"Not the Most Dramatic of Slum Properties": The Standish Apartment Rent Strike and Cincinnati City Housing Policy, 1964–1967

In the summer and fall of 1964, many in Cincinnati believed the city faced the possibility of racial violence as it experienced a rent strike led by the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) against the owner of a decaying, rat-infested tenement in the city's Mt. Auburn neighborhood. After several months of confrontation and negotiation, Cincinnati officials, the landlord, CORE, and the tenants arrived at a compromise that avoided violence in the short term, paid the landlord the back rent, and allowed for the relocation of the tenants with some difficulty, due to the lack of decent affordable housing for low-income families. The following year, the city hosted a conference on substandard housing, in part in response to the rent strike. However, neither the resolution to the strike nor the housing conference contributed adequately to solutions to the housing problems African Americans faced, leaving deep grievances among residents of Cincinnati's growing, crowded, and decaying "second ghetto." As a consequence of these and other grievances, riots broke out in Cincinnati in the summer of 1967 and again in April 1968.¹

This essay examines the Standish Apartment rent strike in the context of Cincinnati officials and housing reformers' failure to solve the problem of where and how to house the city's African American residents throughout much of its history. It also argues that while CORE's community organizing efforts were clearly part of the evolution of the struggle for black liberation, they were also part of a movement toward resident control of their own communities that encompassed the wider culture.²

In the nineteenth century, Cincinnati's blacks lived throughout the walking city, a tightly constricted area bounded by the Ohio River and steep hills that became known as the Basin. Most lived in enclaves containing some of the city's worst housing. Despite this, African Americans built strong community institutions. In the last decades of the century, new transportation options allowed whites of all but the poorest classes to flee the Basin. At the same time, fleeing whites barred most African Americans from these newly opened areas. Despite the exodus, increasing numbers of European immigrants and southern migrants, both black and white, found themselves packed into decaying tenements in the Basin. By the end of the nineteenth century, Cincinnati had some of the nation's worst, most overcrowded housing.³

City leaders attempted a number of solutions to this growing problem. At first, these took place within the for-profit real estate market. In the early 1930s, when these failed to have more than a minor impact, Cincinnati housing reformers and city officials turned to government-funded solutions and created the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). By 1942, it had built more than four thousand units in racially segregated public housing projects under New Deal and wartime housing programs. Under pressure from the NAACP and other African American organizations, CMHA built roughly equal numbers of units for whites and blacks. But limited funds and opposition from real estate interests and many whites meant it built too few units to meet the needs of either race.⁴

At the same time, the Great Migration and the dearth of new housing built during the Depression and World War II led to increased crowding for all low-income families. Worse, the hardening of racial residential discrimination forced most of the city's new black population into its old West End, where, despite the odds, black residents built a vibrant community. Nevertheless, conditions decayed as landlords charged inflated rents and packed multiple families into spaces designed for a single family. As a result, by the middle of World War II, there were virtually no vacancies in black neighborhoods.⁵

After the war, home construction boomed, fueled by increased prosperity and federal government subsidies for middle-class housing, primarily in suburban areas. Though most whites now could find housing in the private market, discrimination largely barred African Americans from these new developments. Generally, the only areas in which blacks could...