RENT’S TOO HIGH: 115 YEARS AGO TODAY
January 9, 2023 -Durt Fibo
Today is the 115th anniversary of one of the most successful rent strikes in modern history, and a model for any present-day solution to the oxymoronic ‘affordable housing’ debacle. The largest of its kind up to that point, New York was startled to see as many as 10,000 dwellings refusing in concert to pay the sums demanded by landlords. The action itself was remarkably short lived, but had been several months in arranging, starting in earnest on December 26, 1907 and ending on January 9, 1908.
Obviously, every participant acted heroically, risking their very survival from the moment a sympathetic synapse chimed somewhere within them, through the threats, firings and evictions during those 12 winter days, but by chance of character 16-year-old Pauline Newman was the indisputable heroine of the affair. A Lithuanian immigrant, Newman was, in America, an overworked textile-factory girl who had lived through the earlier rent strike of New York’s Lower East Side tenement inmates in 1904, which was a moral victory on account of all the threatened evictions not having been carried out. On the practical end, enough landlords had wound up retracting their announced rent hikes, and some even (quietly) signed leases locking rates in place for as long as one year, so residents did have some trophy in hand.
But after 12 months of enduring their rasping city lives, tenants started to see the traditional increases creeping back at them, and through the years 1905 to 1907 their average rent had risen 33 percent. In December of 1907 the new increases announced simply went beyond their means. This, after all, was a macabre holiday gift for victims of what history calls “The Panic of 1907” -also considered the first global financial crisis of the era (although it specifically started in and was caused by American speculative investments crashing -in another model of how the future would function). In the US it resulted in a depression, and by the end of 1907, around the Lower East Side alone, 75,000 to 100,000 people were estimated to be unemployed. Those with homes were already dreading eviction before the unexpected notices of the new, grossly excessive rent hikes appeared.
Newman’s only thought was to halt all commerce in rents. Although the strike occurred before the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Newman had been employed by that same lethal sweatshop, and, sparked by her experiences there, the idea’s justness and the people’s need and their determination, it spread through the city like a fire. Organizationally, it was one of the most natural and flawless dynamics ever presented; while workers organized in the shops, the unemployed and housewives -with an implacable contingent of children in all situations- streamed through streets and over door stoops convincing others to join in.
The IWW had formed back in 1905, under the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. But in New York, one of the IWW’s components -the Socialists- were the native cynosure of the strike outside of the general populace as a whole. In the Lower East Side, garment workers comprised almost half its numbers, and with Newman (who just over a year later orchestrated a General Strike among them, and became a major force in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) working like a human foundry beside them, the notion went from 400 Triangle girls to the approximately 10,000 households, and spread from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, the Bronx and Harlem. Impressed and eager for advice, to the Socialists’ headquarters came representatives from the neighboring International Federation of Italians, and tenants of Newark, across the water in New Jersey.
The landlords of course retaliated instantaneously, cannonading out more eviction notices and chopping off water sources, but the numbers against them were so overwhelming that by January 9th, virtually all had surrendered, once again revoking the rent increases and, in around 20% of the cases, actually reducing the existing price. One clear strike goal was not met by the end: that all rents be legally limited to no more than 30% of a tenant’s income. After a few faltering attempts to raise that baby, it grew up 43 years later, when New York state created its rent regulation laws, commonly known as rent control.