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“We the Tenants”: Resident Organizing in New York City’s Public Housing, 1964-1978
Journal of Urban History, 2017
In the 1960s, resident organizers in New York City brought demands for jobs, political power, and self-determination into public housing from local freedom struggles. Facing budget shortfalls and political hostility, the city’s Housing Authority built alliances with these activists. The partnership programs they created—the Tenant Patrol and the Residents Advisory Council—engaged thousands of residents in community programming, employment opportunities, and political activism. Resident organizing improved working-class neighborhoods, helped preserve public housing, and connected residents to broader struggles for social and economic justice. This article situates tenant organizing within histories of public housing, social movements, and antipoverty policy, and argues that these efforts helped to sustain and improve the lives of poor and working-class New Yorkers in an era of scarcity.
Journal of Urban History, 2017
In the 1960s, resident organizers in New York City brought demands for jobs, political power, and self-determination into public housing from local freedom struggles. Facing budget shortfalls and political hostility, the city's Housing Authority built alliances with these activists. The partnership programs they created—the Tenant Patrol and the Residents Advisory Council— engaged thousands of residents in community programming, employment opportunities, and political activism. Resident organizing improved working-class neighborhoods, helped preserve public housing, and connected residents to broader struggles for social and economic justice. This article situates tenant organizing within histories of public housing, social movements, and antipoverty policy, and argues that these efforts helped to sustain and improve the lives of poor and working-class New Yorkers in an era of scarcity.
This chapter looks at the interrelations and dynamics between urban activism and the politics of co-housing. Drawing on empirical material from Hamburg and Barcelona, it explores the socio-political context of co-housing in the interplay of bottom-up organizing and top-down governance. With particular attention to squatting and related questions of post-autonomous urban activism, this investigation is structured according to three issues: relations to the state; horizontal organizing; and direct actions. This includes questions around the legalization of squatted houses, and intersections with broader movements. On this basis, the chapter discusses what is termed the dialectics of the politics of co-housing. This dynamic relation between grassroots organizing and top-down governance intersects in different political aspirations for co-housing – and eventually in what is understood as sustainable urban development. On the one hand, squatting and urban activism follow a political logic of empowerment, self-management, mutual self-help and solidarity. On the other hand, local city governments impose a political logic of urban governance, often with the aim of regulation, control, marketization and co-optation. This dialectic plays out differently in Hamburg and Barcelona, but the underlying contradictory political logics remain similar.
Afterword: The Futures of Housing Activism
Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, 2018
This book has combined a reappraisal of a key moment in housing history and a critical affirmative engagement with contemporary housing agitation in Britain and Ireland. It has re-examined the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strikes in light of new empirical research and new theoretical understandings and considered its continuing relevance at a time when housing issues have forcefully reappeared at the forefront of political-economic life. The 1915 Rent Strikes, along with housing unrest across Britain, forced government intervention through rent restrictions, and eventually, necessarily, public housing, generating a legacy of progressive improvements in tenants' rights in Britain through much of the twentieth century. But these achievements were progressively undermined from the late 1970s with the virtual decimation of public then social housing 1 through deregulation and privatization, a massively subsidized material-ideological homeownership drive, the increasing financialization of the housing market and the resurgence of the rentier landlord, resulting in a contemporary housing situation mired in crises of affordability, tenure security and quality.
HOPE VI new communities: Neighborhood relationships in mixed-income housing
Environment and Planning A, 2005
Introduction Since 1993 the HOPE VI program (1) has encouraged New Urbanist, mixed-income developments in place of troubled public housing throughout the USA as a means of creating viable communities that reduce the social, economic, and spatial isolation of public housing (Congress for the New Urbanism, undated). In Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) outline fourteen principles to guide redevelopment of HOPE VI sites to attain the architectural and social goals of New Urbanism. Of these, the goal of diversity pertains to the creation of mixed-income housing, stating that these sites should:``provide a broad range of housing types and price levels to bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interactionöstrengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community'' (Congress for the New Urbanism, undated, page 4, emphasis added). Implicit in these goals is the notion that somehow the physical environment can influence social relationships (Talen, 2002). Talen (2002) outlines three possible types of social goals: community, social equity, and the notion of the common good. From her perspective, New Urbanism, while being quite explicit about social equity and the common good, has no explicit social goals of community such as social interactions, social networks, and emotional support among neighbors. Rather, community is a descriptive term, with the idea that somehow proximity is important to create the opportunity for social interconnectedness among people of different incomes and ethnicities. As Talen summarizes,``When this diversity happens in a place such as a neighborhood, it is possible that diverse populations can find something they share in common, since they occupy a shared world'' (2002, page 178). In addition to the New Urbanist emphasis, mixed-income housing has in its own right become the supposed antidote to the problems of concentrated poverty. The notion is that somehow when public housing residents live next to nonpoor neighbors, the more affluent neighbors will demand working local institutions, act as role models, and prevent concentrations of the poor from spreading negative behaviors at exponential rates with increasing concentrations of poverty (for a review see Kleit, 2001a).