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Tenants Protest Gentrification in Harlem
By Vajra Kilgour

Chanting "I’m a tenant and I vote," "Vivienda decente para la gente" ("Decent housing for the people"), and "No housing, no peace," and carrying signs reading "No lease, no peace" and "Inquilinos unidos jamás serán vencidos" ("Tenants united will never be defeated"), hundreds of tenants marched through Harlem on October 28 to protest gentrification throughout the city. The march ended with a rally in Morningside Park.

Organized by the Citywide Tenants’ Coalition, the march began by targeting Harlem USA, the shopping mall at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue. The mall, anchored around a Disney store and an HMV CD store, received $14 million in government loans and subsidies from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone--a boon to businesses that provide low-wage service-sector jobs while housing costs are soaring out of sight.

The first speaker at the rally, Ida Pollack from the Queens League of United Tenants, gave perhaps the best thumbnail description of gentrification by describing it as "a big pot of lard for the landlords." Other speakers told stories all too familiar to rent-regulated tenants--of landlord ruses for getting rid of tenants who pay affordable rents and stubborn refusal to maintain or repair buildings.

But in many neighborhoods, there are other issues at stake besides simple greed. Harlem residents and speakers from Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Queens, the Upper West Side, Washington Heights, and the Bronx reported on the rapid erosion of affordable housing in these neighborhoods. Several of them connected the dots between landlords’ greed and racist "ethnic cleansing" and "planned shrinkage" agendas. Representatives of tenants in a broad range of housing--public, private, and subsidized--made it clear that for low- and moderate-income tenants, regardless of color, there is truly nowhere to run.

There were also stories of fighting back successfully, and all of them struck the same note. "Organizing, organizing, organizing and persistence are the key words," said Joyce Cullens from the Bronx. "Go to your local politicians"--a group conspicuously absent from the rally, whose organizers did not invite them to speak--"and be persistent with it. Make them dance to your tune."

Jeanie Dubnau, from the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association and an MC of the rally, summed it all up: "Without organizing, there’s nothing--sin organización no hay nada."