NYC tenants march from Stuyvesant Town to Union Square

Over 7,000 people from 90 tenants’ groups, labor unions, homeless organizations and AIDS activists working on housing joined the New York Is Our Home! Coalition for a “Hands around Stuyvesant Town” demonstration on May 23. This diverse population held hands and marched to protest the “flipping” of relatively low-rental housing to luxury apartments in New York City.

New York, May 23. WW photo: G. Dunkel

Ed Ott, chair of the Central Labor Council in New York City, kicked off the rally with these words: “The price of housing in this city is effectively theft for working and working middle class people.” He went on to say that housing and other living costs in this city are an increasingly intolerable burden for working families, even with two incomes.

Every tenant in New York City who works for a living is worried about preserving decent, affordable housing. The Retirees Chapter of AFSCME’s District Council 37, CWA 1180, SEIU, UFT, which represents the primary and high school teachers in New York City, Teamsters Local 808 and a number of other city unions had contingents in the line and in the march to Union Square that followed. Acorn and the Working Families Party had members pulling the demonstration together.

Tenant groups from all over the city—in particular, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and the West Side of Manhattan—had sizable contingents. The homeless groups made the point that high rents mean more people on the streets, which official statistics bear out.

Composed of African Americans, Latin@s, and whites, a strong contingent from Starrett City in south Brooklyn raised the issue of flipping the 6,000 apartments there from affordable to luxury. There were two contingents from the Chinese community—the Chinese Progressive Association and Asian Americans for Equality. People coming from work were dressed in jeans and uniforms, as well as business suits.

Stuyvesant Town has around 8,000 apartments in 100 buildings and occupies 80 acres between 14th and 20th Sts., and between First Ave. and Avenue C on the eastern edge of Manhattan. Tishman Speyer Properties recently bought it, together with Peter Cooper Village just to its north, from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. for $5.4 billion and now advertises “luxury rentals.”

Met Life originally had it built in the mid-1940s for returning World War II veterans with aid from the city. Tishman Speyer seems to be betting that enough of the “old” tenants with stabilized rents—about one-third the level of current market rates—will be forced to move out. Then Tishman Speyer will charge $4,000 or more a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

Even if a minimum-wage earner could find an apartment in Stuyvesant Town for what the Housing and Urban Development department calls a “fair market rate”—currently $1,069, they would have to work 122 hours a week—more than three full-time jobs—to afford it. This is the reality that lies behind the fact that more than 100,000 families in New York City pay more than 50 percent of their monthly income for housing.

The New York Is Our Home! Coalition has a clear set of demands: repeal vacancy decontrol, the law that allows landlords an unlimited increase in rents when tenants move out; reinstate full subsidies to public housing; preserve Mitchell-Lama and Section 8 housing, which are different government programs for providing affordable housing; and limit rent payments for New Yorkers living with aid to 30 percent of their income.

The host of politicians who spoke were judged on whether or not they supported these demands. Many of the people listening to the speeches follow local politics closely and had no qualms about telling politicians that they were being watched and judged.

In New York City two out of every three people rent homes. In the rest of the country, two out of three own homes. A law regulating New York rents was passed for the first time in 1920 and different versions of it have been in force ever since.

New York City also still has the largest amount of rental housing under some form of rent control of any U.S. city. If the landlords in New York can do away with rent control, they will transfer additional billions of dollars a year from workers to their profits. They will also discourage tenant groups throughout the country from struggling for this kind of protection.