Harlem Tenants Protest Displacement
By Jean Charles

Tenants and residents of Harlem, many of them wearing garbage bags to symbolize “being treated like trash by HPD,” demonstrated Dec. 14 on 125th Street to protest poor and working-class people being forced out of their homes by the Giuliani administration’s sell-off of city-owned buildings. The protest, in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, was organized by Action for Community Empowerment, a community-based housing organization. It culminated ACE’s year-long campaign against the violations committed against residents under the Giuliani administration’s Building Blocks Initiative, particularly the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program. Between 1 and 3:30 PM, as many as 50 demonstrators voiced their outrage against city Housing Commissioner Richard T. Roberts, the NYC Housing Partnership, and the looming reality that decent and affordable housing is being literally demolished in Harlem, thanks to the for-profit initiative of the NEP program.

The NEP was designed to sell city-owned property, primarily abandoned buildings managed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, to local private landlords. The new owners were supposed to renovate the buildings and allow the tenants to return, with minimally adjusted rents. Yet instead, working-class and low-income families and senior citizens are being harassed and displaced by these private owners, who wish to move in new tenants who can pay much higher rents. Whole blocks in Harlem are now being renovated, such as a row of brownstones at Madison Avenue and 127th Street. But within this “housing renaissance,” no housing is being built or set aside for working or low-income families, in a community where thousands of people make $15,000 a year or less. Last fall, several community-wide meetings were held to inform confused and outraged tenants of HPD’s tactics. At a November meeting at the Oberia Dempsey Center, Councilmembers Bill Perkins and Stanley Michels and a representative from Borough President C. Virginia Fields’ office agreed to help sustain affordable housing, and ensure that tenants are not displaced as a result of the poor monitoring and poor implementation of the NEP program.

Organizers warn that more protests will follow as the fight to keep decent, affordable, and low-income housing in Harlem continues to escalate into 1999.