| Abbreviation | Met Council |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1959 |
| Type | 501(c) organization |
| Legal status | Active |
| Headquarters | New York City |
Region served | New York City |
| Darius Gordon |
| Part of a series on |
| Living spaces |
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The Metropolitan Council on Housing (also referred to as Met Council) is a tenant rights organization in New York City founded in 1959. [1] As the oldest and largest tenants' organization in the city," [2] [3] it has focused on issues including rent regulation and affordable public housing. [4]
The Met Council came together in 1959 as a coalition of twenty tenant councils. [5] The initial founders of the Met Council included Jane Benedict, who had been involved with her neighborhood housing organization, Yorkville Save Our Homes Committee. In response to a need for low-cost, integrated public housing, the Committee organized in their own neighborhood and then merged with other neighborhood-based tenant organizations to form the Metropolitan Council on Housing. [4] The need for said housing was largely catalyzed by a federal program known as “urban renewal.” [1] Though it was promoted as a solution to the grievances posed by tenant organizers regarding limited affordable housing options, urban renewal contrarily led to “the demolition of many working-class neighborhoods, the dislocation of 500,000 new yorkers, and the replacement of their low-rent homes with highways, middle-income housing, and elite cultural facilities such as the Lincoln Center.” [1] The evictions that resulted from urban renewal, commonly in predominantly Black areas, stimulated a rise in tenant movements that eventually became the Metropolitan Council on Housing.
The housing movement in New York City was noted in this era for the prevalence of women in leadership, including at the Met Council; [6] in addition to Jane Benedict, other founders included Esther T. Rand [7] and Frances Goldin, [1] and other women in leadership roles early in the organization's existence included Mrs. Juan Sanchez [8] and Marie Runyon. [1] Leadership was also integrated at the Council's founding; Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality Director and later congressman Major Owens noted that he had learned much from his organizing work with Met Council. [1]
Founder Jane Benedict continued to work for forty years in various capacities with the Met Council; she fought for broader implementation of rent control and rent stabilization, and for the preservation of low income housing units. [9]
The initial headquarters of the Met Council were at 2050 2nd Avenue, New York. [8] Council offices later moved to 339 Lafayette Street, also known as the Peace Pentagon. [10] [11]
Early work by the newly-formed Met Council included a 1959 campaign to remove Robert Moses from his position with the Committee on Slum Clearance. They distributed 100,000 leaflets detailing Moses' failure to appropriately administer the Title 1 program. [8]
Work against slum clearance continued into the following decade and included publication of the 1964 report, A Citizen's Survey of Available Land, which detailed space in New York City available for the construction of low-rent housing without clearing existing housing. [12] Met Council put pressure on the city to take ownership of abandoned buildings, rather than just knock them down. [1]
Throughout the 1960s, the Met Council lobbied to keep rent increases low on rent controlled units. This work included the publication of a 1961 report, The Harmful Effects of a Rent Increase, which detailed how increased rents could in fact increase vacancy rates as a result of increased cohabitation, while current rent controlled units provided landlords with a good return on their investment. This came in the face of lobbies from real estate interests for a 15 percent increase on the cost of rent controlled units. [13] They continued to campaign in 1963 for more low-rent housing, instead of rent increases, as a solution to housing shortages in New York City. [5] In 1968, they published The Case for Overall Rent Control. [14] Work of the Met Council during this era was noted for its efforts to ensure low-cost housing for minority groups. [12]
Met Council's work in the 1970s also included support of squatter-led actions through Operation Move-In, which continued the Council's earlier work against slum clearance and in advocacy for rehabilitation of abandoned buildings. [1] It then took part, alongside representatives from the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and I Wor Kuen, in hosting a Peoples' Court Housing Crimes Trial, which famously put the city on trial for the affordable housing crisis, with representatives from each organization presenting witness testimonials. [1] [15] [16] [17] This action was noted for its use of performative aspects of protest, and the way it successfully attracted media attention. [18]
This work on the Housing Crimes Trial showcased general improvements in the Metropolitan Council on Housing's use of media in its organizing work; the Council began to also hold workshops for tenant organizations on how to garner publicity and present their concerns in the media, and published Techniques and Devices to Get Your Press Release into Print. [19]
After Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller enacted a 1971 law that put rent regulation under state control and would remove apartments from rent control as tenants moved out of them, the Met Council issued a call for widespread rent strikes and hosted workshops for tenants on how they could organize rent strikes in their own buildings. [20] Jane Benedict and the Met Council had fought this move and its subsequent management of rent controlled units through a computer system designed to manage rent increases; they called instead for Federal rent control legislation that would have a national scope and broader tenant protections. [21]
In 1979, in the face of tenants losing apartments because of landlords who wished to enforce roommate occupancy violations, the Met Council spoke up about the need for rent laws to change along with changing living customs in New York City. [22]
Metropolitan Council on Housing joined with other local organizations, including New York Public Interest Group and the Sierra Club, in 1985 to form the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning, specifically to target lead poisoning but more broadly to tackle problems at the intersection of environmental issues and population health. [23]
In 1988, the organization's Co-Chairwoman, Susan Radosh, spoke up against Governor Mario Cuomo's proposal to combine rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments into a single regulation system. [24]
After four decades of work the Metropolitan Council on Housing needed to shift some of its campaigning in response to new issues in New York City's affordable rental landscape, including organizing against rezoning that would impact low cost housing availability. However, the Council's main focus has remained supporting tenant organizations. [25]
The Council is a partner in the Real Rent Reform Campaign. [26] [27] [28] In 2016, Ava Farkas, Executive Director of the Met Council, [29] spoke out against New York City's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policies rolled out by Mayor Bill de Blasio, linking this policy to increases in gentrification in New York City. [30]
The Council currently provides advice to tenants on their legal rights through online resources, a telephone hotline, [31] a walk-in clinic, [32] and a free, bilingual newspaper,Tenant/Inquilino. [33] It also provides data related to tenant practices and behavior in New York City. [34]
During the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, the Council joined a group called Housing Justice for All, which included various organizations and tenant organizers. The group called for an eviction moratorium in New York [35] and offered training to tenants who wanted to organize rent strikes. [36] On March 20, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a 90-day moratorium on evictions. [35]
Early activism of the Metropolitan Council on Housing was noted for its intersectionality; in the 1960s it advocated for an end to the Vietnam War, and leadership was invited to testify at a 1970 state commission hearing on women's rights. [1]
Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has been used to describe a wide array of phenomena, usually in a pejorative connotation.
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe, were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The complex of 33 eleven-story high rises was designed in the modernist architectural style by Minoru Yamasaki. At the time of opening, it was one of the largest public housing developments in the country. It was constructed with federal funds on the site of a former slum as part of the city's urban renewal program. Despite being legally integrated, it almost exclusively accommodated African Americans.
In the United States, rent control refers to laws or ordinances that set price controls on the rent of residential housing to function as a price ceiling. More loosely, "rent control" describes several types of price control:
A housing cooperative, or housing co-op, is a legal entity, usually a cooperative or a corporation, which owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Typically housing cooperatives are owned by shareholders but in some cases they can be owned by a non-profit organization. They are a distinctive form of home ownership that have many characteristics that differ from other residential arrangements such as single family home ownership, condominiums and renting.
Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937, often called Section 8, as repeatedly amended, authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of low-income households in the United States. 68% of total rental assistance in the United States goes to seniors, children, and those with disabilities. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development manages Section 8 programs.
A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent en masse until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord. This can be a useful tactic of final resort for use against intransigent landlords, but carries the risk of eviction and lowered credit scores in some cases.
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum – from emergency homeless shelters, to transitional housing, to non-market rental, to formal and informal rental, indigenous housing, and ending with affordable home ownership.
Knickerbocker Village Limited is a housing development in Manhattan, New York City. It is situated between the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge, in the Two Bridges section of the Lower East Side. Although the location was generally considered to fall in the Lower East Side, it has come to be thought of as part of Chinatown in recent years and the majority of residents are Chinese. It is located a short distance from New York City Hall, Civic Center, and the South Street Seaport. The complex consists of 1,590 apartments in twelve 13-story brick buildings surrounding two courtyards.
The Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) is a municipal authority providing Public housing services in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Coalition for Economic Survival (CES) is a grassroots, non-profit community organization. CES works in the greater Los Angeles area to influence policy makers to improve the lives of low and moderate income people.
Rent regulation is a system of laws, administered by a court or a public authority, which aims to ensure the affordability of housing and tenancies on the rental market for dwellings. Generally, a system of rent regulation involves:
Janet Freeman was an American community organizer and activist for tenant's rights in New York City's lower Manhattan. On June 20, 2013, the corner of Elizabeth Street and Kenmare Street was co-named "Janet Freeman Way" by the New York City Council in her memory and to commemorate her activism on behalf of the community. According to NYC Streets in its listing of street names and their honorees, "Janet Freeman was a community organizer and tenant advocate. She founded the Croman Tenants Association; the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and Section 8; and Co-op Watch, to prevent evictions through phony conversions. She started campaigns to organize tenants against aggressive landlords, phony demolitions, and harassment in and around Chinatown and Little Italy."
The Costa–Hawkins Rental Housing Act ("Costa–Hawkins") is a California state law, enacted in 1995, which places limits on municipal rent control ordinances. Costa–Hawkins preempts the field in two major ways. First, it prohibits cities from establishing rent control over certain kinds of residential units, e.g., single-family dwellings and condominiums, and newly constructed apartment units; these are deemed exempt. Second, it prohibits "vacancy control", also called "strict" rent control. The legislation was sponsored by Democratic Senator Jim Costa and Republican Assemblymember Phil Hawkins.
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.
The gentrification of San Francisco has been an ongoing source of tension between renters and working people who live in the city as well as real estate interests. A result of this conflict has been an emerging antagonism between longtime working-class residents of the city and the influx of new tech workers. A major increase of gentrification in San Francisco has been attributed to the Dot-Com Boom in the 1990s, creating a strong demand for skilled tech workers from local startups and close by Silicon Valley businesses leading to rising standards of living. As a result, a large influx of new workers in the internet and technology sector began to contribute to the gentrification of historically poor immigrant neighborhoods such as the Mission District. During this time San Francisco began a transformation eventually culminating in it becoming the most expensive city to live in the United States.
Operation Move-In was a housing and squatter rights movement of the 1970s. The movement consisted of various anti-poverty and community organizations in New York City, including Metropolitan Council on Housing. It was an early example of New York City squatter activism, which strengthened in the 1980s, and helped publicize tenant rights.
Frances Axler Goldin was a housing rights activist and literary agent in New York City. She was a founding member of the Metropolitan Council on Housing and the Cooper Square Committee. Beginning in 1959, she led a successful campaign to defeat an urban renewal plan of Robert Moses, which would have replaced historic, affordable housing with a freeway in the Lower East Side. For decades, Goldin was associated with the Lower East Side, where she was a neighborhood preservationist and community figure. The 175 Essex Building of Essex Crossing is named in her honor, and she was profiled in the documentary It Took 50 Years.
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 in 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.
The 1904 New York City rent strike was the first mass rent strike in New York City. It took place in the Lower East Side in the Spring of 1904, spreading to 2,000 families across 800 tenements and lasting nearly a month. The strike was a response to proposed rent increases amid a housing shortage. It was primarily organized by local Jewish immigrant women with organizational strategies and language learned from the 1902 kosher meat boycott and the history of labor organizing in the area. Tenant organizers, socialists, and local labor unions united as the New York Protective Rent Association; women who had initially organized the strike such as Bertha Liebson were removed from leadership positions. The strike was successful in the short term, halting the majority of proposed rent increases for the following year. However, landlords began raising rents again a year later, leading to the 1907 New York City Rent Strike.
The term "affordable housing" refers to housing that is considered economically accessible for individuals and families whose household income falls at or below the Area Median Income (AMI), as evaluated by either national or local government authorities through an officially recognized housing affordability index. However, in the US, the term is mostly used to refer to housing units that are deed restricted to households considered Low-Income, Very Low-Income, and Extremely Low-Income. These units are most often constructed by non-profit "affordable housing developers" who use a combination of private money and government subsidies. For-profit developers, when building market-rate developments, may include some "affordable" units, if required as part of a city's inclusionary zoning mandate.
