Rent strike syndrome: Ping Yuen tenants fight back

In the fall of 1978, tenants chained a motorcycle to a door in Chinatown’s Ping Yuen housing project, blocking access to the stairwell behind it. A few weeks earlier, that stairwell had been the site of a horrific and highly-publicized tragedy. At 10PM on August 23, 19-year-old seamstress Julia Wong was brutally murdered after a broken elevator forced her to climb the ten flights of stairs to her apartment. Wong’s assailant was a 33-year-old laborer who raped, strangled, and threw her down the stairwell. The killing shocked Chinatown. While the media eagerly used it as fodder for sensationalized reports about Chinatown crime, Ping Yuen tenants, already organized into a tenants association, demanded the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) make immediate security improvements. The SFHA balked, announcing that Ping Yuen would receive no such “special treatment.” With the blockading of the stairwell, the tenants announced their refusal to pay rent until their demands were met, kicking off the longest rent strike in San Francisco history.

When Ping Yuen (“Peaceful Gardens”) first opened its doors in 1951, it was heralded as a sign of a bright future for Chinatown, one free of the systematic discrimination that had characterized its 100-year history. Even after World War II, racist property laws and restrictive covenants imposed harsh limits on where San Francisco’s Chinese community could live, forcing them into Chinatown’s dangerously crowded living quarters. Slum conditions prevailed in the neighborhood, with infant mortality and tuberculosis rates among the highest in the country. In contrast to the tenements surrounding it, Ping Yuen was bright, spacious, and modern. At the same time, its architecture incorporated distinctive Chinese design elements, signaling that the neighborhood’s future prosperity would not come at the expense of its cultural identity.

Chinatown’s business elite started campaigning for public housing in the district as early as the 1930s, but it took the Chinese Revolution of 1949 for the federal government to make the necessary funds available. More than just badly needed housing, Ping Yuen was intended as a soft power weapon in the Cold War. In the words of the SFHA, it was to be “one of the best arguments against Communism in the Far East.” The housing project was a message directed to San Francisco’s Chinese community that their future (and therefore, their allegiances) belonged with the capitalist West rather than the newly socialist China.

The early days of tenant organizing at Ping Yuen were far from radical. Some of the project’s earliest activism came in reaction to calls by the NAACP and others to integrate Ping Yuen in line with federal and state anti-discrimination law. Many Ping Yuen tenants, themselves victims of San Francisco’s fierce racial segregation, fought hard to preserve their special access to the property at the expense of their Black neighbors (a stance which won them considerable praise in southern segregationist newspapers). Despite some considerable controversy, the project was allowed to persist as a non-integrated “special case.”

The project’s formal tenant organization, Ping Yuen Residents Improvement Association (PYRIA), was founded in 1966. Rather than an organic outgrowth of tenant activity, PYRIA was formed at the urging of the Chinatown-North Beach branch of the Economic Opportunity Council, a government agency created in 1964 as part of President Johnson’s War On Poverty. In its early years, PYRIA maintained a respectful, cooperative relationship with the SFHA. Its members attended Housing Authority meetings and organized occasional letter-writing campaigns to petition the city for improvements.

As the years wore on, Ping Yuen—once an establishment showpiece included on official city tourist guides—became a victim of the same neglect with which other public housing projects contended. As conditions deteriorated and crime surged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many in Chinatown became politicized by the era’s vibrant radical social movements. As young people in the neighborhood battled police at Chinese New Year parades and formed revolutionary organizations modeled on the Black Panther Party, Ping Yuen tenants transformed PYRIA into a fighting organization.

In 1976, faulty boilers left Ping Yuen without hot water. When residents petitioned the SFHA for repairs, the Authority dismissed their concerns, responding that the project’s women “drain[ed] the water” by washing their clothes too often. PYRIA responded with a petition of over 100 Ping Yuen tenants threatening to withhold rent unless the boilers were repaired. Almost immediately, the SFHA buckled and hot water was restored. Around the same time, PYRIA petitioned the city for new safety measures. Amid a rise in gang-related violence in Chinatown, Ping Yuen residents requested additional lighting, screens, and fences. Although money was allocated for the improvements, it went unspent for over 18 months.

When Julia Wong was murdered two years later, Ping Yuen tenants were aware of what collective action could win and were prepared to respond to tragedy with a fight. PYRIA prepared a list of safety-oriented demands for the SFHA, including repairs to the broken elevator (which would have kept Wong from walking 10 flights of stairs alone on the night she was killed), bilingual security guards, and the additional lighting and screens they had already been promised. The SFHA refused to meet the tenants’ demands, asserting that to do so would constitute special treatment (Ping Yuen having apparently lost its status as a “special case”). On October 1, tenants made their rent payments (which amounted to more than $15,000) into escrow, announcing their collective refusal to pay until their demands were met.

The following month, the Housing Authority sent out 170 eviction notices. While the notices were translated into Chinese, information about tenants’ right to a grievance hearing was left untranslated (in a historical irony, striking Ping Yuen tenants were represented by the Asian Law Caucus’s Ed Lee, who would later preside over 21st-century San Francisco’s rapid tech-fueled gentrification as the city’s 43rd mayor). When they got their hearing, the Grievance Panel sided with the tenants, urging the SFHA to make the safety improvements. The SFHA overruled the panel but agreed not to evict the tenants pending further negotiations. The strike was settled in January 1979 after three and a half months, with the Housing Authority agree- ing to PYRIA’s demands for improvements and Chinese-speaking security guards.

In February, Ping Yuen tenants celebrated their victory by inviting public housing residents from across the city to a “unity party” at which they encouraged their fellow SFHA tenants to follow their example. Soon, the Housing Authority publicly lamented the “rent strike syndrome” that gripped their tenants, a wave of whom successfully weaponized rent strike threats to push the Authority to make necessary improvements.

Although they had promised to meet Ping Yuen tenants’ demands, the Housing Authority characteristically continued to drag their feet, prompting a second rent strike in November 1979 to force the SFHA to meet the terms of their own agreement. This strike lasted a stunning 23 months. In September 1981, the Housing Authority finally completed the outstanding maintenance and security improvements in exchange for the rent monies in escrow. Tenants kept the accrued interest, which amounted to more than $20,000, much of which they pooled for collective improvements to their communal spaces. In 1985, tenant leader Chang Jok Lee plainly summed up the key lesson she learned in the long struggle: “If we all work together, anything can be done.”