1907 New York City rent strike

Housing protest in New York City January 2026 January 2026 1907 New York City rent strike Discussing East Side rent strike LCCN97511968.jpg Group discussing the East Side rent strike on a sidewalk December 26, 1907 - January 9, 1908 New York City, primarily the Lower East Side but also Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and Upper West Side. Rent increases and the Panic of 1907 Rent reductions and a cap on rent based on wages Rent reductions for approximately 2,000 people Tenants, Socialist Party of America Pauline Newman ~10,000 people Police, Landlords, Magistrates The 1907 New York City rent strike or the East Side rent strike lasted from December 26, 1907, to January 9, 1908. The rent strike began in response to a proposed rent increase in the wake of the Panic of 1907 which saw tens of thousands unemployed. It began on the Lower East Side and the predominant organizers were Jewish immigrant women in the neighborhood such as Pauline Newman, who played a major role in organizing the strike. It eventually spread to other areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, comprising approximately 10,000 tenants. The strike was taken over by the Eight Assembly District of the Socialist Party of America in early 1908. Due to mass evictions and police brutality, the strike was broken, though approximately 2,000 successfully halted rent increases. Context 1904 New York City Rent Strike In the early 1900s, rent in the area had increased due to an influx of immigrants, the demolition of existing tenements, and slower rate of new buildings due to the Tenement House Act of 1901. This all led to a speculative housing market.Lawson Ronald May 1984 The Rent Strike in New York City, 1904-1980: The Evolution of a Social Movement Strategy http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009614428401000301 Journal of Urban History en 10 3 235–258 10.1177/009614428401000301 145008168 0096-1442 subscription In 1904, landlords called for a general rent increase of 20-30% starting May 1. In response, tenants organized into tenants unions and started a mass rent strike on the Lower East Side, the first rent strike in New York City. The strike comprised 800 tenement houses wherein 2,000 tenants faced eviction. Organizing was initially informal, relying on networking among the Jewish community, and primarily relying on women.Lawson Ronald Barton Stephen E. 1980 Sex Roles in Social Movements: A Case Study of the Tenant Movement in New York City https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173924 Signs 6 2 230–247 10.1086/493794 3173924 144940583 0097-9740 free Poy Lucas 2021-05-31 Radical Housing Journal https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/265684842/A_tale_of_two_cities_The_tenants_strikes.pdf Radical Housing Journal 3 1 131–147 10.54825/wamd5849 2632-2870 The first neighborhood organization, the New York Protective Rent Association, was formed by socialist leaders as an umbrella organization. It provided striking tenants with a lawyer to assist them by contesting cases on technical grounds to gain adjournments. Between 1902 and 1908, rents in the tenements increased by approximately 25%.Mele Christopher Selling the Lower East Side: culture, real estate, and resistance in New York City 2000 University of Minnesota Press 978-0-8166-3182-7 Globalization and community Minneapolis 62 The Depression of 1907 led to 75-100 thousand men on the Lower East Side being unemployed. In December 1907, landlords announced rent would be increased by 1-2 dollars, the latest in a series of rent hikes over the past several years.Joselit Jenna Weissman The tenant movement in New York City, 1904 - 1984 Rutgers Univ. Press 1986 978-0-8135-1158-0 Lawson Ronald New Brunswick, NJ 39–50 1: The Landlord as Czar - Pre-World War I Tenant Activity 1907 rent strike The rent strike began December 26, 1907, and lasted until January 9, 1908, primarily led by local housewives who canvassed the neighborhood tenements for support.Robbins Glyn December 26, 2021 The Radical Legacy of New York's Winter Rent Strike en-GB Tribune https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/12/new-york-1907-rent-strike-pauline-newman 2023-07-26 Pauline Newman, then 16 years old and working in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, helped organize the strike and was labelled in city newspapers as "The New Joan of Arc.1907-12-27 NEW JOAN OF ARC LEADS RENT STRIKE; Pauline Newman Has Organized 400 Women for a Crusade Against Grasping Landlords. COME DOWN OR NO PAY" Already the Dwellers in Five Big Tenements Have Made Demands -- Evictions Expected. en-US The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1907/12/27/archives/new-joan-of-arc-leads-rent-strike-pauline-newman-has-organized-400.html 2023-07-25 0362-4331Bartoletti Susan Campbell 1999 The Power of Work and Wages: Working Toward Historicity in Children's Fiction https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/249759 Children's Literature Association Quarterly 24 3 112–118 10.1353/chq.0.1101 145431916 1553-1201 subscription By December 26th she had organized about 400 working girls to canvass the neighborhood during the evenings.Bartoletti Susan Campbell Kids on Strike! Clarion Books 2003 0618369236 62–81 3: "Dear God, Will it ever be Different?" - Pauline Newman and the New York City Rent Strike (1907) By December 28th, tenants made lists of the buildings code violations in the neighborhood and presented them to city officials, prompting attention from inspectors in the Tenement House Department and Health Department. Papers such as The Daily Forward urged rent strikes. 1907 NYC Rent Strike - Children Hanging Landlord Effigy.jpg Tenant Strike NYC 1907.jpg Tenement children on the Lower East Side hanging the effigy of a landlord during the strike A tenant organizer on the left with her fist raised, addressing a group of tenants outside a Lower East Side building in December 1907 In 1908, the rent strike was brought under the Socialist Party of America's Eight Assembly District. While initial organizing had been done by women, the party was composed primarily of men. The Socialist Labor Party, the rival social democratic organization, was critical of the strike, taking issue with organizing workers as consumers. Under the party, the rent strike spread to Brooklyn and Harlem; tenants of Newark, New Jersey, also sent a delegation to discuss organizing their own strike. Sympathy strikes were organized in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Manhattans Upper East Side and Upper West Side. Tenants were organized in Italian as well as Jewish neighborhoods. Organized by the party, the tenants hung effigies of their landlords and hung red flags, often dyed petticoats, from their windows. Due to the strike's association with the Socialist Party, it was considered a leftist activity by much of the New York City public. As a result, it became susceptible to waves of anti-communist sentiment. The media was less supportive of the strike than the one in 1904, calling it a "tenant uprising", "rent war", and "tenant rebellion". On January 5, 1908, under the direction of the landlords, police brutalized strikers after they had refused to disperse meetings and take down the red flags and protest signs hung up.Goldstein Robert J. 1974 the anarchist scare of 1908: a sign of tensions in the progressive era https://www.jstor.org/stable/40644042 American Studies 15 2 55–78 40644042 0026-3079 Aftermath and legacy thumb|Political cartoon in Louis Miller's newspaper Di Varhayt - “How the landlord pictures himself in the great rent war.”1918-20 New York City rent strikes Magistrates issued thousands of eviction notices, effectively breaking the strike.Marcuse P. July 1999 Housing Movements in the USA http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14036099950150026 Housing, Theory and Society en 16 2 67–86 10.1080/14036099950150026 1403-6096 subscription Of the 10,000 participants, only about 2,000 received rent reductions.Triece Mary Eleanor On the picket line: strategies of working-class women during the Depression 2007 Univ. of Illinois Press 978-0-252-03151-9 Urbana, Ill. The demand to cap the rent at 30% of wages was unmet. The strike did not result in long-lasting organizations or changes to the Lower East Side. On January 12, 1908, Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld published a one-act play titled Rent Strike in The Daily Forward.Rent Strike https://jewishcurrents.org/rent-strike 2023-07-24 Jewish Currents en Nothing comparable took place until after World War I. The strike drew the attention of women leaders in the settlement house movement, who would then introduce the concept of rent control into NYC politics.Hyman Paula E. 1999 The Jewish Body Politic: Gendered Politics in the Early Twentieth Century https://www.jstor.org/stable/40326488 Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 2 37–51 40326488 0793-8934 In 1917, a wave of rent strikes began which led to the institution of rent controls in 1920. See also Anti-Rent War Tenants' strike of 1907 Old Law Tenement New Law Tenement New York shirtwaist strike of 1909 Further reading Rousseau Victor http://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1908-01-25_52_2666 "Low Rent or No Rent": The Tenement Dwellers’ Rebellion In New York January 25, 1908 Harper's Weekly Internet Archive 25 English 2666 References Category:Housing in New York City Category:1900s strikes in the United States Category:Tenants unions in the United States Category:History of the Lower East Side Category:Protests in New York (state) Category:Rent strikes Category:1907 labor disputes and strikes Category:1907 in New York City Category:Labor disputes in New York City Category:December 1907 in the United States Category:January 1908 in the United States