The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  New tenants and people who have lived here for a long time should not be pitted against each other. That weakens us—and empowers the landlords. Break the cycle! Break the cycle!

  The sound of agreement rumbles across the room—either side of fifty people, nodding and shifting forward in their seats.

  The woman in the middle of the circle goes on:

  We are not a union in name—we are a union in deed and action. New York was the birthplace of the labor movement, and it will be the birthplace of the tenant union movement.

  She opens the floor with a question:

  What’s going on in your building? Any improvements?

  Silence. So the woman brings a new question to the room, asking if anyone has recently experienced harassment or encountered new problems. Hands are raised all around her—and then a few overlapping voices:

  They’re not housing people, they are housing cattle!

  I am not an animal!

  The woman reestablishes order by pointing to a young woman who stands to speak. Her name is Nefertiti Macaulay; she is thirty-two years old and she begins by giving the address of her building:

  1059 Union.

  Everyone begins by giving their address—it’s a tag, a badge, it is the piece of crucial information: 1159 President Street, 1580 President Street, 1045 Union Street.

  Nefertiti tells her story of living on the third floor with her deaf, diabetic grandmother, caring for her for a decade until she passed in 2007. She has rats in her kitchen, visible water damage in multiple rooms, and her apartment has not been painted since her grandmother’s passing.

  I can remember her there in her chair by the window, watching TV.

  My grandparents moved in when I was born, and I moved in to take care of her when I was nineteen. The super knew me. The landlord would come in and sit on our couch and have conversations—he knew me. But still I got a note of eviction saying I am squatting. We were in court for a year, every month. I had a lawyer and we went through trying to prove I lived in the apartment. All my bills were at my mother’s house so the only proof we had were the people who knew me. I went around the building and got them to sign, saying that I lived in the building. We even brought neighbors and medical caregivers to court to say that I live in the building. After a year the judge said, basically, “You don’t have any proof that you live there so we’re going to have to give you fair market price.” And my rent went from $750 to $1,156.

  She passed away and it was thrown at me. As a young person, you don’t prepare for these things. I think they wanted to scare me so I said, “I’ll take it.” And sometimes I take three jobs to make it work.

  I have nowhere else to go. It’s scary. The system is not on our side. We need to get everyone on board. This is not fighting for one person’s rights—it’s fighting for everyone’s rights.

  Each person who speaks is asked to yield the floor before she has told all there is to say, because there are always more tenants waiting to speak, more stories to be told. There are common themes that run through the testimonies: lowball buyout offers, threatening lawyers, unsanitary living conditions, and unsafe construction sites.

  During a break in the meeting, two politicians running for the same office in the same upcoming primary work the room, sympathizing, handing out business cards.

  Representatives from various nonprofit organizations are here, some offering advice, some just listening.

  One in-demand, frequent visitor, Brent Meltzer, is not present to hear these testimonials because he must work deep into the night. So I go looking for him in the Downtown Brooklyn building where he works. He greets me at the elevator and takes me to his office. The filing cabinet has broken: stacks of folders and pieces of disassembled drawers are strewn across the small room; miscellaneous hardware and tools have been dropped in frustration onto every surface unclaimed by the folders and busted drawers. There is barely room for Brent, let alone visitors, so we convene in the conference room down the hall. Everyone has left and all the lights are out. The room is lit by the last traces of sun coming through the windows. Brent, forty, has a knee that won’t stop bouncing. He leans back in his chair and tries to wipe the exhaustion from his face:

  I saw one building where on the main floor the landlord punched a hole through to the basement. You go down and there are rooms. No certificate of occupancy. So someone’s not supposed to live there because there’s no windows, and it’s a fire hazard. Two young guys rented it. Got it for $2,300 bucks and thought it was a steal, and they don’t know it’s a firetrap.

  Brent has worked for South Brooklyn Legal Services since 2002. His office, which is a UAW union shop that provides free legal advocacy for low-income people living in Brooklyn, is part of a consortium of offices throughout the city, which began in the 1960s using federal funds provided by President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Brent has been the manager of the housing unit since 2008.

  I come from Canada so with that alone we have different cultural backgrounds. There’s some mistrust at times and you want to try and get past some biases. I’m not super judge-y. I tell my clients this all the time: “You need to tell me everything because I’m your lawyer I’m not your parents. Whatever you tell me is pretty much fine.” They can tell me they’ve killed someone and I can’t disclose it. The only thing I can disclose is if they’re going to kill someone. Clients love that one.

  He laughs.

  It’s just a good way of breaking down barriers.

  We do have stronger tenant laws here compared to other cities but the pressures are also much, much more here than other cities. I lived in Portland, Oregon, for a while and there’s a lot of housing. The vacancy rates in New York are under 5 percent. If you get evicted you can’t just go down the street.

  A lot of people are precariously housed in New York at the moment. So while we do a lot of housing work, we also work with tenant organizers. I work with this group FUREE, Families United for Racial and Ethnic Equality. They had a big fight with rezoning Downtown Brooklyn and our office helped them with Mama Joy. She was a homeowner and she believed that her basement was used for the Underground Railroad over here on Duffield, and they were going to do eminent domain and take away her home and create a parking lot. So we sued and, lo and behold, it looks like it might have been used for the Underground Railroad. So they stopped the eviction.

  Mama Joy appears in a photograph clipped out of a community newspaper. She stands in her basement, her braided hair poking out from under a bright orange gele. In the image, she points at a portion of the wall that was clearly once an opening—a tunnel of some kind, which has been covered over with bricks. She died a month ago and a street near her preserved home, not far from the office where Brent and I sit, has been renamed Abolitionist Place.

  I moved to New York in 1999. So I’ve only known Giuliani and Bloomberg. And I wouldn’t say Bloomberg was hostile to us but he wasn’t necessarily friendly.

  He laughs.

  And Giuliani was definitely hostile.

  He laughs again.

  Bloomberg made the government work. But the question is for who? When I think of the Bloomberg administration, they’re modernizing, computerizing—you can go online and check stuff and it’s great. But it didn’t happen in any of the agencies I work with, the poor people’s agencies. For instance, lots of tenants that live in public housing, they’re on public assistance. And there’s just not communication between those two agencies. It’s shocking when you think that’s what Bloomberg was all about, getting government to be more efficient and there was no efficiency for poor people. It was all for the Upper East Side and can they call 311 and, you know, get the snow removed. But meanwhile we’re paying so much money for people in shelters because these agencies just weren’t talking together. You know lately that’s what’s been on my mind a lot, how can we make this government reactive for my clients?

  No doubt there’s going to be changes with de Blasio, even the access that we’re getting.
But what’s shocking to me, talking to people I know who are connected to de Blasio, it takes time to get up and running. Yesterday I met with Vicki Been, the head of the Housing Preservation Department. And Vicki is my old law school professor. She is really smart, but we’re having this meeting and there was a lot of stuff she just doesn’t know. This is a bright professor. It’s not her fault, she doesn’t know about everything and she needs to get briefed on it. The head of the Human Resources Administration is Steven Banks who was the head of The Legal Aid Society but even then he doesn’t know everything—and he’s one of us, literally he’s one of us. So it’s going to take some time.

  We’re taking some different tactics with this administration. We’ll reach out to them and say we’re about to do this, and give them the benefit of the doubt, and say, “Will you work with us on this?” And if they don’t, so be it. We’ll shame you all to death.

  He laughs.

  I’m not trying to stop gentrification, I’m just trying to stop my client from being evicted. I’m not opposed to change. And yet there are some that say, “Well yeah, if we allow the neighborhood to start changing it’s going to remove long-term housing and that might be something we should be concerned about.”

  And I say, “Well, yes, but if there’s more affordable housing and it’s real affordable housing, I’m alright with that.”

  Neighborhoods are going to change. Even people who say, “Oh, gentrification is horrible,” it’s sometimes rooted in that, “Oh we like these black neighborhoods, these Latino neighborhoods and now these white people are coming in and ruining it all.” And it’s not necessarily the case. There are definitely neighborhoods where black middle-class professionals move in—is that gentrification? I don’t think if you ask most people in Harlem or somewhere else they’d consider that gentrification.

  Then it gets complicated. You start talking about class, you start talking about race. Take Crown Heights for a moment. This is predominantly an African American neighborhood and it’s becoming white. Really, really white. So what does that mean?

  I think in the United States it’s hard to disentangle class and race. I live two blocks from here. I moved to this neighborhood in 2003 and every year they’d have a big Puerto Rican block party and they’re all old-school rent-stabilized tenants. But since I’ve been here, they slowly shifted out. This was a strong Latino community around here but it’s just gone. I don’t know what to think about that. It’s problematic that we’re losing affordable housing. But if it’s just a shifting of ethnic groups, the romantic in me has no problem with it, you know, that’s what New York’s been about. I mean Carroll Gardens was an Italian neighborhood and there’s still some vestiges of that but it’s changing.

  When you’re talking about gentrification are you talking about class? Are you talking about race? Are you talking about ethnicity, language? There are all these different things. Atlantic Avenue used to be a big Arab population, now they’re all out in Bay Ridge and have started up a new community out there. And that’s interesting to think about, is that gentrification? I don’t know.

  For instance the Fulton Street Mall was the second or third highest grossing commercial strip, after 125th street and the Hub up in the Bronx. But the language has always been we need to clean this up. It used to be a Jewish strip but there’s not actually a Jewish community living there so people would come in and the talk around the city, we have to clean it up. Which was code to get rid of the Jews.

  And then it became an African American strip and if you went down there on the weekend it was a very black shopping commercial district. You know, Big Daddy Kane used to go down there—that’s gone. I know an activist, and she had a shop down there, and they basically said you’re not good enough for us. Now there’s an Armani there because that was a good commercial space. And she’s out of business. She couldn’t set it up somewhere else because this was where people knew to come. So that, to me, looks like gentrification because it’s getting rid of local businesses and putting in big box, corporate businesses. Which I’m happy to have as well but what has that done and who is that helping?

  The desire to shift a population from its neighborhood is often expressed openly. In 1929, a consortium of boosters in Lower Manhattan wrote a proposal called the “New York Regional Plan,” which called for the removal of the area’s existing population, the construction of residential units for upper-class residents, new shops, and the physical redevelopment of the Lower East Side highway system, so that it would link up more directly with Wall Street: “The moment an operation of this magnitude and character was started in a district, no matter how squalid it was, an improvement in quality would immediately begin in adjacent property and would spread in all directions. The streets thereabouts would be made cleaner.”

  Another question: who’s actually getting into new buildings? Who are they developing these for? It’s not my client who’s on public assistance because the landlords are not going to take them in.

  There are definitely some people in my field who think that we should only be working with people at 30 percent of area income and below, and we just shouldn’t do anything else. But then you’re going to squeeze out the middle class. What are you going to do with the teachers? Where are the police officers going to live? They’re all going to live out on Long Island because they can’t afford the city.

  It’s funny that when I first started and I was in law school I was like I’m never going to turn anyone down, that’s the worst thing you can do. And honestly that’s part of my job now. We have limited resources. I’m one of the biggest housing units in the country and we only have 10 or 11 full-time attorneys for all of Brooklyn—2.3 million people. That’s not a lot. If we tried to help everyone that came in, gave everyone advice, that’s all we’d do. We’d never represent anyone, we’d just be doing intake and nothing else. So it’s these hard choices that we have to make and, yeah, it sucks. I always say we should have a therapist on staff for us because I spend half my day going out into the hallway and being very cold and saying, “No, you have to call our hotline, no I’m not going to give you any advice, I’m not going to help you.” So there’s that.

  And they say, “But I really need an attorney.”

  And I say, “I know you need an attorney, it’s just not going to be our office, I’m just not going to do it.”

  You know, I just did a training recently on unconscious bias, and it’s been really interesting for me to think when I walk out into the hallway here and I’m helping someone: Who do I talk to, who do I not talk to, why do I talk to them? Also making sure that I’m not being—I mean, I’m a gatekeeper, we’re an institutional player as well. We spend the day railing against other institutions and it’d be pretty hypocritical for us not to look inward and make sure that we’re not keeping people out, too. It’s trying to catch yourself in all this stuff, being equal to everybody.

  I struggle: we turn away a lot of hard cases at times. Those are the ones that, theoretically, we should be doing. Hard cases. But if we just did those we’d never meet our numbers because we also have grants with requirements. So it’s finding that balance, and I think we pride ourselves in thinking about ways that we can impact our clients’ lives beyond the individual case. The person that really, really needs our help, but who’s a long shot, can we justify putting resources into that? I was just talking to someone today who was completely railroaded in court. The judge was just wrong. The whole case was just wrong. But they can’t afford their rent. So do we go into that case because there’s a right involved? Absolutely there’s a right violated. But we’d go in, vindicate that right, and then the person is going to be evicted in two or three months because they can’t afford the rent. What do you do with that? I don’t know.

  I always ask, “What’s the exit strategy?” It’s horrible to say, like it’s the Iraq War. But seriously, if we’re going into this, how are we going to get ourselves out, because if we’re just going to go in and fight for ri
ghts, that’s great but we need to get out because otherwise what’s the point?

  So we really try to focus on cases where landlords are clearly violating the law. We have at least four or five cases right now where landlords go in and demolish properties. It used to be that they just wouldn’t do repairs and through neglect the tenants would move out. Or they would bring bogus cases. There’s one landlord attorney in court and he has a kind of big mouth and he was saying, “I tell my clients bring ten bogus cases, it’s only forty-five dollars to file. And nine of them get dismissed but you win one and you get your money back plus so much more.” And that’s the reality.

  Housing court is definitely an experience. Go to federal court first and then come to housing court—just to see what a money court is versus a poor person’s court. Family court, housing court, criminal court—those are all poor people’s courts. There’s no justice. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that.

  Have you gone to housing court before?

  You need to go to housing court.

  22.

  The civil courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn sits amid a cluster of bureaucratic towers that border a commercial strip whose tenants include everything from a ninety-nine cent store to the kind of restaurant where bartenders prefer to be called mixologists. The Quaker-affiliated Brooklyn Friends School—$28,000 a year for preschool—is just up the block.

  Inside the rectangular steel-and-glass building leased by the civil courthouse, the elevators break down year-round; the air conditioner only in summer. Before he was mayor, Bill de Blasio, acting as public advocate, put the building’s landlord on his “Worst Landlord” watch list. The city’s lease for the property expired last week but, unable to find new housing, housing court—ironically, or perhaps not—will stay in the ailing building.