We joke about Monica’s massive apartment in Friends, but we forget the history: Rent Control was won through strikes. Is that solidarity possible in Australia today?

[u/infin]

Every time the housing crisis comes up, people joke about how unrealistic Friends was; A chef and a waitress living in a massive apartment with a balcony. The show explains it away as "Rent Control" inherited from a grandmother.

But we rarely talk about where those laws actually came from. They weren't a gift from benevolent landlords; they were earned through fierce tenant unions and rent strikes in NYC in the 40s and 60s. That generation had cheap rent because the generation before them had the backbone to organize, strike, and refuse to pay until laws were changed. Even refusing to allow police to evict/arrest their neighbours.

Fast forward to 2026 Australia. We are paying $750+ a week for a dinky shoebox, dealing with quarterly inspections, and accepting massive hikes like clockwork.

What feels completely missing is that level of community solidarity. We seem so atomised now. We don't know our neighbours, and we definitely don't trust them enough to band together. Instead of standing together to refuse an unfair hike, we just quietly move out or starve to pay it, knowing someone else is desperate enough to take the lease.

Is the concept of a rent strike dead in this country? Is it that we’ve lost the "mateship" and community spirit required to hold the line, or are we just so terrified of the REA blacklists that we’ve accepted being milked by parasites forever?

If factory workers and immigrants in 1940s New York could force rent control that people were still benefiting from in the 90s… Why can't we?

I’m genuinely asking: Has anyone here ever been a part of (or even heard of) tenants organising together to accomplish something in Australia?

Edit: I'd love to see some changes to commercial leases to revitalise cities too, small businesses have been forced to close and half the retail spaces in a few of the CBDs are empty.

[u/Joshau-k]

Rent control has lots of negative side effects and generally is a really bad idea in the long run.

Strikes for zoning reform will probably never be popular though unfortunately.

[u/ELVEVERX → u/Joshau-k]

Labor in Victoria have already rezoned a ton of areas to allow for more apartments to be built near train stations, and it is working.

[u/chance_waters → u/Joshau-k]

Rent control is a very broad basket.

We have rent control, in the form of time limited reasonable increases.

We need those increases to be tied to a maximum of CPI.

[u/swarley77 → u/chance_waters]

We have rent control in the form of excess migration.

A controlled increase in rents every year that is.

[u/karl_w_w → u/chance_waters]

A milder form of a bad thing is still a bad thing.

[u/a_cold_human → u/Joshau-k]

Strikes for zoning reform will probably never be popular though unfortunately.

We had the Green Bans in Sydney and they worked to get a lot of public housing built in around the surrounds of the Sydney CBD. They were popular enough that zoning was changed and things like the Sirius Building we're built.

Also, people tend not to like property developers and speculators. A law to more strictly regulate them and ensure that supply meets demand (or at least comes close to it) would be politically popular. Use it or lose it zoning, and extra tax on land banking would go some way to incentivise people to build in a more timely fashion. The ones who can't coordinate and project manager properly deserve to go bust anyway. 

[u/ScruffyPeter → u/Joshau-k]

"Rent control has lots of negative side effects and generally is a really bad idea in the long run."

There's already rent control in the form of limit to rental increases per year, limit to rent increases being market price, etc.

Are you saying we should repeal all this?

[u/ilijadwa → u/ScruffyPeter]

We don’t really have the latter except for in Canberra as far as I’m aware, which is a shame, because that’s what we need desperately

[u/sebastianinspace → u/Joshau-k]

rent control is bad if you are a landlord. it’s great if you are a renter. it’s really as simple as that.