Followers of the Times' City Room blog may have seen that the United Nations has dispatched Raquel Rolnik (pictured), its Special Rapporteur for housing issues, to America. She'll visit various U.S. cities on her trip, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans.
Right now she's in New York. Runnin' Scared caught up with her as she
toured The Bronx, where tenants and organizers prepped her on what they
described as the newest phenomena of housing woes, "predatory equity."
At an hour-long presentation at the Sedgwick Branch Library on
University Avenue and 176th Street -- a futuristic 90's building that
looks part space shuttle and part Star Wars, -- the rapportuer was told
that in a four-square-mile area of the North and South Bronx, six
private equity firms have officially driven 2,738 apartment units into
foreclosure or risk of foreclosure.
Cesar Guzman, who lives at a building formerly owned by Ocelot Capital Group,
said when Ocelot officially "disappeared" -- meaning they literally
can't be traced, they "packed up everything and left town" -- they also
left his 16-unit building in foreclosure and total disrepair, with
things to this day "getting worse."
Other tenants told the the rapporteur similar horror stories.
Dina Levy, organizing and policy director for the Urban Homesteading
Assistance Board, who helped organize the tenants, found one common
denominator in all these cases: buildings with over-leveraged mortgages
that their rent revenues can't support.
And when a building is over-leveraged, said Levy, the landlord
inevitably fails to maintain it. "The landlords have these outrageous
mortgage payments," she said. "And they either have two choices: they
can pay the mortgage, or they can fix the building."
Every single building holding the 2,738 endangered or
foreclosed units saw a dramatic increase in violations, going from a
handful to over 200 in less than a year. For Guzman and many others,
this meant no heat and no hot water last winter. (He told us he took a
cold shower this morning because the boiler broke down -- again.)
Before leaving the prep talk for her tour of a few of the
foreclosed buildings, the rapporteur said she'd file reports with the
City, the U.S. government and the U.N. But, she added, "I am glad to
see that you tenants have organized. Nothing can ever replace people's
organizing. Without pushing from below and taking direct action,
nothing ever changes."