City of tenants: New York's housing struggles and the challenge to postwar America, 1945--1974

In the decades after World War II, New York City's tenant movement, led by women, fought to preserve and expand affordable and racially integrated rental housing. This dissertation argues that the tenant movement posed vital alternatives to the prevailing social tide of postwar America and helped to sustain New York's unique labor, civil rights and feminist politics through the Cold War and beyond.;The postwar years witnessed explosive suburbanization in the United States, as developers built tracts of detached houses and the state financed their sale to whites who were leaving the central cities. Together these forces established an American ideal---and to a large extent a reality---of privately owned housing in segregated suburbs where conservative gender norms attached to the "separate spheres" of politics and home.;Against this backdrop, New York's tenant movement championed an alternative social vision. The city's high rate of tenancy and vigorous left formations fostered a political culture in which "property values" did not reign supreme. Thus tenant groups and their labor-left allies embraced different values, and lobbied successfully for rent control, public housing and landmark antidiscrimination laws. They also fought developers who threatened to raze low-rent dwellings under the banner of "urban renewal." When the black freedom movement gained steam in the early 1960s, New York's activists of color made better rental housing a chief demand. And when women's liberation took the stage, New York's young feminists found in the tenant movement's senior cohort a potent example of female leadership. Through these struggles, tenant activists countered the Cold War's suburban norm with a more egalitarian notion of postwar citizenship.;Tenant groups also affected New York's material reality by establishing a measure of security for poor and moderate income families, and promoting racial integration, amid a tight market. Finally, New York's tenant struggles served as a central venue in which an Old Left cohort of leaders trained and collaborated with younger organizers, thus regenerating feminist and other egalitarian politics over three generations.