Opinion: Hell to Pay For Manhattan Pad
With Friends Like These
by Max Lorentz

The emotional zenith, and media focus, of Tenant Lobby Day this past May 20 was when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a charismatically-challenged orator, was introduced at the rally and the crowd, coaxed by the organizers and elected officials (mostly Assembly Democrats) who had surrounded the podium, chanted "Shelly, Shelly, Shelly!"

The choreography was symbolic of a political strategy that in the end bore a poison fruit: focusing almost all grass-roots pressure on the Republicans -- Governor Pataki, State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (a wholly owned subsidiary of real-estate interests) and the "swing" Republican Senators from Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island and Westchester--while trusting the Speaker and his Democratic colleagues to stand by tenants. As the crowd was walking back toward the buses, I heard one lonely voice yelling, "We’re being sold out by the politicians."

He was one of the "Citywide Rent Strike" folks, whose militant strategy and Lower East Side anarchism was dismissed by most tenant advocates as unrealistic (as it surely was). Everyone ignored him, a snake at the garden party, irked at his seemingly anachronistic rhetoric. When the deal was struck a few weeks later, I thought back on this lonely character. Was his warning prophetic?

The strategy of taking the support of Silver (and the Democrats in general) for granted, and taking the Speaker’s "No Compromise" promise at face value, contributed to what is unquestionably a horrible setback for tenants. Not a bad deal when compared with the the expiration of the whole system, but would the Republican Party have risked its majority by allowing rent regulations to expire altogether? No.

The tenant movement, with the most visible mobilization in memory, had the Republicans on the run. Then Silver blinked. Why? One reason certainly appears to be that the tenant movement did not exert sufficient pressure on him and the rest of the Manhattan delegation, but rather trusted that they would do the right thing, ignoring the maxim that political backbone requires grass-roots pressure.

The tenant movement itself blinked when it came to the issue of mandatory rent deposits. Although word had been leaked to the press that Silver was willing to compromise on this issue, a devastating loss for low-income tenants, but the Speaker’s promise of "No Compromise" was accepted at face value and no effort was made to force his hand.

The lesson is that elected representatives, even liberal Democrats, cannot be taken for granted on any issue of importance to tenants or low-income people. To be treated seriously, we must make clear, even to political "friends," that results are what counts, not good speeches and hollow promises. Political allies must know, as much as political enemies, that when our interests are compromised so drastically, there will be consequences. If we cannot do this over the next two years, all of the terrific organizing this year will have been for nought, and we will have ended up worse off and politically weaker than when we started.