Lepers at the City Gate: Single Room Occupancy and the Housing Crisis
Merrifield, Andy
IT' S A SULTRY July morning; I am sitting on a low wall outside a three-story brownstone on West 120th Street, a stone's throw away from Mount Morris Park, in Harlem. Four workmen, covered in...
...Whatever the case, the 203(k) program has been instrumental in property flips in Harlem, increasing the pace of gentrification...
...But after number seventeen's owner died, things started to deteriorate...
...took care of yourself...
...the floor was gutted...
...Another is the danger of over-speculation and over-building, a lesson learned from the slump of the early 1990s, when hoteliers and investors got burned...
...All that makes the housing situation more difficult...
...There are downsides to this boom, needless to say...
...As Porter and Gross stayed put, the environment around them became steadily tonier...
...If they're clean, they get a green light...
...Residents still, as then, inhabit one room, with meager furniture, usually sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities with fellow occupants along the hall...
...many are now burnt-out shells, boarded up and abandoned...
...Manhattan has more than three-quarters of the city's stock, many in large, pre-war apartment hotels...
...It's not converting an SRO to serve yuppies with high incomes...
...Osborne was given a week's notice...
...How did this happen...
...Unfortunately," Porter chips in, "the building started to get run down...
...New York mayor Rudolph] Giuliani isn't interested in preserving low-income housing...
...It was really a ploy to edge them out, Porter believes...
...They wanted to sell and wanted us out...
...THE LAW PROJECT occupies a cramped, ground-floor office on Columbus Avenue between 91st and 92nd Streets in a community center...
...ACCORDING TO HPD data, the number of legal building conversions in New York rose from 82 in 1993 to 140 in 1997, affecting 1,683 units as opposed to 568...
...The city doesn't follow up...
...You feel like you're an outsider...
...Either somebody with absolutely no interest in running the building as housing will buy them, milk them, and sell them again...
...Four workmen, covered in dust and dirt, are coming and going, throwing debris and masonry onto a nearby dumpster, bantering with each other and disappearing into a gutted building, number seventeen...
...As it transpired, appraisers got carried away and persistently over-valued property...
...My eyes follow a uniform row of red brick and terra-cotta houses, most built around 1890, grand in their day...
...wait three years...
...Thereafter, rent is supposed to be lowered to the stabilized level, and the resident effectively becomes "permanent...
...It's filled with her modest possessions: a small television, a radio, a refrigerator, clothes stacked up on a single bed, all covered with plastic wrapping— "to protect everything from water leaks and the mess," Osborne laments...
...It's become so posh...
...The math is fairly simple: It's a lot more economical to pay us...
...She can't sleep...
...As we sip iced tea and talk, Porter's neighbor, Grace Gross, an African-American woman maybe ten years Porter's junior, joins us...
...The scam now affects Central Harlem, where "mortgage lenders have been aggressively pushing to sell these properties to nonprofits...
...It was then that she accused her landlord of harassment...
...Osborne didn't waste time...
...On the Verge,' more like...
...Early on, HUD's auditors smelled a rat, rightly suspecting the program of being "highly vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse by investors and non-profit borrowers...
...His latest book, Dialectical Urbanism, is forthcoming from Monthly Review Press in 2002...
...Poe worries that this is "a huge scandal," and it "may potentially have a major impact on SROs in Central Harlem...
...Osborne didn't want trouble, so she gave in and fled...
...Osborne has a mop of black curly hair, with only a couple of gray strands...
...Although New York's population grew by 350,000 between 1981 and 1999, it added just 42,000 new rental units...
...Instead, flimsy harassment laws prevail, and savvy landlords and developers with time and money can easily circumvent them...
...In fact, these allegations, subsequently substantiated, helped scuttle PMG's activities at the Allerton Hotel...
...She's hyperglycemic and has hypertension and high cholesterol...
...the fingers just about make contact...
...After a while, the SRO became the Broadway American...
...Many displaced tenants will doubtless go to live with family or friends, if they have any...
...The community center felt obliged to intervene and, working with local housing associations and other groups, lobbied the city to preserve precious SRO stock...
...Between 1996 and 1997, applications for Certificates of No Harassment grew 40 percent for the city at large and 35 percent for Harlem...
...After the old owner died, new owners "kept breaking the bathroom windows in the winter...
...Now, the hotel management sits out a three-year ban at the Allerton, able only to carry out renovations that don't alter unit numbers or dramatically reconfigure rooms...
...They got paint in the bathtub and the toilet is all blocked up and doesn't flush...
...Fifteen billion dollars were spent at hotels, stores, restaurants, and cultural attractions, which, in turn, generated $2.9 billion in local, state, and federal tax revenues and provided 275,000 jobs...
...Greater vehicular and pedestrian congestion is one...
...At the top, a diminutive African-American woman, Mary Osborne, greets me, shakes my hand cheerily, and ushers me into a second-floor room...
...assessing trends in Harlem...
...Why should we sit here and die...
...In early March, it had reached Porter and Gross's floor...
...He would renovate the eleven units, knocking down adjoining walls on every floor, combining rooms, installing new toilets and kitchens, transforming dingy rooms into plush one- and two-bedroom apartments, with rents beginning at $2,000 per month...
...it would have saved them even if they had lost...
...But the proposed measure received a lukewarm reaction in official circles and was swiftly canned...
...Osborne sought guidance from Harlem's Legal Aid Society on 125th Street, which holds a clinic every Tuesday...
...This used to be a residential neighborhood...
...The park, which interrupts Fifth Avenue for a five-block stretch and is dominated by a craggy outcrop of rocks, was renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973, in honor of the Jamaican black nationalist...
...At first, Osborne refused to budge...
...The stock also provided cheap and safe shelter for single women, struggling artists, and factory workers, or for anybody else who sought the city's bright lights...
...Since 1975, median rents jumped 33 percent, while median incomes, adjusted for inflation, grew 3 percent...
...Now, the banks and mortgage companies are foreclosing...
...I am early for an appointment with number seventeen's last tenant...
...What will come from that suit we have yet to see...
...By 1996, less than forty-seven thousand had withstood the freemarket onslaught...
...She's a single-room-occupancy (SRO) tenant, somebody who isn't gaining during these boom times, nor is she ever likely to...
...The lepers can't know the outcome in advance...
...The Law Project is bracing for a wholesale emptying out of SRO buildings in Central and Lower Harlem...
...So the city finally began to confront what was already obvious to many...
...dust and debris were everywhere...
...By the following January, the rehab had begun at the top and was working its way down fast...
...The Legal Aid people recommended that Osborne consult the West Side SRO Law Project, a specialized tenant advocacy and advisory organization...
...They said they'd give us a larger room with a bathroom...
...Poe and Kane concur that New York's steady rightward shift makes their life and job tougher...
...But with their resources stretched thin, Kane and her staff need to muster broader community support...
...These new rehabs look quite delightful...
...Some of our friends on the eighth floor moved...
...In a nutshell, the 203(k) program became rich pickings for the wrong sort of people...
...In 1981, New York City sort of looked down and said, `Oh my gosh, we now have this huge homeless population that we didn't have just a few years ago...
...She lives in a prim, eighthfloor, oblong room that measures about fifteen feet by eight feet...
...and pressuring city agencies to prosecute where harassment is ongoing, ensuring that landlords don't find harassment a simple and efficient method to expel low-income dwellers...
...So they started putting in prostitutes and drug dealers and dangerous people, starting using terror tactics...
...It was a Sunday evening, around seven thirty, last October...
...Now she is alone...
...Should the buyer default, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) steps in, guaranteeing the lender's money, plus all incurred costs...
...But a crash might help SRO tenants by forcing rents down and releasing displacement pressures...
...As I ponder the scene and look more closely at the fine detail, I notice amid the wreckage and dereliction that a few structures actually look healthy...
...Nevertheless, landlords with renovation plans can lie low...
...They've been very effective at trying to help me...
...I asked them, 'Why did you move?' 'I don't know, don't know,' she answers...
...It was a little oasis of peace and safety and tranquility...
...PMG made the construction as loud as possible, as dirty as possible, with as much harassment as possible," Porter recalls...
...landlords reap rewards...
...Harlem is clearly an untapped reservoir for speculative redevelopment, but it's also a long-standing source of low-income housing...
...It's depressing, it's hard, it's draining," Kane told me...
...She pays $60 per week for rent, contributing $25 from her disability income...
...Harlem has the densest concentration, frequently in lower-rise rooming and town houses...
...It's another world out there now...
...Now, it's yuppie-duppie, $2,000-plus rents...
...Immediately, PMG committed itself to a $12 million overhaul of the grossly "undercapitalized" property...
...It was wonderful...
...She thinks the law should be amended to cover at least a five-year stretch, "and if landlords have a history of harassment elsewhere, this should be taken into account, too...
...Still, in practice, as long as SRO tenants remain ignorant of this law, landlords can—and do—charge what they like...
...We can only try to stop the floodgates from opening," Terry Poe concedes, "[and] force landlords to retain some rooms for permanent residents while they're allowed to convert others into tourist use...
...Then I remember Mary Osborne, sitting in her little room in Harlem, amid the rubble, wondering where she might go next, thinking about whose hand she might clasp...
...She says the neighborhood was frayed and the building shabby—but clean and safe...
...and there was endless thumping and drilling, even on weekends—especially on weekends...
...At their request, we initiated a civil suit against the landlord for damages based on the 'warranty of habitability.'" The case against PMG "is plodding its way very, very slowly through the court system, in part because the landlord would like it to take as long as possible...
...From my perch, I can hear drilling and banging inside...
...An amendment to J-51 coding in 1975, for one thing, provided subsidy and tax breaks to any owner or developer who undertook upscale conversion...
...In one corner there's a cheap bookshelf, upon which I spot Alex Haley's Roots, a biography of Malcolm X, several Bibles, a bulky biography of Queen Elizabeth II, and, curiously, a paperback by a certain Donald Trump...
...and a few will find their way onto the street...
...Now she draws public assistance and represents a beleaguered and endangered species in the city...
...The waiting list for public housing currently tops 130,000 families, and shelters are stretched beyond coping on typical nights...
...She pays $239 per month now, suffers from depression, no longer works, and has received disability assistance and food stamps since 1988...
...En route, a lot of tenants lost their heating, hot water, and elevator service, or were strongarmed by thugs and intimidated by drug dealers and prostitutes, who, Poe thinks, were recruited to rid buildings of rent stabilized tenants...
...In and around the city, there were 134 such loans made in 1996...
...Recently, Osborne met one of her former neighbors shopping on 125th Street with her little girl...
...Ridding the city of SROs, replacing them with higher order uses, seemed to make sense...
...A third, more profound contradiction confronts the city's planners and politicos: New York's extrovert, cosmopolitan nature—open to the world, a magnet for travelers—is increasingly threatening its neighborhood character, its traditional hometown status, its role as a place where ordinary folks eke out a living...
...They said they're in a shelter...
...The point was that it wasn't supposed to be as nice...
...But when I first moved into the building, one elderly gentleman owned it and you had to be interviewed to make sure that you were respectable and...
...Up and down Broadway, between 72nd and 112th Streets, former SRO buildings have steadily been picked off...
...Right now, for 350 or so brownstones in Central Harlem, the tension between these two realities is palpable...
...At the Commander Hotel, dozens of harassment charges and grievances were filed against the company in early 1998...
...It was a godsend, a lifesaver for me...
...We pleaded with them not to go...
...If we remain here, we shall die too...
...The latest landlord had big plans for his Harlem property...
...As of 1986, only sixty-four thousand units still existed...
...We were supposed to leave...
...SRO UNITS are one of New York's most important reserves of affordable housing for single adults on fixed incomes or with limited resources...
...One broker has already sent out a list of 114 properties fresh on the market...
...nonprofits were DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 81 HOUSING CRISIS eventually overwhelmed by covert for-profits, while contractors, realtors, and brokers skimmed off exorbitant fees...
...They wanted us to move downstairs...
...Drilling and banging all night," she says...
...In 1976, the building, known as the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, was a somewhat shabby and cheap residential hotel, full of single-room occupants, working people who were just about making out...
...Eighteen months ago, the Law Project and the Sixth District's Democratic councilwoman, Ronnie Eldridge, drafted a more definitive tenant protection bill, which, if it had passed, would have compelled the Department of Buildings (DOB) to halt unauthorized construction work, immediately imposing Stop Work orders...
...She moved to New York at the age of seven and worked once— that was before getting sick...
...to any sort of program that benefits poor, working-class people in this town...
...It was our home and they're taking it away...
...With demand far exceeding supply, and with a relatively dwindling stock and low vacancy rate, rents skyrocketed...
...The latter involves an official inquiry, determining whether they have a record of harassment in the three years prior to their application...
...I can't do nothing...
...All tenants—Osborne, a middle-aged African-American man, and three Ecuadoran families—had to vacate, immediately...
...Osborne finds inspiration here: "I, too, am entering the city," she said...
...He was like a little kitten...
...They wanted richer people in...
...Before this decade is done, SROs could well be extinct...
...There's us, the tourists, and the people downstairs...
...If anything, Osborne and her ilk are directly threatened by today's thriving economy and buoyant real estate sector...
...The Law Project, says Terry Poe, one of four tenant organizers, was conceived back in 1981 in response to the alarming decline of SROs and the belief that New York's homelessness crisis could be traced to this loss...
...Out of this agitation came the Law Project, funded by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD...
...Figures for shady renovations aren't known, though the West Side Law Project estimates that the number of SRO units illegally converted easily matches the number of legal conversions...
...It was bleak...
...Osborne learned about her rights the hard way...
...Now, when you go out you know it's not like that...
...Since last March, it's been difficult for Osborne to pursue her regular reading regime...
...She's adamant in the belief that in the 1970s New York intended to destroy SRO buildings...
...Just this past year, many more residents with inquiries, grievances, and requests for help—Mary Osborne included— have come in...
...Tenants lived through really horrible conditions and didn't cave...
...In November, many of DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 79 HOUSING CRISIS Osborne's clothes were damaged by a water leak...
...Citylife Hotel Group, a division of PMG, would run operations and manage the new creation...
...Builders blocked up the windows, submerging everything in eerie darkness...
...In 1998, the number exploded to 1,128...
...SRO dwellers must now endure its discontents...
...We'd never have heat or hot water," Porter remembers...
...These properties (90 percent are likely SROs), face imminent mortgage foreclosure because they're part of a controversial federal loan scheme: the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Rehabilitation Mortgage Insurance (Section 203 [k] ). In the beginning, the 203(k) program had an honorable intent: to promote home ownership for poor and moderate-income people and help nonprofits in neighborhood restoration...
...As it happens, when the men reach the camp, no one is there...
...I don't really live off anything too much...
...The mechanism," Kane says, "tries to make it not so economically worthwhile for landlords to harass tenants...
...Then the owner started "doing harassment...
...I'm trying my best to fight for my rights as an SRO tenant," she says, resolutely...
...Bankers and financiers provided mortgages of up to $400,000 toward house purchase and rehab in neighborhoods and for people otherwise deemed risky bets...
...In a sense, the building's fortunes over the years mirror the changing fortunes of the Upper West Side and New York itself...
...above all, they need SRO residents themselves to join the effort to halt the speculation, the demolitions, the emptying outs—to fight for justice...
...Elizabeth Kane identifies it as an emerging and threatening trend: "Gentrification," she explains, "had slowed down in the 1980s...
...The code, meanwhile, requires that landlords provide a tenant with a Notice of Rights and Duties, a formal contract detailing the precise status of their permanent tenancy and the safeguards protecting them from illegal eviction...
...They really never thought that the few of us who stayed on would be able to stick it through...
...If they didn't know you, they would stop you, ask you who you were and where you were going...
...It's amazing that somebody is still there, living in what looks like rubble...
...It was a neighborhood once," Gross reminisces...
...He lives in New York City...
...If the buildings go to auction or a receiver is appointed, it's going to be very serious for the tenants...
...It costs somewhere around twenty thousand dollars a year to house a single adult in a shelter...
...It's been a harsh struggle...
...Even when work is carried out illegally, without a permit, it's seldom stopped quickly enough, if it's stopped at all...
...I feel I expend as much energy, both psychologically and physically, dealing with the bleak political atmosphere that we function in as I do providing services for tenants...
...There was a rat running around as well," she adds, matteroffactly, "[that] came in through a hole in the kitchen...
...0 N THE Upper West Side, below Harlem, SRO tenants face another enemy...
...even, as some have, give out Christmas gifts—until, of course, they receive the necessary certificate...
...Back then Porter paid $36 a week, sold cosmetics, and tried to pick up the pieces of a failed marriage...
...But Porter and Gross were suspicious...
...I wasn't really happy, but a neighborhood friend of mine found me this room...
...It seemed lovely to everyone," Kane says...
...They don't understand the court system," Osborne says...
...One of the things we point out to the city every year we go down to City Hall to beg and plead for our funding," Kane says, "is that we're a lot cheaper than homelessness...
...So I started walking 'round in boots...
...Or somebody will buy them up, try to push the tenants out, renovate them, and sell them for more money...
...The tourist boom is the driving force...
...Porter says things in and around her building weren't very nice...
...These days, she says, you have to arrive early to avoid a long wait...
...Seemingly overnight, the other tenants disappeared...
...be obliging about maintenance and service provision...
...Historically, SRO tenants have had certain rights under New York's Rent Stabilization Code...
...On the Upper West Side especially, many owners wanted to convert their large SRO buildings into glitzy condos or upscale co-ops...
...Nobody seems to know the true extent of abuse and finagling...
...They eventually had their license taken away and could no longer operate...
...The place was shabby," Gross admits, "but very clean and quiet, and there was always somebody down at the desk...
...Porter and Gross can't hide their nostalgia...
...For two DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 83 HOUSING CRISIS years, there was often no hot water or heating...
...If it was before, you didn't feel it...
...Since 1983, would-be building converters can obtain a work permit only if they've first gotten a Certificate of No Harassment...
...Now it's tourism...
...And, to cap it all, five blocks to the north, Starbucks, the Gap, and Disney have set up shop...
...Leah Porter, a sixty-three-year-old white woman, is one of seventy or so remaining SRO tenants at the hotel...
...Guest rooms continue to sell at ultra-high prices: last year's average was $204 a night, the most expensive in the nation and double what it was a decade ago...
...We've had a lot of different owners," Porter tells me...
...It's so money oriented...
...Elizabeth Kane, an attorney and the project's director, describes its birth pangs and growing pains...
...ANDY MERRIFIELD teaches in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Massachusetts...
...Being an SRO tenant once meant independence, Porter laments...
...She explains that she gets $215 per month federal shelter allowance, plus a further $68 toward her nine kinds of medication...
...The air is thick with dust and I feel it catch my throat...
...I've been here since 1993," she tells me...
...He's not interested in preserving opportunities for low-income people to live in this city" Kane insists that her clients have more difficulty now with immigration issues and with welfare: "They're not able to get the same benefits, not able to get food stamps, not able to switch to Social Security when it's appropriate...
...One day, Poe and his Law Project colleagues hope for a real political commitment of resources toward affordable, single-person accommodation, probably not SROs, but studio apartments with kitchenettes and bathrooms...
...I watch a disheveled African-American man, with two loaded bags, emerge from one ruin across the street...
...The fire department turned off the water mains and electricity...
...Judgment Day arrived at the Broadway American in April 1997, when an ambitious New York real estate investment company, Property Markets Group (PMG), bought the building for $20 million...
...I always felt that when I went outside I was walking with people who were like me, who were just getting the rent check written every month...
...But there are transiency loopholes, and landlords flout stabilization laws...
...Outside the entrance, there's a large mural painted by neighborhood kids: two out-stretched hands, one yellow, another brown...
...I could hear him moving like a human being...
...Now . . . it's not gentrification for people in the city...
...For the time being, "we see no commitment...
...During the next three decades, the stock was steadily whittled down...
...I'm hoping we can work something out, something comparable, because I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place right now...
...SROs date back to World War I, when ex-servicemen with no families to return to found a grubby haven...
...Under the scheme, HUD simply underwrites all risk...
...We SRO tenants are lepers at the gate of Giuliani's New York...
...They eat, drink, and clothe themselves...
...The project is scrutinizing Certificate of No Harassment applications...
...I was living at 121st Street until the old owner died and the new one started tearing everything 78 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 HOUSING CRISIS down around me...
...Every single one of them since has said, 'We should have listened to you.' It's like it's three different hotels now...
...But what's been typically happening," Terry Poe explains, "is that they've been getting these high mortgages and not putting any money into the building, not doing any rehabilitation...
...if they kill us, we die...
...Throughout the 1950s, there were around two hundred thousand SRO units in Gotham...
...communities are usually glad to see scruffy, old, problematical buildings full of problematical people gentrified...
...and, to top it all, the city claimed that its tax base expanded...
...Why should we sit here until we die...
...A Stop Work order may be issued, but what then...
...Sometimes," says Porter, "you feel like you're on Fifth Avenue, you can't walk on the streets, they're so crowded...
...Hopefully, there will be some real compensation...
...I guess all the mortgage lenders must have gotten together," Poe says, "and hired brokers to try to get rid of the buildings before they're foreclosed on...
...HPD denied PMG a Certificate of No Harassment in February 1999...
...Of course, the lepers have really nothing to lose, sort of like Osborne...
...Since then, it has become one of Manhattan's most aggressive hotel converters...
...Now I have to go to the store around the corner where they have a bathroom...
...The owner wanted Osborne out of the single room...
...The Reagan administration slashed funding for public housing in the eighties, further exacerbating the situation...
...The ceiling of her kitchenette, which is about the size of a small closet, caved in after workers labored in the apartment above...
...Wire fences seal several off...
...As I leave the Law Project's offices, I glance back at that colorful mural, those two almostclasping hands...
...They have fine wooden shutters in their windows, renovated facades, recent paint jobs, and window boxes bearing fresh flowers...
...Except for the obvious: if you destroy the housing of your lowincome people, where are they to go...
...The workmen are unperturbed as I walk into the premises and go up the stairs in semi-darkness...
...She's fifty-four, yet looks ten years younger...
...Since the early eighties, decline has been dramatic...
...She still works for a bank and pays $430 a month...
...Company executives pressed city housing officials to overrule the verdict—unsuccessfully...
...Her room, I discover later, is bright and attractive, about twice the size of Porter's, full of plants, and has a lovely bird's eye view over Broadway...
...They even took the toilet seat away...
...She'd cited from her Bible, from 2 Kings, chapter 7, the parable of "lepers at the city gate...
...PMG did actually receive a Certificate of No Harassment for its conversion of On the Ave...
...some, if they're lucky, may find alternative cheap housing...
...Overlooking Broadway is 222 West 77 Street, a big pre-war apartment building that embodies this latter tension...
...For example, hotel and rooming house owners can legally charge whatever they want for the first six months of a tenant's occupancy...
...Gross arrived in 1981 and paid more, but with a steady bank job it was affordable...
...Their activism somehow saved them...
...Overhead, there's a lamppost adorned with a banner welcoming me to "Mount Morris Historic District," a patch bound by Lenox Avenue to the west, 124th Street to the north, 119th Street to the south, and Mount Morris Park West to the east...
...The workmen are busy around the clock, coming in the morning and leaving practically at dawn, with hardly any respite...
...If we decide to go into the city, we shall die there, for there is famine in the city...
...There were loud bangs and vibrations, and suddenly, water came gushing though the light fixture, drenching everything...
...If they spare us, we live...
...But, for the foreseeable future, such defensive maneuvering is as good as it gets...
...This project has been funded at under five hundred thousand a year and prevents a lot of people from becoming homeless...
...Amsterdam Avenue wasn't that safe, neither was Columbus, especially after dark...
...I was too scared to even eat or sleep...
...It's decorated with floral curtains, and her divan bed acts as a sofa by day...
...Today, after a costly facelift and rehab, the old Broad82 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 HOUSING CRISIS way American is the new "On the Ave," a midpriced, short-stay boutique hotel, with rooms beginning at $240 per night...
...In response, a blitz organizing and outreach campaign is currently in motion...
...There was nothing better...
...In 1980, another landlord took control...
...knee-high weeds and accumulated litter make everything feel forlorn and menacing...
...Something she said lingers with me...
...So they decide to go to the camp of the Aramaeans...
...Indeed, an unprecedented 36.7 million tourists and business travelers flocked to the Big Apple last year, second only to Orlando, Florida, and 11 percent more than the previous year...
...84 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...On the Ave,' yeah, sure," Gross jokes...
...It's barely twelve feet by twelve feet, though the tall ceilings make it feel less claustrophobic...
...No warning, no letter, no nothing, just 'boom, boom, boom!' at the door...
...The minute landlords get the Certificate of No Harassment and work permit," Kane argues, "they use the construction itself to try to drive out tenants...
...Today, it's estimated that fewer than forty thousand survive...
...She feels like "the last leaf on a lonely tree...
...I hope that if the wind blows me off, it blows me off to a special place...
...Despite record budget surpluses and eight years of un8o n DISSENT / Spring 2001 HOUSING CRISIS precedented economic expansion and prosperity, nobody seems concerned about building affordable housing...
...they are the telltale signs of change in the air, a revival of sorts in Harlem, where, after years of neglect, properties are miraculously being spruced up, money is flowing in after decades of flowing out, and middle-class people, are returning...
...They don't understand their rights...
...After all, it brought a lot of money to the city: developers and construction companies hire workers and make healthy profits...
...Didn't have either all weekend...
...We'd put cardboard up and they'd rip it down...
...many more will likely end up in shelters...
...The rooms they were offered faced an alley and were darker...
...Kane sighs...
...AT THE Broadway American, Elizabeth Kane believes, "They were clearly trying to get tenants out and went about it in a very brutal fashion...
...But we told them we weren't moving, that we had no place else to go...
...Four leprous men are deliberating...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
