You know, there's a very specific, almost heavy
feeling you get when you sign a lease. You're
sitting there, maybe in some sterile leasing
office with really bad coffee or maybe just at
your own kitchen table. Right. And you're just
staring at page after page of this dense legal
jargon. And as you sign your initials over and
over again, bottom right, bottom right, you know,
the back of your mind, this document. It basically
rules your life for the next 12 months. It is
a binding contract. It feels absolute, almost
like the law of gravity. Exactly. It's like physics.
Yeah. And because it feels so absolute, we tend
to think of the relationship between a landlord
and a tenant as this unshakable thing. It's just
a given. Yeah. It's a simple equation. You pay,
you stay. You don't pay, you leave. But then
you hear a term like rent strike, and it just
sort of glitches that logic. It breaks the physics
of it. It sounds like a contradiction in terms,
doesn't it? I mean, in our culture, we associate
strikes with labor. Right. We think of factories,
picket lines outside a coal mine, maybe teachers
walking out. A worker stops working to get better
wages. They're withholding their labor. But a
tenant, a tenant isn't producing anything for
the landlord. They're just existing. They're
living. Right. So when I see headlines about
rent strikes, my first thought is usually, OK,
that sounds chaotic. That just sounds like a
bunch of people ran out of money and are trying
to rebrand it. And that is such a common misconception.
If you look at it from a distance, you know,
without the context, it does look like a financial
dispute, a transaction gone wrong. But if you
dig into the research we've pulled for today
and we have a massive stack here, truly, you
realize that a rent strike is rarely just about
the check. It's a high stakes, high risk leverage
tactic where the home itself. It becomes the
battlefield. And that is exactly what we're doing
today. We're doing a deep dive into the hidden
history of the rent strike, not just as a flash
in the pan news story, but as this historical
recurring one. We're going to look at the mechanics
of how you actually fight a landlord who, frankly,
holds all the legal cards. And we're going to
look at the history, which is wilder than I expected.
I mean, we're talking medieval peasants. 20th
century shipbuilders, even modern university
students. We have sources covering arrears lists
from the 15th century all the way to the tin
houses of California farmworkers. It's a huge
sweep of history that really highlights how people
fight for their own space. So if you're listening
to this and you rent your home or even if you
own property, this is the history of the power
struggle that defines where we all sleep at night.
But before we get to the medieval peasants, we
need to lay down some ground rules. Some definitions.
Exactly. We need to define what we're talking
about because the words really matter here. They
certainly do. So what is the actual difference
between a strike and, say, me just being broke
and missing a payment? Because to the landlord,
the bank account looks the same. It's empty.
The result might look the same on a balance sheet,
sure. But the intent and the mechanism are completely
different. If you as an individual can't pay
your rent because of hardship. You lost your
job. You had a medical emergency. That's a tragedy.
It's a personal crisis. But it's not a strike.
It is not a strike. A rent strike is a collective
direct action. It's political. So it has to be
a group. It can't be a solo act. It has to be
a group. The power lies entirely in the collective.
I mean, think about it. If one person withholds
rent, they're just a non -paying tenant. Right.
You get an eviction notice. You get an eviction
notice. You get a sheriff at the door and you're
out. But if an entire building or a whole neighborhood
or a city withholds rent, well, you can't evict
everyone. You break the enforcement mechanism.
That is that nuclear option phrase I saw in the
notes. It is absolutely the nuclear option for
a tenant. And we have to be really clear about
the stakes. Right at the top here, this is not
a game. For the landlord, obviously, a strike
is a loss of revenue and a loss of leverage.
But for the tenant, if you do this wrong, you
aren't just making a point. You're facing eviction.
Okay, that's huge. You're looking at a destroyed
credit score. a blacklist that might prevent
you from renting elsewhere, potential legal consequences,
and, you know, literally being put out on the
street. It's not something people do for fun.
It's definitely not a hobby. Never. It's an act
of desperation, but also strategy. It happens
when the status quo just becomes unbearable.
Let's get into that strategy. The how. Because
I think most people assume a rent strike is just
everyone shouting stop payment and, I don't know,
hoping for the best. Right. Looking at the breakdown
here, there are serious mechanics to resistance.
It's almost like a military operation. There
is, and it all revolves around that one concept.
Leverage of bargaining power. Which, usually,
the tenant has zero of. The lease is written
by the landlord for the landlord. Individually,
yes. Zero. A standard lease is designed to give
the property owner all the power. But the landlord
has a vulnerability. Which is? They have bills,
too. They have mortgages, property taxes, insurance,
maintenance costs. They rely on cash flow. Their
entire business model assumes a steady, predictable
stream of income. So the strike attacks the cash
flow. It chokes the engine. Exactly. But you
can't just stop paying and go buy a new TV with
the money. That's a very quick way to lose public
support and lose in court. Of course. The sources
all emphasize that successful strikes almost
always involve organized groups. typically tenants
unions. And one of the first things they do is
create a war chest. A strike fund. A strike fund.
Yeah. Or crowdfunding in the modern era. Because
if the landlord drags you into court, and they
will, you need legal representation. You can't
fight a legal battle on an empty stomach or with
empty pockets. You need to show that you have
the money. You're just choosing not to give it
to the landlord for a specific reason. Precisely.
It's a strategic withholding, not an inability
to pay. Now, I want to double click on this one
specific tactic mentioned in the notes because
it sounded incredibly devious. The rolling rent
strike. This sounds like something out of a spy
novel. It's a fascinating piece of legal maneuvering.
It really shows how sophisticated these movements
can get. So who came up with this? This was devised
by two lawyers, Lester Evans and Richard Livingston.
They were affiliated with the Met Council on
Housing in New York, and they were looking at
the traditional way of striking, which was putting
rent into an escrow account. Pause. Escrow. For
the non -lawyers listening, that basically means
giving the money to a neutral third party, right?
Correct. You say to the court. Your Honor, I
have the money. I'm willing to pay, but I'm holding
it here in this safe account until the landlord
finally fixes the boiler. It shows good faith.
Exactly. It shows you aren't just trying to steal
the service. You're a responsible party in a
dispute. Okay, so escrow is the polite way to
fight. What is the rolling strike? Evans and
Levinson realized that escrow was safe, but it
was predictable. The landlord knew where the
money was. They knew eventually they might get
it, so they came up with the rolling rent strike.
In this scenario, the tenants pay rent one month
and then withhold it the next, then pay again,
then withhold. They toggle it. They're turning
it on and off. They toggle it month by month.
Or sometimes they rotate which tenants are paying
and which aren't. Why? I mean, that sounds like
a headache for everyone involved. It's a massive
headache, and that is precisely the point. The
goal is to confuse the legal process. It's like
you're gaslighting the accounting department.
Essentially, yes. Think about it from the landlord's
perspective. You prepare eviction papers for
non -payment for, say, month A. Right. By the
time you get a court date, the tenant has paid
for month A, but now they haven't paid for month
B. So your whole case for month A is moot. You
have to start the paperwork all over again. Oh,
that is wicked. You're always one step behind.
It keeps the landlord in a state of absolute
uncertainty regarding their cash flow. They can't
predict their revenue from one month to the next.
And the courts get clogged with all these confusing,
half -resolved cases. You weaponize bureaucracy
against the person who usually uses bureaucracy
against you. Precisely. It turns the predictability
of rent, which is the only thing banks and landlords
really care about, into a variable. And frankly,
it protects the tenant a little bit more than
a total refusal because they can always argue
in court that they have been paying. Just inconsistently.
That is next level strategy. Yeah. But let's
back up to the why. We know how they do it. But
what pushes people to this point, I assume the
rent is too damn high, is, you know, reason number
one. High or rising rent is definitely the most
common trigger, certainly. We see that again
and again throughout history. But looking at
the record, poor maintenance is a massive, massive
driver. We're talking about unsafe, unhygienic
conditions. The classic slumlord scenario. Right.
Rats, mold, no heat in the winter, holes in the
floor, sewage backups, things that make a home
unlivable. But also just general housing insecurity,
the fear that you could be kicked out at any
moment for no reason. But the notes also mention
that sometimes it goes beyond the building itself.
Absolutely. And this is where the rent strike
connects the micro to the macro. Sometimes the
strike isn't just about the boiler being broken.
It's about civil rights. It's about social housing
policy. It's about challenging the entire political
status quo. Which we're going to see later on
when we get to places like South Africa. But
let's go way back to the beginning. The sources
have this section called Roots of Rebellion.
And I was shocked to see a date that starts with
14. Yes, the 15th century. Are you telling me
that medieval peasants were doing rent strikes?
In a sense, yes. We have evidence from the 15th
century in these things called arrears lists,
which are basically the accounting books of the
feudal lords. Okay. And there's a specific Latin
phrase that the scribes would note down. My high
school Latin is non -existent. What's that mean?
It translates literally to because the tenants
refused to pay. As simple as that. Simple as
that. It wasn't that they couldn't pay. They
refused to pay. And the really important part
is that it's written in the plural tenentes.
Exactly. It implies a group, a collective refusal
right there, recorded in the Lord's own ledger.
So this act of withholding payment as a group
is centuries old. It seems that as long as there
have been landlords, there have been tenants
figuring out how to say no. That's wild. But
the modern rent strike, the kind where you have
picket lines and banners and that sort of thing,
that comes later. That really accelerates with
industrialization and urbanization in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Because suddenly
you have masses of people cramming into cities,
living in buildings owned by strangers rather
than, you know, working a plot of land for a
local lord. The relationship changes. It becomes
anonymous. It's transactional. It becomes transactional
and much more concentrated. But there's this
fascinating American example. that kind of bridges
that gap between the feudal style and the modern
urban style, the anti -rent war in New York State.
The anti -rent war, that sounds like a movie
I'd definitely miss. This was 1839. 1839 to 1845,
upstate New York in the Helderberg Mountains
area. Okay, set the scene for us. Why was there
a war in upstate New York? So even though this
is America in the 19th century, You know, the
land of the free upstate New York was essentially
operating under a feudal system. It was called
the manor system, and it was run by these figures
called patroons. Patroons. That sounds very Dutch.
It was a holdover from the Dutch colonial days.
These huge tracts of land were owned by a single
family, the patroon. And the people living there,
the farmers, they didn't own their farms. They
owed labor, crops and rent to the manor lord.
It was basically medieval Europe. In 1840s America.
That's incredible. Yes. And eventually the tenants
just said, this is un -American. We fought a
whole revolution to get away from kings and lords.
So they declared independence from the manor
system. And how did that go over? Did they just
stop paying? It got violent. They formed armed
bands. They actually disguised themselves as
calico Indians wearing masks and these calico
dresses to hide their identities. Wow. They used
tin horns to signal each other across the valleys.
And they would resist tax collectors and sheriffs,
often physically preventing them from selling
off farms for unpaid rent. So it wasn't just
we're not paying. It was we are physically blocking
you from enforcing the debt. Exactly. And the
amazing thing is they won. They won. against
a system that had been in place for centuries.
They successfully demanded land reform. The state
constitution was eventually amended to abolish
this kind of feudal tenure. It was a massive
victory against a semi -feudal aristocracy right
here in New York. That's incredible. It really
shows that even these deeply ingrained systems
of property can be overturned if the resistance
is fierce enough. So it starts in the fields,
but then it moves into the city. Let's talk about
New York City in the early 1900s. The sources
mentioned a couple of really big strikes, 1904
and 1907. The 1904 strike was the first mass
rent strike in New York City. You had about 2
,000 families striking over rising rents, and
they actually won some rent reductions. It proved
the concept could work in the dense urban tenements.
But then 1907 happens, and the scale just jumps.
1907 was a massive, massive escalation. We're
talking 10 ,000 families in lower Manhattan.
That's not a protest. That's a small army. And
speaking of armies, the general of this army
is someone I had never heard of. But now I'm
completely fascinated by her. Pauline Newman.
Pauline Newman, yes. You have to picture this.
She was 20 years old. 20. At 20, I was barely
managing my own laundry. She was a Jewish immigrant,
a teenager really, working in the garment industry.
And she organized these 10 ,000 families. The
newspapers called her the new Joan of Arc. I
love that image. A 20 -year -old leading 10 ,000
families against the powerful landlords of New
York. And this wasn't just men, right? The sources
make a big point about the role of women. Oh,
that's a crucial theme that runs through almost
all of these stories. Housing has historically
been the domain of women, especially in this
era. How so? Well, the men were at work in the
factories. The women were the ones at home dealing
with the rent collector, the broken stove, the
leaking roof, the sick kids. They were on the
front lines of the housing crisis. So it makes
sense they'd be on the front lines of the resistance.
Exactly. So when the resistance started, it was
often led by housewives and women working in
the garment industry, like Pauline Newman. And
what was the result in 1907? Did they win? It
was mixed but significant. About 2 ,000 of those
10 ,000 families won rent reductions. It showed
that even the poorest, most marginalized populations,
immigrant women, garment workers could force
concessions from property owners if they banded
together. It really put the landlords on notice.
And this wasn't just a New York thing. The sources
say that around the exact same time, 1907, we
see something similar happening down in Argentina.
Yes, down in Buenos Aires. It's almost simultaneous,
which is fascinating. They had these tenement
houses. house is called Convendios. Convendios.
And the strike there was massive. 32 ,000 workers
were involved. And the sources note a heavy presence
of anarchists and socialists. So it's very political
from the start. Very. This goes back to what
we said about the macro issues. This wasn't just
about rent. For them, it was about class struggle.
They saw the landlord as the ultimate symbol
of capitalism, exploiting the worker at their
most vulnerable point, their home. So the early
20th century is really heating up. You have New
York, you have Argentina. But then we hit World
War I. And this, to me, is one of the most cinematic
stories in our entire stack of research. Glasgow,
1915, Mrs. Barber's army. This is arguably one
of the most famous and most successful rent strikes
in history. Understand it. You have to understand
the context of Glasgow in 1915. The war is raging.
The war is raging. It's the height of WWI. And
thousands upon thousands of workers are flooding
into Glasgow because the city's shipyards are
building the dreadnoughts and cruisers for the
Royal Navy. So it's the engine room of the war
effort. Absolutely. So housing is incredibly
scarce because everyone is moving there for these
vital jobs. And at the same time, most of the
local men, the husbands, the fathers, the sons,
are away fighting in the trenches in France.
Exactly. So you have a severe housing shortage
and the households that are left are mostly run
by women. And the landlords saw an opportunity.
A huge one. It's cynical, but they viewed these
women as easy targets. They started raising rents,
sometimes by up to 25%. They just figured the
men are gone. These women will just pay up or
get out. They have no protection. Big mistake.
Huge mistake. They completely underestimated
the women of Govan and Partick, specifically
women like Mary Barber, Mary Burns Laird, Helen
Crawford, and Agnes Dolan. This is Barber's army.
They organized a resistance that was incredibly
physical. It wasn't about writing letters to
the editor or filing complaints. This was direct
action. The details here are hilarious and also
awesome. It says they used visceral physical
resistance. They did. They had a system. The
women in the tenements would sit in their windows
with bells. And if they saw a bailiff, that's
the officer sent to evict someone approaching
the street, they'd start ringing the bells. It's
an alarm system. It's an alarm system. And suddenly
hundreds of women would pour out into the street.
And they were armed. Armed with what? Not guns,
I assume? No, no. Armed with flower bombs, wet
clothes, and general refuse. So imagine being
a bailiff. You're just trying to serve a notice,
and you get pelted with a sack of flour and last
night's dinner scraps. And it gets even more
humiliating for them. The sources mention a very
specific tactic. They would pull down the bailiff's
trousers. Stop. They pantsed the officers of
the court. They pantsed them. In the middle of
the street, in front of the whole neighborhood.
In some cases, they would physically pick them
up and throw them into the midden, which is the
communal trash heap in the backcourt of the tenement.
I mean, the psychological impact of that, it's
not just resistance, it's total humiliation.
It's saying, your authority means nothing here.
You're a joke. It sends a very, very clear message.
You cannot enforce an eviction if you are being
laughed at and covered in garbage. But the real
genius of Mrs. Barber... And the other organizers
was that they knew this physical resistance wouldn't
be enough on its own. They needed more leverage.
Exactly. The strike had to spread beyond the
tenements. And it did. It went to the shipyards.
That is the ultimate nuclear leverage we talked
about earlier. The women went to the shipyards
where their sons and brothers and neighbors were
working on these vital warships. And the shipbuilders,
in solidarity, threatened to go on strike. They
said, if you evict our families from their homes,
we stop building ships for the war. And there's
a war on. They are building the very ships that
are fighting the Germans. Precisely. The government
in London panicked. They absolutely could not
afford a labor strike in the munitions sector.
It was a direct threat to national security.
Lloyd George, who was the minister of munitions
at the time, basically got on the phone and said,
fix this now. So the landlords weren't just fighting
a bunch of angry tenants anymore. They were suddenly
fighting the entire British Empire's war effort.
They were. The balance of power shifted completely.
So on November 27, 1915, the government rushed
through legislation specifically to restrict
rents to pre -war levels. The 1915 Rent Restrictions
Act. It was a total victory for the tenants.
And it happened because of that incredible solidarity.
There was even a famous protest where thousands
of workers marched to the court to support five
women who'd been summoned for nonpayment. The
crowd was so huge and angry, the sheriff had
to dismiss the case just to prevent a riot. That
is such a powerful example of how housing issues
can ripple out into the wider economy and even
national security. If you push tenants too hard,
you might accidentally shut down a shipyard.
Exactly. It proves that housing is infrastructure.
If the housing isn't stable, the workforce isn't
stable. Okay, so let's move forward a bit. The
war ends, but the strikes don't. We enter the
interwar years and things get cold. Very, very
cold. We're back in New York City, 1918 to 1920.
What's the context here? The war is over. The
war is over, but you have a housing shortage
caused by it. And on top of that, you have a
severe coal shortage. It was a brutal winter
and landlords were either running out of coal
or in some cases refusing to buy it because the
price had spiked so high. So they just stopped
heating the buildings in New York winter. Yes,
but they kept raising the rents. You're literally
freezing to death and you're paying more for
the privilege. That sounds like a recipe for
a riot. It spurred what were called the freezing
flat strikes. It actually began as a safety issue.
People were getting sick, literally dying of
pneumonia in their own apartments. So the strike
morphed from give us heat to we will not pay
you rent until we get heat. And the scale here
seems massive as well. We're talking tens, maybe
hundreds of thousands of tenants involved across
the city. It forced the state to act. And this
led directly to the passage of emergency rent
laws in New York. Why is that historically significant?
Because these were essentially the nation's first
comprehensive rent control measures. They stayed
in place all the way until 1929. So if you live
in a rent -stabilized apartment in New York City
today, the DNA of those laws comes directly from
these freezing tenants in 1918. It's amazing
how these acute moments of crisis write the laws
that we live by a century later. And it happens
again in Chicago just a year later, 1920 -1921.
Another series of strikes there led to the Kessinger
Tenant Laws. But there's a really specific detail
in the Chicago Victory that I love. The heat
ordinance. Yes. They passed a city ordinance
requiring landlords to keep flats above 68 degrees
Fahrenheit during the winter. 68 degrees. So
that's where that number comes from. If you rent
an apartment in Chicago today, or really in many
U .S. cities, there is a legal requirement for
a minimum temperature. That rate exists because
people went on strike for it in 1921. It defines
the baseline standard of living. It says you
cannot legally charge rent for an icebox. And
these weren't just happening. the U .S. The sources
mentioned Barcelona in 1931. A massive strike.
The numbers are hard to pin down, but estimates
range from 5 ,000 to 100 ,000 people on strike.
Wow. But it wasn't always a win, though. We have
to be honest about the risks. The source mentions
Sweden in the 1930s. Right. The Olskroken conflict
in Gothenburg, 1936 -37. Sweden seems like a
place that would have strong tenant protections.
It does now. But back then it was a huge battle.
The tenants went on strike, but the landlords
were very organized and they retaliated heavily.
What happened? What did they do? They just started
evicting people en masse. Hundreds of tenants
were put out of their homes. The landlords had
the resources to wait them out and the full backing
of the legal system to remove them. Ouch. So
the tenants lost. The tenants ultimately lost
that conflict. Yeah. And it signaled the end
of tenant militancy in that region for quite
a long time. It's a really sobering reminder
that collective action doesn't guarantee a win.
the opposition has leverage, too. Right. It's
not a magic wand. And sometimes a win isn't even
about the rent check at all. As we move into
the 1960s and the civil rights era in the U .S.,
the rent strike starts to look different. It's
not just, I can't pay. It's, I won't pay because
you are stripping me of my basic human dignity.
The shift in the 1960s is profound. You look
at Harlem in 1963 and 64. This strike was led
by an organizer named Jesse Gray. Jesse Gray.
He was a brilliant organizer. And he realized...
that for the tenants in Harlem, the issue wasn't
just the dollar amount on the lease. It was the
rats. It was the falling plaster. It was the
unlivable, dangerous conditions. He famously
brought a cage full of rats to a court hearing
to show the judge what his tenants were living
with every day. That's effective. Yeah. It's
a very visceral way of asserting that a lease
is a two -way street. You pay money, you get
a habitable home. If the home isn't habitable,
the money stops. Exactly. And this philosophy,
this tactic. was picked up by the biggest name
in the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King
Jr. You know, I think a lot of people know MLK
for the marches and the speeches, I have a dream,
voting rights. But I had no idea he was so deeply
involved in housing specifically. This was the
Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Yes. Dr. King
knew that civil rights meant very little if you
were forced to live in squalor. Economic justice
was central to his vision. So he and Karata Scott
King did something remarkable. They actually
moved into a slum apartment on the west side
of Chicago, 1312 South Holman Avenue. They moved
in themselves. They moved in. They wanted to
experience the conditions firsthand and, just
as importantly, expose them to the national media.
It was sweltering in the summer, freezing in
the winter, and the conditions were shocking
even to them. Talk about walking the walk. And
they tried a very innovative tactic called trusteeship.
The idea was that the tenants would clean up
the building themselves, they would claim trusteeship
over the property, and then they would pay their
rent to their own organization, the Freedom Movement,
to use for repairs rather than paying the landlord
who was neglecting the building. That sounds
incredibly logical. You won't fix it, so we'll
fix it with your money. Logical, yes. But legally,
very, very difficult. Did it work? The landlord
actually sued them and won in court. It really
highlights how the law is so often written to
protect property rights over tenant rights, even
when the conditions are horrific. The judge basically
said, I don't care how bad the landlord is, you
can't just take over the building. So it was
a legal loss, but was it a moral victory? It
was a massive moral victory. It brought national
attention to the issue of urban slums. It forced
the city of Chicago to confront its housing problems.
And it paved the way for later housing reforms
and the Fair Housing Act. But around the exact
same time, we have a much clearer victory out
in California. And this wasn't city apartments.
This was farm workers. Yes, the two -layer labor
camps from 1965 to 1968. The story is intense.
We're talking about the National Farm Workers
Association, which would become the UFW. Exactly.
And these workers were living in what were just
called tin houses. Literally tin huts. Metal
shacks in the blazing California heat. No insulation,
terrible sanitation. They had actually been deemed
uninhabitable by the county, but the rent just
kept going up. So the growers who own the land
were just treating the housing as another tool
to extract money from the workers. It was part
of the system of control. So they struck. For
how long? They struck for three years. Three
years. Yeah. How do you sustain a rent strike
for three years? It takes an incredible amount
of community cohesion and just pure grit, but
they won. They stopped the rent increases and
eventually those tin huts were torn down and
replaced with actual new houses. It's such a
stark example of how even the most vulnerable
workers, migrant farm laborers could stand up
to powerful agricultural interests if they held
the line. We also see rent strikes being used
in these really intense political conflicts like
the troubles in Northern Ireland. Yes. It was
used as a direct protest against internment,
which was imprisonment without trial. People
would withhold their rent and council rates from
the local councils to deny the government revenue.
So it was a way of defunding the state that was
oppressing them. Exactly. It turns a household
bill into a weapon of political protest. And
South Africa in the 1980s. This is maybe the
ultimate example of the political rent strike.
In South Africa, the rent strike was an explicit
weapon against apartheid. The goal wasn't just
better housing. The goal was to end the entire
regime. They wanted to gain ownership of their
housing and cripple the state's control over
the townships. And the state responded with force,
I assume? Oh, yes. They sent troops into Soweto
in 1987. It was treated as an insurrection. It
was a war zone. But here is the incredible thing.
By the 1990s, the state officials effectively
stopped trying to collect. They just gave up.
They gave up. The system simply could not process
that level of mass noncompliance. Thousands of
housing units were effectively turned over to
the tenants because there was no way to force
them to pay. It goes right back to that nuclear
option idea we started with. You can evict one
person. You can maybe evict 10. Can you evict
an entire township? No. When the noncompliance
is total, the enforcement mechanism breaks down.
It proves that the entire system relies on our
cooperation. And when we withdraw that cooperation,
the gears just grind to a halt. So we've covered
a lot of history, but I want to bring this into
the present day because people might be listening
and thinking, oh, rent strikes are a black and
white photo thing. They happen in history books.
Right. But they're happening right now. And interestingly,
one of the hot bits for them is at universities.
This is a newer trend, and it's really interesting
to look at. Take UCL University College London.
Between 2015 and 2018, you saw a huge movement
called Cut the Rent. Why were students striking?
I mean, student housing is notoriously bad, but
usually you just suffer through it for a year
and then you leave. That's the usual pattern.
But the rents at UCL and other London universities
were becoming astronomical. And the conditions
were still terrible. Mice, flooding, the usual
nightmares. But you're paying premium London
prices for it. So the students argued that the
university was acting like a corporate landlord,
not an educational institution. Exactly. Exploiting
them for profit rather than providing a service.
So they organized. And how big did it get? It
started small. Just 60 students in one hall.
But it grew to over 1 ,000 students across the
university. And yes, they won hundreds of thousands
of pounds in concessions and rent freezes. Eventually,
the total figure cited is over 1 .5 million pounds.
That is real money. That is a significant victory.
And the campaign spread to other UK universities,
too. It shows that the student demographic, which
is often seen as transient and hard to organize,
can actually wield significant power. They realize
they're not just students, they're also tenants
and they're customers and they have collective
bargaining power. There's also a very recent
example here in North America, in Toronto Thorncliffe
Park from 2023 into 2024. This one is a classic
case. The landlords wanted an above guideline
rent increase about 5 .5 % and they were citing
renovations they'd done in the common areas.
The lobby looks great, but my sink is still broken.
That's exactly it. Meanwhile, the tenants were
claiming that their actual apartment issues,
the real maintenance problems, were being completely
ignored. So what tactic did they use? They used
a tactic where they paid their rent into a trust
held by the landlord and tenant board. It's a
sort of formal, legal way of saying, we have
the money, we are willing to pay, but not until
you justify this increase and address our concerns.
It's a more Modern, bureaucratically savvy version
of the old escrow account. I just want to mention
one more from the UK Kirkby in 1972, because
it brings us right back to that powerful theme
of women leading the charge. The Tower Hill estate.
A 14 -month strike by 3 ,000 tenants. 14 months.
The sheer endurance of these groups is just mind
-blowing to me. It really is. And this was led
by the Unfair Rents Action Group, which was comprised
mostly of women. The context was a factory closure
crisis that hit the town hard, and it coincided
with a big national rent hike. So a perfect storm
of economic hardship. A perfect storm. It was
a fight for survival. They picketed. They marched.
They physically blocked evictions for over a
year. It wasn't just about the rent increase.
It was about protecting their entire community
from dissolving. So we've looked at all these
examples from medieval England to modern Toronto,
but there's a section in our notes called the
silence in history. And this really struck me.
Why don't we learn about this in school? We learn
about labor strikes. We learn about coal miners
and factory workers. Why is the rent strike so
often treated differently or just ignored? It's
a great question. And I think part of it is just
the nature of the record keeping. Rent strikes
often rely heavily on a word of mouth and community
organizing. Unlike big labor unions that have
archives and newsletters and professional historians,
tenant groups are often ad hoc. They form to
fix a specific problem and then they might dissolve.
Exactly. They form, they fight, they win or lose
and they dissolve. And historically, who writes
the history? It's not the tenants. The records
we do have are often from the police. So they
focus on the disturbance, the riot, not the underlying
conditions that caused it. Right. You see the
arrest record, but you don't see the freezing
apartment that led to the protest. You see the
action, not the reason. That's a perfect way
to put it. Also, traditionally, historians analyze
this only as a subset of the labor movement.
It was seen as workers' issues, but secondary
to what happened on the factory floor. But since
the Great Recession of 2008, there's been a real
shift. Academics are starting to look at housing
movements as a standalone field of study in its
own right. That makes a lot of sense. As the
gig economy grows and the nature of traditional
labor changes, you know, not everyone works in
a factory anymore. The one thing that connects
almost everyone is the need for a roof over their
head. Precisely. For many people, the home is
the new factory floor in terms of economic struggle.
Rent is the biggest bill most people pay every
month. So the conflict naturally moves there.
So when we step back and look at this entire
history. What's the big picture? What does this
all mean? I think if we connect all these dots,
it reveals a fundamental tension in our society.
The tension between property rights and human
needs. The right to make a profit from your property
versus the right to not freeze to death in your
apartment. Bluntly put, yes. A rent strike forces
that question out into the open. It challenges
the assumption that the ownership of property
is an absolute, unquestionable right. It asserts
that the tenant, the person actually living in
the space, has a stake and a voice in the conditions
of their own existence. It's really about dignity.
It is about leverage and dignity. It reminds
us that laws and contracts are not forces of
nature like gravity. They are agreements made
by people. And when the terms of those agreements
become unlivable, history shows again and again
that people will find ways to break them. And
that leads me to a final thought I've been mulling
over listening to all this. We talked about the
hidden history, the straits that didn't get recorded.
The ones that didn't make the newspapers. Quiet
rebellions. Yeah, exactly. If so many of these
massive history -changing strikes went unrecorded
simply because tenants didn't keep meticulous
records, how many are happening right now? How
many small buildings or duplexes or neighborhoods
are in some quiet state of rebellion that we
won't know about for decades? It's a very provocative
thought. The history of this kind of resistance
is likely so much larger than the history we
have written down. We only see the ones that
exploded into the public view. We don't see the
thousands of small ones that were settled in
a quiet, tense conversation after a check didn't
arrive on the first of the month. Something to
think about the next time you sign that lease.
You might be stepping into a history you didn't
even know existed. Indeed. That's it for this
deep dive. Thanks for listening. And keep looking
closely at the world around you. You never know
what you'll find in the fine print.