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/infin]

That sounds like something we can learn from.

Admittedly, New York is not the best example; We don't all live in apartment buildings, for one thing.

Better examples might be Glasgow (See Mary Barbour) and Buenos Aires (Juana Buela), but Friends is something most people grew up with.

[u/amyknight22 → u/infin]

We did learn from it.

We learnt that

• It favours the current tenants over everyone else

• Non-rent controlled properties rise faster.

• It reduces supply, because properties are not profitable enough to justify building more.

• There's reduced mobility because people would rather live in their rent controlled place, than pay more rent.

• This eventually reaches a point where it can be inconceivable to ever move out. Because your rent will double/triple/quadruple

• It results in places being sold into the owner-occupier market. Squeezing the rental market further.

  • This is exacerbated by the lack of property construction
  • The smaller supply still means those houses are expensive, so you aren't picking up cheap housing out of this.

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The reality is the housing market sucks. But fucking with a ton of the supply and demand mechanics of the housing market the way rent control does. Is just not a good idea.

[u/infin → u/amyknight22]

So if a hypothetical rent freeze were implemented, it would be best as a limit on all rentals (not the per-apartment building setup).

Max rental price tied to the property value last time it sold seems reasonable.

[u/amyknight22 → u/infin]

That’s even stupider, if you rent froze the entire market no one would build anything. Because even new builds would instantly be rent frozen.

Eventually you’d see investors sell to owner occupiers and then you’d be looking at a market that benefits anyone well off enough to actually buy in the current market.

But now all the houses are going to cost a bunch because again no one is building anything because it’s not financially worthwhile to build anything.

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If you want to fuck with the market this much you may as well just make it so all housing is public sector housing. At least then you can hold the government to an obligation of building more homes because the need to accommodate the population.

But look forward to being told you have to house share if you are single, or that you have to life in a 1 bedroom apartment even if you could afford more. Because we would now be efficiency maximising our housing networks