlords and tenants. In at least one-third of these cases, however, landlords refused to negotiate or appear at rent proceedings. Often, landlords simply ignored compromise settlements and, according to Fogelson, cited their “Constitutional rights” to higher profits.
As Fogelson clarifies, most New Yorkers viewed the strikes not as the radical overturning of the tenant–landlord system, but as short-term solution to force landlords to rescind rent hikes. While some public officials succumbed to Red Scare fears and denounced the strikers as tools of the Socialists or other “Bolshevik” groups helping to organize the strikes, several Judges presiding over eviction cases expressed the fear that rent hikes forced working-class New Yorkers into the arms of radicals. The debate surrounding rent strikes focused on strategies for producing more housing. Socialists demanded government-subsidized public housing, while real estate interests lobbied for alterations to existing building codes to lower construction costs and spur development. Increasing demands for state intervention by tenants, municipal courts, and labor unions forced the legislature to restrain landlords and protect renters. In 1920, the Republican majority in the State Legislature, fearing electoral defeat in the fall, enacted legal restrictions on evictions and rent control by requiring that landlords maintain “reasonable” rents.
The legal battles over eviction codes, the definition of “reasonable” rent, and the legality of rent control itself are the focus of the second half the book. While New York’s public overwhelmingly supported rent control, real estate developers fought in the courts to have the regulations overturned. Some of the biggest names in the American legal system contributed to the debates regarding rent control, including Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, in 1921, wrote the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of rent control. Originally intended as a wartime emergency provision, the extension of rent control remained the center of intense battles between tenant and landlord groups for the remainder of the decade. In 1926, with residential construction on the upswing landlords argued that the emergency had expired and it was time for rent control’s expiration, but the political power of tenants kept the laws in place. In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the legislature finally allowed the emergency rent control laws to lapse.
Fogelson’s conclusions eerily reflect many of the factors complicating New York’s present housing woes. While tenant activism and rent control legislation succeeded in stopping landlords from enjoying “profiteering” rent increases, he argues that they failed to solve the problem of the shortage of affordable housing. Just as today’s spate of residential construction favors high-rent tenants, the building boom of the 1920s added 20 percent more new housing to the market, two percent of which was affordable to low-income tenants. In style and chronology, Fogelson’s work is the worthy successor to Roy Lubove’s The Progressives and the Slums, a classic study tracing the debate between housing reformers in the late-nineteenth century who supported laws enforcing construction codes, but shunned government intervention in the housing market, and the younger generation of reformers of the early-twentieth century who advocated for more assertive government intervention, including subsidized housing for the poor. Just as Lubove’s work foreshadowed the post–World War I demand for rent control legislation, The Great Rent Wars’ discussion of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred E. Smith, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, and Robert F. Wagner explains how the battle over rent regulations laid the foundation for the establishment of public housing during the New Deal era. 4
Roberta Gold’s When the Tenants Claimed the City picks up after World War II when the New York’s housing shortage reached historic highs. Gold chronicles the efforts of left-wing housing activists, mostly women, who organized successful campaigns to extend wartime rent control, establish the first anti-discrimination in housing statutes, and implement a massive public housing construction program. While the activists largely failed in their attempt to stall urban renewal and preserve racially mixed working-class neighborhoods, their organizing of African American– and Puerto Rican–led rent strikes in Harlem and other low-income neighborhoods during the 1960s forced the city to crack down on slumlords to repair buildings and lower rents. During the post-War period, Gold demonstrates, activists achieved victories that included antidiscrimination laws and subsidized public housing programs that provided economic security for thousands poor and working-class New Yorkers.
Gold’s story overlaps several earlier post-War housing histories, such as Joel Schwartz’s The New York Approach and essays in Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison’s The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984, but brings a thematic complexity that earlier works lacked. Gold is particularly interested in the idea of “New York exceptionalism” (p. 31). Other municipalities established laws protecting tenants’ rights, “but in the post-War period,” Gold argues, “New York’s . . . local leftists and other housing advocates preserved levels of tenant organization and protection that were obliterated elsewhere” (p. 3). Most U.S. post-War housing, for example, was privately funded suburban developments that intensified racial segregation. New York’s left-wing housing reformers expanded the construction of government subsidized public housing, extended rent control, and fought against the city’s urban renewal policies that destroyed racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. Gold’s work builds on recent studies like Rhonda Williams’s The Politics of Public Housing, which examines the role of Baltimore women engaging in “bread and butter issues” like housing and welfare reform. Gold’s activists, honing their craft in the crucible of Communist Party–affiliated labor unions during the 1930s, served as mentors for local activists who continued to organize tenants throughout the twentieth century. They created, Gold argues, a “distinct political culture” that preserved the pluralistic character of New York well into the 1970s. 5
During the 1940s, Gold argues, Communist activists joined a coalition of liberal middle-class and union tenant activist groups that reshaped housing in New York. Accurately identifying the lack of low-income housing as the heart of “the housing problem,” the coalition organized campaigns resulting in the construction of twelve public housing projects sheltering more than twelve thousand low-income families, a slum clearance program that demolished some of the worst old-law (post-1901) tenements and the extension of the War-time rent control system. Despite all these gains, and the construction of ten thousand additional units of temporary dwellings for veterans, the housing shortage intensified. By 1950, the city faced it worst housing crisis as vacancy rates plummeted to below 1 percent and the housing shortfall was estimated to be near five hundred thousand dwellings. 6
The same year, the left-liberal coalition responded with a successful campaign for permanent rent control legislation enacted by New York State. Capping the rents of two million apartments made it possible for millions of families remain in the city and preserved the cultural viability of dozens of working-class neighborhoods. The city responded to activists’ demands for an increase in public housing construction by using federal as well as city and state funding to build seventy-five thousand low-income units by the end of the decade. Coupled with the success of labor unions in developing cooperative housing for its workers, government subsidized and cooperative housing dramatically increased the amount affordable housing in New York. By the mid-1960s, the vacancy rates grew to a “post-war high of 3.2%.” 7
Tying the housing campaign to the African American struggle for civil rights was another distinctive feature of New York’s housing reform movement. Radical housing activists organized protests to integrate Stuyvesant Town, a massive middle-income housing complex for veterans’ families built and managed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on land donated by the city, after Met Life announced it was a whites-only development. These protests failed to integrate Stuyvesant Town, but led to several landmark antidiscrimination legal decisions as well as several laws barring housing discrimination in New York.
As Gold points out, to construct public housing projects and labor cooperatives on such a massive scale involved the tearing down of working-class neighborhoods. Under Robert Moses, the city’s slum clearance and housing construction had the support of liberal reformers, but was ultimately responsible for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of working-class families who could not be immediately rehoused in newly built projects. Leftist reformers organizing local residents to protests against urban renewal argued that these densely populated working-class neighborhoods, often racially and ethnically mixed, were not slums, but vital and vibrant communities. Leftist community organizers often Jewish or African American and predominantly female, led the struggle resulting in urban renewal policies that avoided displacing tenants and the eventual ouster of Moses as the city’s slum clearance commissioner. During the 1950s, urban renewal coupled with the exodus of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs to the suburbs and middle-class, white families to the suburbs intensified the level of poverty and segregation in the city’s racial ghettos.
By 1963, a series of rent strikes organized by Jesse Gray, a Communist labor organizer, spread from Harlem to East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Harlem tenants withheld rent and demanded city officials force slumlords to make repairs. The strikes marked a dramatic shift in the civil rights movement as black and Latino activists shifted from a demand for integration to improved services in their own neighborhoods. While the strikes succeeded in bringing national attention to “ghetto housing conditions” (p. 215) and tighter city oversight of code enforcement, they failed to achieve tenant demands for legislative reforms or increases in public housing construction. During the 1970s, Gold contends, the continuation of community activism among Latino reformers resulted in the construction of two of the last large-scale public housing projects: Taino Towers in East Harlem and Betances Houses in the Bronx. By the 1980s, the two projects built with input from neighborhood residents, were swept up in the wave of crime and violence that plagued the surrounding neighborhoods. But they also demonstrated, according to Gold, “that democratic planning and rebuilding are possible” (p. 236).
Gold is a vivid writer and an expert at simplifying New York’s complex racial, ethnic, and political issues. But the postwar reforms that lasted in New York longer than in other U.S. cities and made it a haven for working-class and low-income families have largely receded. The weakening of rent control, the physical decline of New York’s public housing system, the increasing homeless population, and the persistence of de facto segregation testify to the power of private property and politicians beholden to real estate developers. This should not diminish the accomplishments of radical reformers who fought to preserve racial and economic diversity and create housing that served the needs of the city’s most vulnerable families.