New Yorkers from a variety of age brackets, races, and economic backgrounds came together on May 23 to demand their rights as tenants not be sacrificed in the name of economic development.

First Avenue, between 14th and 23rd Streets in lower Manhattan, was lined with thousands of protestors participating in the “New York Is Our Home” march and rally, a citywide action that decried rising, deregulated rents; harassment of tenants by landlords; and the elimination of Mitchell Lama and Section 8 housing.

A diverse collection of community and housing-advocacy groups from throughout New York City were represented at the event, including the Coalition for the Homeless,  Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens, Queers for Economic Justice, and Make the Road By Walking, a Brooklyn-based group whose advocacy focuses on low-income and immigrant communities.  Many protestors carried yellow, A-frame-shaped signs that simply read “Save Our Homes.” 

Here in the Bronx, about 20 to 25 members of New Settlement Apartments’ Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) program boarded a bus at 170th Street and Grand Concourse, wearing eye-catching orange shirts with “CASA” in black letters (more CASA members joined at the rally itself). 

 New Settlement Apartments is a non-profit organization that owns 993 housing units in the Bronx, and provides education and advocacy services in issues of housing affordability and safety.

CASA member Almadia Smith, 64, said a large part of her motivation for attending the demonstration was the negligence of landlords in terms of maintenance and repairs.  Among the problems with which she most frequently contends, Smith cited dirty hallways, faulty door locks, and a lack of heat and hot water during the winter. This negligence, Smith said, is made all the worse when coupled with steady rent increases. “In the last 5 years, it’s been almost like 30 percent,” Smith said of her rising rent. “And I’m still living in bad conditions.”

Fellow CASA activist Donna Johnson, who lives across from the new Yankee Stadium construction site on Jerome Avenue, spoke to a concern voiced by many in attendance at the rally: gentrification. “What happened to Harlem is going to happen in the Bronx,” Johnson said, elaborating that she feared major development projects such as the new stadium would in turn result in higher property taxes, and then higher costs overall. The result, Johnson said, could be that longtime residents of neighborhoods like Highbridge would no longer afford to live there.

“Most of us will be losing our apartments when the change goes into affect,” Johnson said. “Landlords will want to better their real estate, and to do that, they need tenants who can afford today’s market price.”

Like Johnson, Doris Scott suggested the issues of landlord harassment of tenants, gentrification, and rising rents were all connected: The link, she and others suggested, was vacancy decontrol. Under current city housing law, a previously rent-stabilized apartment becomes destabilized if it is vacant and the monthly rent has risen to $2000 or higher.

One way a landlord could increase the rent to $2000 even for a rent-stabilized apartment is by performing major capital improvements (MCI’s)—in other words, large-scale building repairs—after a tenant moves out.  Therefore, Scott said, a cycle often ensues where landlords pressure tenants out of the building so that they can perform MCI’s and increase the rent, subsequently move new tenants in, and repeat the process.

“The landlords, they’re very unscrupulous,” said Scott, who lives at 167th Street and Grand Concourse. “They’re using every egregious trick in the book.”

There was at least one high-profile voice in attendance—Kool Herc, who grew up in a Mitchell Lama house on Sedgwick Avenue and is widely considered the founder of hip-hop. Kool Herc said he was motivated to attend the rally out of anger at observing people in his home neighborhood forced to leave by the process of gentrification. 

Herc said he hoped his notoriety as a hip-hop founder and star could help draw attention to issues of housing affordability and preservation.

“This is their home,” he said, speaking particularly of residents priced out of the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up. “It’s nothing nice about uprooting.”