The right to affordable housing in New York City: The case of Stuyvesant Town and the conflict over rent control

The towering apartment blocks of Stuyvesant Town were occupied for barely a decade when Henri Lefebvre’s influential essay The Right to the City was published; and from the housing project’s inception Stuyvesant Town has been an unlikely site for struggles over inhabitance and social justice. Located along the East River above New York’s 14^th Street in the former Gashouse District, the 28-acre parcel was targeted for redevelopment by Robert Moses as part of the city’s post-war plans. Using an early model of Public-Private Partnership, residents of the Gashouse District were displaced to make way for the initially whites-only affordable housing project. Assisted by New York’s rent stabilization legislation, Stuyvesant Town persisted as an option for affordable housing (by New York standards) through to the early 2000s, when owners MetLife attempted to sell the property and convert the housing units to market-rate rentals. An unlikely coalition of residents mobilized to block the sale, and by the late 2000s rent controls were reestablished in Stuyvesant Town.

The Stuyvesant Town case brings together significant themes related to social justice and housing including rent stabilization legislation, community activism, and neoliberal marketization strategies. We evaluate the utility of the Right to the City perspective for understanding the struggle for affordable housing. In particular, we question the extent to which Lefebvre’s portrayal of a Right to the City conforms to the Stuyvesant Town context, since the movement to protect affordable housing was in this instance led by residents who are not the traditional working-class ‘agents, social carriers, or supporters’ associated with his concept. While remaining sympathetic to Souza’s critique over the vulgarization of the Right to the City concept, we argue a focus on rights can transcend both a limited ‘politics of turf’ and empty ‘rights talk’ to create space for broadly empowered and inclusive communities.