Tenants in New York City are organizing for the city’s largest rent strike in decades, according to multiple reports online. The strikers are demanding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo cancel rent and mortgage payments for four months or for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, whichever is longer.
The strikers recently got a high-profile supporter. “People can’t pay,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Socilist Democrat from the Bronx, who is co-sponsoring a national bill to cancel rent, said on a call with strikers Monday.
“You cannot coerce someone into doing something that they cannot do. There is no money in the bank.”
“It’s not that it’s impossible to do and it’s not that we can’t do it,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a live video on her Facebook page on Monday. “We lack enough politicians with political will to actually help people who are tenants and actually help people who are mom-and-pop landlords.”
Renters account for about 68 percent of all households in New York City, compared to 36 percent nationally.
According to the NY Times, to cancel rent and mortgage payments, the federal government would have to take sweeping and possibly unconstitutional intervention in the housing and financial markets, interceding in private contracts and ordering banks and landlords not to collect money.
In response to rent strikes, some landlords are threatening a strike of their own.
According to The Real Deal, an online petition headlined “Property Tax relief or Tax strike” has collected nearly 1,400 signatures supporting a call for landlords to withhold their New York City property taxes. The Change.org petition blasts politicians for enabling tenants to not pay rent even if they can.