A brief history of rent strikes

The Week in Housing 14/02/2025

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Clúid Housing and Social Justice competition. We run this competition every year in conjunction with my Social Justice and the City module, where students design their own model of socially just housing. This year's winners are incredibly innovative models, and can be viewed here. Thanks to the input of Clúíd Housing residents whose expertise is crucial in the module. And particular thanks to the Clúid Housing policy team Andrew Daly and Tara Gallagher for their input into the module and the competition, and to CEO Brian O’Gorman for meeting with the winners.

“Dear Sir; In light of the high cost of rent in this building . .. and the tenants being in general agreement . .. we have decided to ask you, as the owner, to reduce the rent by 30 percent. That is our only request. We await a prompt and favourable response to our request. Yours truly, The Tenants”.

The above quote is from a letter written by tenant Antonio Rinaldi in Autumn of 1907. It was one of many such letters that kicked off a mass rent strike in Buenos Aires. That strike was part of a wave of early-20^th century rent strikes, a period in which mass tenant movements completely reshaped the politics of the private rental sector and housing systems more generally. With debate on the ending of RPZs kicking off here in Ireland, it seems a good time to revisit the politics of rent strikes.

The background to these historical rent strikes was the urbanization and the commodification of housing markets in the 19^th century, giving rise to unaffordable housing, chronic overcrowding, and appalling housing conditions (famously documented by Engels). Perhaps the most well-known example of the period is the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915. The context for the strikes was a population increase in Glasgow, combined with slum housing conditions for many workers, war profiteering by landlords and frequent evictions. Before World War I, Scottish tenants had been agitating and organising around housing for some time. In 1913, the Scottish Federation of Tenants’ Associations was established, and in 1914 the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association was formed. In 1915 a major rent strike began which culminated in an estimated 25,000 tenants participating. The rent strikes were articulated, in the context of World War I, as a response to the profiteering of unpatriotic landlords who were exploiting, and often evicting, families, including those left behind by soldiers. During the strike, eviction attempts were sometimes blocked, and mass protests were a regular feature. Ultimately, on November 28, the Rents and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Bill, which established rent controls, was introduced at the House of Commons, and became law in December of 1915. Rent controls would remain in place until their repeal under Thatcher in 1988.

Like the Glasgow case, the background to New York’s wave of early twentieth century rent strikes was appalling housing conditions in the city’s rapidly expanding rental sector. However, it was a series of sharp rent increases at the outset of the twentieth century, triggered by inadequate housing supply, partially related to tenement demolition, and the influx of migrants, that provided the immediate catalyst. In 1904, against this backdrop, a rent strike began ‘involving 800 tenement houses and the threat of eviction for 2,000 tenants in the Jewish quarter of the Lower East Side’ (see Lawson’s account). A second wave of rent strikes occurred in the winter of 1907/09, and once again during World War I. Just like in Glasgow, housing shortages and associated rent increases caused by the WWI led to hardship for tenants. This gave rise to a long period of rent strikes between 1917 and 1920 across working class neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. By 1920, the scale of organised tenant resistance to rent increases was such that the state legislature introduced rent controls.

As mentioned at the outset, in Buenos Aires, in 1907, residents of some of the city’s tenements responded to rent increases of almost 50% by refusing to pay, which spread quickly to other buildings thus kicking off a prolonged mass rent strike. By the end of the year, tenants of more than 2,000 buildings were participating in the strike, ultimately incorporating approximately 120,000 tenants, around 10% of the city’s inhabitants, as well as spreading to other cities. Tenants established neighbourhood and building committees to collectively organise the rent strike and coordinate with the trade union movement.

The above are just three examples of some of the most well-known instances of mass tenant mobilization during the early twentieth century. Guzmán and Ill-Raga point out that there were many more mass rent strikes throughout the period, including Barcelona in 1904, Milan in 1909, Vienna in 1910, Leeds in 1914, Paris in 1919, Stockholm in 1920, and Barcelona again in 1931.

We can learn much about the political significance of tenant organisations from the historical examples discussed here. The role of women, and the ‘sphere of social reproduction’, in housing struggles emerges as one important theme. Mary Barbour, one of the most famous leaders of the Glasgow 1915 rent strikes, organised tenant committees and anti-eviction actions during the strikes, with her supporters becoming known as ‘Mrs. Barbour’s Army’. Gray argues that during the Glasgow rent strikes:

[I]t was women who led the rent strikes, and women who forced the housing issue on the ground, even if strong support from other organizations was crucial… the vast majority of rent strikers were working-class ‘housewives’, whose actions were based on their everyday experience of tenement life…

The role of women was also notable in the Buenos Aires case. Juana Rouco Buela, for example, was a leading figure in the 1907 rent strikes in Buenos Aires. Women also played leadership roles both in street protest and in civil disobedience and direct action. The demonstrations of the time are often remembered as ‘broom parades’ because women protesters marched with brooms to represent the sweeping away of landlords and high rents. Baer also gives the example of a prominent eviction attempt which was blocked by women activists:

Some of the women in the conventillo (tenement) tried to bar the police from entering. They closed all the doors and windows to the street. Those officers who did get into the building were attacked by broom-wielding women and had boiling water poured onto them from the patio above.

The politics of the PRS, then, are also the politics of home and therefore relate directly to questions of social reproduction.

The relationship between tenant politics and labour movements is also evident through the examples discussed here. In Glasgow, labour organisations were instrumental in commencing and supporting the rent strikes, and the threat of industrial actions was one of the factors that led to the introduction of rent controls. In both Buenos Aires and New York, the tenants who organised the rent strikes had experience as part of the organised labour movement and borrowed tactics and strategies from this experience. The very name ‘tenant unions’ for the organisations created by the rent strikers indicates the parallels between tenant activism and working class political organisation. Lawson argues that: ‘[c]alling the organizations they formed in their buildings “tenant unions”, they collectively withheld their rents from their landlords just as they had frequently withheld their labour from their employers’.

Finally, as Gray argues in a point relevant for all the historical cases discussed here, “probably the greatest lesson from the 1915 rent strikes is that the threat and practice of collective tenant organization and direct action is a prerequisite condition for radical housing transformation”. While the Buenos Aires rent strike was ultimately unsuccessful, in the New York and Glasgow cases, collective action by tenants had enormous impacts. In the NYC case, the intensity of rent strikes and the scale of working class participation ‘were interpreted as posing political threats in addition to pressing the landlords individually’ (Lawson). This fear triggered a dramatic policy reaction: ‘So great was the fear generated… that in 1920 the state legislature enacted rent controls in order to defuse the issue’ 38). Similarly, in Glasgow, in response to the tenant-led rent strikes the British government established rent controls for the first time.

The introduction of rent controls had huge knock-on consequences for the development of housing systems. This first generation of ‘hard’ rent controls played a role in the decline of PRS housing, which in turn was one of the crucial factors which pushed states towards direct public provision of rental housing, i.e. social or public housing. Recent cross-national comparative research has shown that the development of social housing is closely related to the introduction of rent controls and the decline of PRS investment in the early and mid-20^th century. With this in mind, we can see that the agency of tenants and tenant activism have had a wide reaching impact on the development of housing systems.

Events & news

I was on Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show on Tuesday discussing the RPZs and some other issues, watch back here. Great piece by Lorcan Sirr in the Irish Times last weekend looking at the politics of the housing crisis. I was featured in The Housing Agency’s Spotlight on Housing Research series, where I discuss my forthcoming book.

What I’m reading

A new OECD report includes discussion of Irish housing market and policy, including calls for reform of rent regulation.