Lower East Side Tenant Union Launched
By Wasim Lone

Over 60 Lower East Side tenant leaders, representing tenant associations in public housing, privately owned and city-owned buildings launched the Lower East Side Tenant Union at a community meeting on Feb. 9. They unanimously agreed to fight landlord harassment and intimidation and to try to stop the further displacement of low-income tenants from the neighborhood. The idea for the union emerged in the summer of 1997, after a series of planning meetings among tenants of distressed buildings and Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), a community-based tenant rights organization. Tenant leaders had expressed frustration that despite the intense harassment and displacement of tenants, there was no effective neighborhood organization to organize and mobilize them.

"It is important that the low-income tenant associations come together as a tenant union, so that they are not fighting alone but fighting together as a unified group supporting each other and going after landlords who are making life miserable for the tenants," said Lan Yee, a tenant leader from a group of four private buildings owned by the same landlords. "Our landlords have successfully harassed most of the tenants from the buildings by refusing to do any repairs and maintenance at all, by insulting, ridiculing and scaring them." Only 20 of the 50 apartments in the four buildings are still occupied, he added; the rest are vacant and warehoused. "We are not taking it any more. We are getting organized to save our community," declared Erma Campbell, a tenant leader from Haven Plaza, a 350-unit federally subsidized Section 8 development on Avenue C. "We have seen our families, friends and neighbors displaced by landlords who will resort to anything to drive tenants out so they can jack up the rents. At Haven Plaza, the rents have been going up, up, and up while the living conditions are going down, down, and down."

Robert Watlington, a leader from 103 2nd Ave., a privately owned building, described how tenants there endured a whole month without heat and hot water last winter. "It was hell, and it was not until we organized a tenant association and took action that the landlord repaired the boiler. "I think that the landlord would have preferred if we had all moved out," he continued. "Times are hard for low-income tenants in the Lower East Side. Landlords know that there are upper-income tenants who are able to pay significantly higher rents, and it is making life difficult for us. They want the buildings, they want the gardens, everything is up for grabs."

According to leaders, the union's main plans for 1998 are 1) to strengthen the tenant associations already in the union; 2) to organize buildings where there are no tenant associations; 3) to target the worst landlords and undertake campaigns against them; 4) to hold public officials accountable for their complicity in the displacement process or lack of action against it; and 5) to distribute tenants' rights literature all over the neighborhood.

For more information about the Tenant Union call GOLES at (212) 533-2541.