It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They __elped get rid of the riffraff,_ some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a __lass_ with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not __rice gouging._ In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country__ strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience__his kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
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Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They __elped get rid of the riffraff,_ some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.In years past, renters opposed landlords and saw themselves as a __lass_ with shared interests and a unified purpose. During the early twentieth century, tenants organized against evictions and unsanitary conditions. When landlords raised rents too often or too steeply, tenants went so far as to stage rent strikes. Strikers joined together to withhold rent and form picket lines, risking eviction, arrest, and beatings by hired thugs. They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not __rice gouging._ In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country__ strongest to this day.Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience__his kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision.
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