Public Employee Press

New York is OUR home!

Thousands demonstrate for affordable housing

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

“New York is OUR home!” shouted 7,000 housing activists from DC 37 and a coalition of 90 unions, politicians, residents and advocates who marched May 23 from Stuyvesant Town to Union Square in a demonstration for affordable housing.

“Millions of New Yorkers cannot afford a decent place to live,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. “The situation is desperate.”

The campaign to demand that the state and federal governments act to save affordable housing for New York City dwellers was organized by advocacy groups Tenants and Neighbors and ACORN, and included the Central Labor Council, City Council members, state legislators and unions.

Marchers formed a human chain around the East 14th Street housing complex.

Stuyvesant Town was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and heralded as a bastion of affordable housing for the city’s white middle class as soldiers returned from World War II. Earlier this year it was sold for $5.4 billion.

The sale of the 80-acre, 110-building complex, which includes Peter Cooper Village, is another tremor in the Big Apple’s seismic shift from working class to upper class. In the last decade, thousands of rent-regulated apartments where teachers and teamsters, police clerks and officers, nurses and accountants once lived have been permanently repackaged into luxury housing. Almost 800 DC 37 members live in Stuyvesant Town.

The Big Apple building boom has created thousands of million-dollar residences from Battery Park to Harlem. But less than 3 percent of the new units are affordable for working people. As the cost of a two-bedroom rental in Cooper Village exceeded $4,600 a month for newcomers, according to a recent ad, masses of demonstrators demanded more affordable alternatives to being priced out of their homes.

The fired-up and friendly crowd chanted, “What a shame, what a pity, we can’t live in New York City!” as it prepared to march to Union Square. The “New York is OUR home” campaign will fight to preserve the city’s shrinking affordable housing stock, and to protect housing for seniors, disabled people and those with HIV.

Nine days earlier, almost 2,000 public housing residents, including two busloads of DC 37 members, traveled from around the country May 15 to march on Washington. Demanding more federal aid for public housing developments, the demonstrators carried signs that said “United we stand, Divided we’re homeless,” and urged Congress to reverse the eight-year decline in federal funds for preserving and operating public housing.

Housing: a civil rights issue
Shortly after Tishman-Speyer, an international real estate corporation, took over Stuy Town, developers set their sights on Starrett City, a 46-building complex spread over 140 acres on the Brooklyn-Queens border. But the plan to buy and privatize the 5,880 apartment complex — one of the largest federally subsidized housing projects developed in the 1970s — was snatched off the table in part because of intervention by the federal Housing and Urban Development Dept. and DC 37, City Council member Charles Barron, who represents that community, and other legislators who stepped in and blocked the sale. Five hundred ­DC 37 members live in Starrett.

“The housing crisis is our city’s biggest problem,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. New York City has lost 25,000 Mitchell-Lama units and thousands of Section 8 subsidies in recent years. Hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments also have been lost to vacancy decontrol.

“Housing is a civil rights issue,” said Assembly member Keith Wright. He stood with the protestors and Comptroller William Thompson, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and others. Together they called for Albany to act now and repeal the Urstadt law to let New York City control its own rent guidelines. With Eliot Spitzer as governor, many leading Democrats are hopeful that in the 2008 elections, far-reaching change in Albany on housing law and other issues will be “just two seats away.”