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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
citys 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 Apples
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 cant
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 citys 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 were
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 citys 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. | |