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The 1970s was the dawning of the tenants-rights movement and there is an old Victorian home in East Orange that became the hub of this activism.
In 1973, activists Pat Morrissy and Ron Atlas bought an old rundown home at 31 Chestnut Street in East Orange for $12,500. Morrissy and Atlas, who had just founded the New Jersey Tenant Rights Organization in 1970, welcomed other like-minded idealists into their three-story Queen Anne, including Atlas’s brother, John; Woody Widrow, who drafted Newark’s rent control ordinance; and Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, who founded the East Orange Tenant Organization.
It was under this roof that this group of friends formed a collective that built a national infrastructure for their activism and created what would become a news publication called Shelterforce, founded 50 years ago. This formative time in Morrissy’s life is the subject of a memoir called Staking Our Claim that was published this year.
“The reason I wrote about this is because it’s the period that shaped what the rest of my adult life was going to be,” said Morrissy at a September book-signing event at the HUUB in Orange.
Morrissy wasn’t from the Oranges — he was from Detroit — but the situation happening in places like East Orange and Orange was familiar to him because these cities were similarly affected by White flight, redlining, urban renewal, and the exodus of private-sector investment.
“In East Orange we had our share of bad actors, con artists, and sleazy profiteers making money from the city’s decline,” Morrissy wrote. “We had slumlords. We had housing inspectors who looked the other way, and we had judges with a disdain for poor tenants regardless of how bad their living conditions were.”
Together, they managed to pass rent control ordinances in East Orange and Orange while Ron Atlas helped strengthen rules against evictions statewide with the Just Cause Eviction Act in 1974. They were a force to be reckoned with and many of the legal protections tenants enjoy today were planned at the kitchen table here.
This was a decade when many Victorian homes were beginning to fall into disrepair — a pressing issue within the tenants-rights movement because landlords weren’t making the necessary repairs. It was fitting that Morrissy and friends were living in an aging 1890 home because he understood intimately the sort of problems his neighbors were dealing with.
Morrissy was determined not to go the way of so many landlords in the 1970s by stripping the Victorian home of period-appropriate details. Instead, he learned to repair the home with his own hands and it became a crash course in carpentry that would serve him later in his career as the founder of Orange’s Housing and Neighborhood Development Services, which provides grants for home repairs.
In 1975, John Atlas came up with the idea for a newsletter, which Morrissy named “Shelterforce.” The publication included news stories about urban renewal, redlining, and high-profile tenant battles in cities across the nation along with information for tenants and even reviews of books like Cities Destroyed for Cash that details predatory mortgage scams in Detroit.
John Atlas, a lawyer who lived in the home for more than a year, said that living under one roof was integral to the success of Shelterforce. “We were talking about what we were doing all the time,” Atlas told the Four Oranges. “When you’re trying to do politics and make radical change, which is almost impossible, proximity is important.”
One thing that ensured the success of both Shelterforce — which is now under the auspices of the National Housing Institute, which Atlas founded — and the activism of this friend group was their ability to bring together people for a common purpose. Those who came in contact with Morrissy soon helped him or contributed to the publication whether it was art, editing, or expertise.
The collective also empowered other residents, such as Florence Stevenson and Jackie Cooke, to become agents of change and taught tenants practical maneuvers — such as rent strikes — to force landlords to maintain the buildings and make necessary improvements.
In the 1970s and 1980s, community development corporations like La Casa de Don Pedro, New Community Corporation, Ironbound Community Corporation were founded in Newark and served as “bulwark in the face of suburban exodus and urban decline.”
This inspired Morrissy who founded a version of this called Housing and Neighborhood Development Services based in Orange. This will be the subject of Morrissy’s next memoir, he said at the book-signing event.
The themes of Morrissy’s book still echo today as we see an affordable housing crisis of a different kind — corporate developers gobbling up the housing supply.
One lesson that contemporary activists can take from Morrissy’s memoir is that change often relies on getting the right people elected into office. Morrissy and his friends helped get Joel Shain, Orange’s first Jewish mayor, and County Executive Peter Shapiro elected into public office. The name Shelterforce signifies that activism and political power go hand in hand.
“There’d be little doubt about what we believed in,” writes Morrissy about the name of his publication. “That shelter was a basic human right and we weren’t going to achieve it without a political force.”
