Tenants Take To The Streets For Rent-Law Reforms
The tenant movement raised the stakes in the fight for rent-law reforms in July 2010, when members of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, alongside other groups in the Real Rent Reform (R3) campaign, took part in a civil disobedience direct action protest. Our target was the leadership of the New York State Senate, which has failed to act on a package of bills to strengthen the rent laws and stop the loss of rent regulated and subsidized housing.
First we held a rally of 200 tenants mid-day at City Hall Park in Manhattan, and then marched across the street to block the entrance to 250 Broadway - a building where many state senators have their offices. When the crowd was told to disperse, 13 tenant activists remained, linked arms, and sat down in front of the building, and for doing so, we were arrested. Our message to the senators: "Don't come home until you pass our bills!"
I'm happy to share the video evidence:
What Led Up to This
Engaging in civil disobedience is a significant escalation of tactics in our campaign for stronger tenant protections. In part it is a recognition that we need to raise the stakes to counter the powerful landlord lobby, which is willing to spend nearly limitless amounts to influence politics and prevent the passage of tenant bills that would put a dent in their profits.
More importantly, however, our move toward more dramatic direct action events was a way to empower ourselves and energize our organizing. Direct actions can be immediately transformative, giving power to people who have long felt on the defensive. The tenant movement set the housing agenda in New York City in the mid-20th century, enacting and preserving the nation's most sweeping rent regulation system and the largest and most reputably run public housing program. The 1990s and 2000s, however, saw a string of setbacks - most notably the loss of hundreds of thousands of rent regulated apartments through 'vacancy decontrol', a law that allows landlords to push out tenants and remove vacant apartments from regulation entirely - and the loss of tens of thousands of Mitchell-Lama and other subsidized buildings as landlords 'opted out' of programs that kept rents affordable to low-income tenants.
Many tenants put their hopes in Democrats, who assured that once they took control of the New York State Senate they would push through bills to restore and strengthen the rent laws. After over 40 years in the minority, Democrats narrowly took the majority in the State Senate in 2008 - owing in part to the tremendous work of tenant groups. We had a package of bills ready, promptly got the Assembly to pass them, and we shifted into lobbying mode, mobilized members for dozens of rallies in the city and trips to Albany to pressure our Senators.
Promises were made dozens of times over the past two years that votes on our legislative package were imminent, and these promises were broken over and over. We were told to wait, to keep playing the party politics and help expand the majority. Met Council's members, however, were feeling helpless and at the mercy of politicians who let us down.
The erosion of New York's affordable housing stock is a crisis, and for thousands of tenants who worry about being able to afford to remain in the city, patient lobbying has become unacceptable as a primary strategy. Civil disobedience direct actions convey the urgency of the situation, and we hope to build on this energy to grow a movement of tenants who can increasingly move towards our vision of a city where housing policies are designed to meet the needs of people, not profit.
Met Council on Housing is a North Star Fund grantee. It's most recent award was for the Spring 2010 grant cycle.
