Art by Jerome K. Moore
While the likes of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were raking in millions during the 1980s, working-class Americans often found themselves struggling to make ends meet. Industrial factories were laying off thousands across the “Rust Belt” while farmers in the Midwest were staving off foreclosures. People residing in big cities like New York, meanwhile, had their own set of problems, including finding themselves unable to pay soaring rental costs and being evicted from their apartments.
The wealthy Oliver Queen suffered his own financial downturn during the end of the 1960s, transforming his superhero persona of Green Arrow into a social justice warrior looking out for the underserved and underprivileged of the country. During the early 1980s, writer Joey Cavalieri kept that activist streak alive with numerous Green Arrow narratives that directly related to the times.
In Detective Comics #537, Oliver Queen returns to his brownstone apartment to find a discarded box of records lying on the sidewalk. As he flips through the box, he slowly comes to the realization that the collection actually belongs to him, as does the couch currently being carried out of the building by two movers. “We’re evicting a deadbeat,” they tell him when asked, then quickly flee when Queen threatens them with bodily harm.
“Nothing is happening to you that hasn’t befallen everyone else in the building,” an elderly neighbor informs Oliver Queen. “All of the tenants have been harassed and threatened with eviction. There’s been no heat. No hot water. No repairs. And no answers from the landlords, either. My guess is they would love for us to get fed up and move so they can turn the place into a condominium.”
After the shock fades, Oliver Queen decides to organize a tenant’s strike. “Well, the landlords are cutting off our services in the hopes that we’ll clear out, but we won’t be intimidated,” he tells the media. “The outfit that owns this building owns a few others on this block as well. So if this one goes, they’ll probably follow suit. The residents can’t afford that. We want our landlords to know right away that we’re not going anywhere.”
In his 2013 book Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s, Michael Stewart Foley writes that rising prices for existing homes and an increase in construction costs for new rental units resulted in a housing crisis during the 1970s, making it difficult for many Americans to find a place to live. Realizing that they were unable to afford a house of their own, tenants residing in apartment buildings began seeing themselves as permanent renters and started demanding rights as a result.
In June 1975, for instance, middle-income tenants at the state subsidized Co-op City in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx – consisting of fifteen thousand rental units in thirty-five towers and six townhouse clusters – went on a thirteen-month tenant strike. The Riverbay Corporation running Co-op City had increased rent by more than 125 percent between 1965 and 1975. Close to ninety percent of the residents participated in the strike, depositing $27 million into an escrow account as opposed to paying rent. Although the state of New York threatened eviction, the scope and size of the tenant strike made such actions impossible.
Corporations and wealthy investors, meanwhile, began buying apartment buildings in the early 1970s as tax shelters. This new breed of landlord was inaccessible to tenants, while the management companies hired to oversee the buildings were often unresponsive to tenant concerns. As tenants began to organize during the mid-1970s, owners began converting the apartment buildings into condominiums to force the renters out. Michael Stewart Foley notes in Front Porch Politics that 366,000 buildings made conversions from apartments to condominiums between 1970 and 1979.
Real estate developers used other tactics as well. After Green Arrow and his partner Black Canary assist the fire department by rescuing a woman and her baby trapped inside a burning building in Detective Comics #553, the fire chief congratulates the pair on a “splendid job,” adding that would make sure that they received a commendation from the city for their heroic efforts. Before he can say much more, however, Green Arrow cuts him off.
“We both know what happened here tonight, so save your speeches for the press,” he says. “These buildings have been abandoned so long that squatters have moved in and made ’em home. But now some big real estate concern wantsa buy ’em, but the deal won’t go down while the squatters are still there. Nobody’ll move ’em. Not the real estate boys who don’t want bad press. Not the city welfare agencies who can’t house ’em. But it looks like the money boys are startin’ to get itchy. It doesn’t take an Einstein to see they’ve hired a torch to start scarin’ the squatters. An’ this whole town is so corrupt, it’s gonna sit back an’ let it happen so it can unload the property.”
It wasn’t the first time that Green Arrow uncovered a plot to burn down abandoned buildings as part of a get-rich scheme. In World’s Finest Comics #281, Oliver Queen discovers that the wealthy Allan Starkwether has been buying old buildings and burning them to the ground so that he can construct a new office and residential complex in their place. When an elderly homeless woman dies as a result, Green Arrow records a confession from the arsonists. Instead of handing the evidence over to the police, however, he gives Starkwether the choice of either going to jail or building a homeless shelter instead.
Within the world of Green Arrow, it wasn’t just arson that was used by real estate developers to realize their plans. “He’s ticked that the city won’t let him build anything on his own land but housing because of the city’s zoning laws,” a drug dealer explains of a developer named Marty Costa in Detective Comics #561. “So he’s gonna make it a low-income project, let in a lot of poverty-stricken families, then import and let us sell ’em boatloads of skag. When the neighborhood crumbles, Costa’ll be in a position t’say ‘I toldja so’ and snow the city into doing things his way.”
Rising rents and limited availability of affordable apartments inevitably led to an increase in homelessness. Michael Stewart Foley writes in Front Porch Politics that “a more accurate name for the homeless would be ‘the evicted… since people don’t simply fall out of the housing market – they are usually pushed.’” The list included those who had lost their jobs outright as well as those who were underpaid compared to the rising rental costs in large cities. Many of these new homeless not only began squatting in abandoned apartment buildings but petitioned city governments to allow them to live there for free if they made improvements to the buildings, an arrangement known as “sweat equity.”
The Bronx was again the focal point for this new movement when squatters were granted “sweat equity” in abandoned buildings on Washington Avenue. President Jimmy Carter made a trip to the neighborhood in October 1977 and publicly praised the improvements being made in the neighborhood. Unfortunately the president’s visit coincided with a recent rash of arson on nearby Charlotte Street – landlords were setting their deteriorating apartment buildings on fire so that they could collect the insurance money.
As Michael Stewart Foley explains in Front Porch Politics, tenants and renters in big cities like New York had faith in the American dream and the ethos that if one worked hard enough, they would find themselves rewarded. “This, they all believed, is how America works – or should work,” Foley writes. “But the 1970s and 1980s crushed those expectations and showed just how tenuous the American dream had become.” For Green Arrow writer Joey Cavalieri, a hero was needed to restore that American dream – even if he was fictional and regulated to the inner pages of a comic book.
Anthony Letizia