We Won’t Move!: An Interview with Maggie Schreiner
Today on Gotham, Katie Uva interviews Maggie Schreiner about We Won’t Move! Tenants Organize in New York City. This 2022 publication is an updated edition of the catalog that accompanied Interference Archive’s 2015 exhibition of the same title, which explored decades of tenant activism in New York City through oral history, press clippings, photographs, organizing materials, and more.
Can you tell us a bit about how the original 2015 exhibition came to be? What was the catalyst and how did you decide on the parameters of the show?
Interference Archive is a volunteer-run archive of social movement cultural ephemera which was founded in 2011, and I started volunteering there the following year. I had recently completed an MA in Archives and Public History at NYU, where I curated a digital exhibition on the history of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, the oldest tenant organization in New York City. At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to expand on this research to develop an analog, IRL exhibition about the history of tenant organizing in the city.
I was also motivated by the upcoming 2015 rent law renewals in New York State. Until 2019, New York State’s rent laws, which govern rental housing in New York City, had a sunset clause, which meant that they expire after a set period of time. As a result, housing justice organizers had to mobilize regularly to maintain, and hopefully expand, tenant protections. The exhibition was timed to be on display in the lead up to the rent law renewals in Spring 2015. The exhibition was accompanied by a programming series to highlight the contemporary work of organizers, and bring exhibition visitors into the housing justice movement at a critical juncture.
The upcoming rent renewals also informed the broader parameters of the exhibition. We Won’t Move focuses on residential tenants in NYC. There are a lot of topics which impact housing in NYC that weren’t included in the exhibition or book: squatting, homesteading, loft conversions, the Mitchell-Lama program, and zoning are just a few examples!
Interference Archive is a unique organization–all-volunteer, deeply collaborative, and typically its programming/exhibits/publications are developed in concert with community partners. What are the benefits of this structure and process? How did the relationship with organizations like the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), Banana Kelly CIA, Inc., CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and others listed in this publication shape the project?
The collaborative nature of Interference Archive shaped every element of the resulting exhibition, programming series, and book. I started the process by gathering a team of fellow volunteers who were interested in working on the exhibition — primarily existing Interference Archive volunteers who were organizing in their buildings, fighting their own rent increases, and advocating for repairs. We started our process with a study group, during which we spend several months reading and discussing a selection of historical scholarship on the city’s tenant movement. This process was essential for developing a shared historical understanding, and also getting to know each other as collaborators.
Our next step was to interview tenant organizers about what would be most useful for them to know about the history of the movement, and their current campaign goals. We interviewed organizers from our own networks, such as the Met Council on Housing, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. We also reached out to organizations beyond our immediate networks, and developed relationships with Community Action for Safe Apartments, the Flatbush Tenant Coalition, and others. This process was facilitated by all our existing relationships within NYC’s activist community.
We used these interviews and relationships to shape the core content of the exhibition. Since many organizations were gearing up for the 2015 rent law renewals, the development of the rent stabilization system was of particular interest and as a result became a central component of the historical narrative we created in the exhibition. We also worked with organizations to co-curate a section of the exhibition which highlighted contemporary campaigns. We wanted to create explicit connections between the past and present of tenant organizing in NYC. Finally, these relationships also shaped our accompanying programming series. The series included film screenings, panel discussions, and know your rights trainings for tenants.
There are some really interesting and informative graphics on p. 46-8 about the rates of owner-occupied, unregulated, rent-stabilized, and rent-controlled apartments in the city from 1970-now. The most conspicuous thing to me was the dramatic drop in rent-controlled apartments but the significant increase in rent-stabilized apartments. Why did this happen and what are the implications?
Rent control and rent stabilization are two different regulatory systems that govern rental housing in NYC. The rent control system was established after WWII, as a result of tenant organizers fighting to extend wartime rent freezes. In 1969 a weaker system called rent stabilization was enacted to cover apartments built after 1947, which were not included in the rent control system. In the early 1970s, the real estate and landlord lobby pushed the neoliberal government of Governor Nelson Rockefeller to undermine the system of rent control though a package of “decontrol” bills, which moved rent regulation from city to state jurisdiction (often referred to as the end of “home rule”) and introduced vacancy decontrol, which withdrew apartments from the rent control system as they were vacated. Within two years, over 400,000 apartments in NYC were deregulated as evictions surged.
Tenants responded to this housing crisis and in 1974 the Emergency Tenant Protection Act was passed, which extended rent stabilization to most apartments that had been impacted by vacancy decontrol. The result of these changes was the transfer of almost a million apartments from the more robust protections of rent control to the weaker regulatory system of rent stabilization over the course of the 1970s alone. Today fewer than 20,000 apartments remain within the rent control system.
You can also see in the graphic that the number of rent-stabilized units has remained relatively stable from 2011 to today, based on data from the NYC Department of Housing and Preservation Development. But last month, The City reported a loss of almost 100,000 rent-stabilized units since 2019, using data from the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal. This drop is likely due to apartments being illegally removed from rent-stabilization; and demonstrates the consequences of inadequate enforcement (and the vagaries of data!). Additionally, tens of thousands of rent stabilized units are currently “warehoused,” or held intentionally vacant by landlords, an issue which directly impacts apartment availability and affordability, and which has been a focus of tenant organizers since the 1980s.
The worker-owned design practice Partner & Partners created the design for the original exhibition and both books, and they developed this data visualization which really strikingly illustrates the impact of these regulatory changes.
The publication starts with urban renewal in the 1940s and ends in the present with debates over rezoning and gentrification, among other issues. What are the biggest ways housing dynamics have changed in New York over this timespan and how has tenant activism evolved to reflect this?
Tenant activism has always responded to the changing realities of housing in the city. In the 1950s and 1960s, urban renewal posed a significant threat to the city’s housing stock, especially in low-income neighborhoods, and tenants organized to save their homes. With the end of “home rule” in the early 1970s, tenants began to prioritize advocacy at the state level for stronger rent protections, which has remained a central focus of tenant activism ever since. The 1970s were also characterized by the extensive landlord abandonment of rental housing stock, which resulted in the emergence of squatters’ and homesteaders’ movements. These movements were pivotal in creating pockets of deeply affordable, permanent housing.
There are also important continuities, in particular the role of race and racism in shaping housing in NYC and the consistent response of tenant activists. During urban renewal, a disproportionate number of those displaced were people of color, and new developments were often segregated. In the late 1940s, tenants organized to protest a whites-only policy at the newly constructed Stuyvesant Town, helping launch the national fair housing movement. In the 1960s, the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality investigated and exposed discriminatory practices by development companies such as the LeFrak Organization. Today, the Right to Counsel program provides legal support to tenants facing eviction, the majority of whom are people of color.
What’s distinctive about New York City as a site of housing struggles and tenant activism?
New York City is distinctive because it is a city of tenants. Close to seventy percent of NYC residents are renters, far above the national average of just over thirty-five percent. NYC renters occupy more than two million apartments, with about one million of these covered by rent regulation. New Yorkers have been tenant activists for over a century, and as a result enjoy some of the strongest tenant protections in the country. And at the same time, New York is also a center of global capital, and real estate speculation has long shaped the housing options available to New Yorkers.
What has been added to this second edition of the publication?
The biggest new element of the second edition is that it is English-Spanish bilingual. The first edition was only in English, and it has been a long-time goal to make this material available to Spanish-speaking tenants in NYC. I’m very happy that this book is out in the world in a bilingual edition!
The other major change are the updates to the “current campaigns”. This was a really exciting update to work on, because the housing justice movement has won some really substantial victories in the then-current campaigns covered in the first edition in 2015. The second edition profiles the end of the cluster-site shelter program; the creation of the Right to Counsel program; and the expansion of tenants’ rights during the 2019 rent law renewals. Some of these victories were the result of decades of organizing, and it is exciting to be able to profile these victories within their historic context. The final section on contemporary campaigns also looks forward to present-day campaign goals, such as ensuring a just implementation of the Right to Counsel program, and advocating for Good Cause eviction, which would extend tenant protections to residents of unregulated (“market rate”) housing.
Right now, New York City is attempting to recover from the pandemic, more populous than ever before, and facing exorbitant housing costs. It seems to be both booming and in crisis at the same time, and this situation has fueled increasingly tense YIMBY/NIMBY discourse and really contentious debates about what would make housing more available and more affordable. What are some ways the history featured in We Won’t Move! should inform our understanding of housing in New York in the present?
The tenant protections and affordable housing programs which we have today are primarily the result of grassroots organizing and advocacy. While the power of real estate capital can seem overwhelming, We Won’t Move aims to demonstrate the political power of tenants, and to offer an understanding of NYC’s rich history of tenant organizing as an inspiration and strategic tool.
Maggie Schreiner is a PhD student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching queer and trans organizing for affordable housing in NYC from the 1970s through the 2000s. Maggie is an adjunct faculty member in NYU’s Archives and Public History MA program, and the former manager of archives and special collections at Brooklyn Historical Society.