The East Side Tenants Council was a community organization founded to advocate for tenants rights on the Lower East Side of New York City during the mid-20th century. It was a local affiliate of the Metropolitan Council on Housing.
The council's roots could be traced to the 1930s tenant activism of members of Communist Party and American Labor Party and neighborhood-based opposition to Robert Moses' reimagining of New York City. Tenants were organized at the building level for actions to stabilize or lower rent and to improve the physical condition of the often-dilapidated housing stock. Because the tenant-landlord relationship in New York City was strictly regulated, much of the advocacy took the form of navigating the paperwork of the city's bureaucracy on tenants' behalf. The council also provided assistance to individual tenants and ran housing clinics.
From the guide to the East Side Tenants Council Records, Bulk, 1955-1970, 1937-1975, (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive)
