renters

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.