Met Council’s Annual Assembly

Code enforcement, the connections between a variety of tenant and housing issues, and stopping the Rent Guidelines Board’s “poor tax” were the main issues discussed at Met Council’s annual assembly May 22, held at the Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in Manhattan.

Harlem tenant organizer Linda Daniels spoke accompanied by her son Sean, who survived being severely burned in February when he fell into a bathtub with 200° water. Daniels’ building has over 900 violations, yet, noted Met Council’s Kenny Schaeffer, the city’s code-enforcement litigation bureau has been so decimated by the Giuliani administration’s budget cuts that is no longer brings “comprehensive cases” against landlords with multiple violations. Andrew Goldberg of the New York Public Interest Research Group discussed lead poisoning as a code-enforcement issue, urging people to “show their outrage” at landlord attempts to weaken the city’s lead-paint law. “Giuliani governs the city for the people who don’t live here, and doesn’t listen to the people who do,” Councilmember Stephen DiBrienza told the assembly.

Jeannie Dubnau of RENA (Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association) talked of ways to get the Rent Guidelines Board to rescind the “poor tax” on low-rent apartments.

New Met Council organizer Dave Powell moderated a panel discussion on “Communities in Crisis: Learning From Successes and Defeats,” featuring Frank Brodhead on SRO hotels, Harry Bubbins of the More Gardens! Coalition, Susan Howard of Charas, Steve Englander on squatters, and Nia Mason of the Association for Community Empowerment in Harlem, describing the effects of the city’s Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program there.

With many tenants frustrated by having often been sold out by Democratic Party leadership, the assembly also heard from two third-party organizers, Eljeer Hawkins of the Labor Party and Tom Siracuse from the Greens.

The assembly also elected Met Council's 17-member board of directors. Newly elected to the board are Barbara Conn, a former Met Council organizer who now works for the Local 802; Cathy Grad, a tenant lawyer formerly with the Community Law Office in East Harlem, now in private practice at Grad & Weinraub; and Nia Mason. Re-elected board members are: Angelita Anderson, director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court; Susan Howard; Vajra Kilgour, a leader of the 515-521 W. 122nd Street Tenants Association; Met Council executive director Jenny Laurie; Jon Lilienthal, of the Queens League of United Tenants (QLOUT); Henrietta Lyle of the Lenox Terrace Tenants Association; Seth Miller, tenant attorney with Collins, Dobkin & Miller; Dave Powell; Alan Reich, Met Council's phone volunteers coordinator; rent regulation expert Bill Rowen; Kenny Schaeffer, tenant attorney with the Legal Aid Society; Deborah Schutt, former Met Council organizer; Scott Sommer, UAW staffer and host of Met Council's weekly radio show on WBAI; and Gloria Sukenick, tenant activist from Chelsea.