Tenant Organizing: A Harlem Saga
By Linda Daniels

In November 1995, I moved into 101 West 140th St., hoping to find a better home for myself and my six children than the place where we had been living. But not long after we moved in, I began to discover serious violations in my new apartment.

For one thing, the hot water simply didn’t run at various times during the day and evening. The radiators throughout the apartment were leaky, windows were broken, and the sinks in both the kitchen and the bathroom were leaking. When I complained to the manager about these problems, he promised to take care of them. After I complained a few more times, he finally sent a couple of guys to my apartment to address the water problem. They did some work, but the problem remained. When I complained again, he said that I was the only tenant complaining and that he needed more proof that this problem really did exist.

I decided to go from door to door all through the building, to find out if anyone else had these same problems—and what I came across was a lot more than water problems, although it turned out that just about everyone from the fifth floor up had to wait as long as 15 minutes for the hot water to come up. Tenants throughout the building complained about everything from rats to radiator leaks, leaky ceilings, and broken windows—the same problems I had and then some. Broken door locks were trapping tenants in their own homes; stoves and refrigerators didn’t work; ceilings were falling. There are 52 units in the building, and most of the people who live here work or are retired and living on fixed incomes. Our rents are not cheap; people are paying over $1,000 for a five-room apartment. Some tenants are the third generation of their families to live here, and they have watched rents get higher and higher while services have nearly disappeared. One tenant who has lived on the seventh floor since 1938 is in her eighties now. She has six flights of stairs to struggle up whenever the elevator is out.

When I suggested forming a tenants’ association, the response I got was more than positive, so I gathered one person per floor and held a meeting, where we formed the steering committee. We discussed the most common problems of the building and gave a list of complaints to the manager. At the first general tenants meeting, 45 people showed up, and agreed that the next meeting would include management. At the second general meeting, management promised to take care of the violations in the building—but they never did. So the tenants’ association took the landlord to court to sue for repairs.

But then management changed hands, from L.B. Management to E.D.A. Management, which is run by a woman named Geraldine Puente. After E.D.A. took over, we went for 88 days without heat and hot water in the winter of 1996; the elevator was broken for three weeks; sewage was allowed to accumulate in a stagnant pool in the front alley of the building; and the intercom ceased to function. The court action we had begun earlier helped, though; these violations have been corrected. Some of the individual violations have been corrected, too, but have reoccurred because the repair work was so shoddy.

This year, there have been some serious accidents in the building. A ceiling fell on a young mother, injuring her back. A broken window slammed down on a child’s fingers, cutting them so badly that they all required stitches.

As if all this weren’t enough, tenants are systematically harassed with threats of eviction for not having rent receipts from prior managements. Some people have been dragged into court and made to miss work; others have been physically intimidated.

The management has recognized that the tenants’ association is effective in helping everyone to secure their rights as tenants, and because of this, they have employed some very underhanded and tricky tactics. Some of these include using the building superintendent to try to turn some of the tenants against the organizers, telling tenants who may owe rent not to participate in the tenants’ association or attend meetings, spreading false rumors about organizers, and even cutting deals with a few people. But these are all tactics that I have seen or heard of before, and I have vowed that the tenants’ association will continue to push on in our fight to exercise our rights and get the services we pay for.