"Eviction-Proof" NYC Tenants Warned Against Cash-Strapped Corporate Landlords Looking To Force Them Out & Replace Them With The More Affluent

In New York City, Columbia University's Columbia Spectator reports:

• For years, the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center has led workshops to teach local tenants to organize and take landlords to court for harassment. But at a convention last week, the usual presentations on tenants’ rights and navigating city agencies took on new urgency.

• As the financial crisis moves north from Wall Street to West Harlem and Washington Heights, Garrett Wright of the Urban Justice Center reminded attendees of the tactics landlords used to replace lower-income tenants with “white, yuppie residents” during the housing market’s peak in the last few years, such as neglecting repairs and attempting to evict rent-stabilized tenants.(1)

• Activists told tenants to brace themselves for more of the frivolous lawsuits and harassment experienced during the housing boom. Landlords are beginning to default on loans they took out to purchase their buildings, and today, unlike in recent years, “they really need the money,” organizer Rolando Rodriguez said.

For more, see Wall Street Crisis Impacting Rent-Stabilized Housing.

(1) Rent-stabilized tenants are those tenants in New York City rent-regulated apartment buildings who, so long as they use their apartments as their primary residence, don't sublease to another, and basically don't destroy the place, can for all practical purposes stay in their apartments for the rest of their lives, subject to what most landlords feel is a modest annual rent increase (the determination of which is made by a third party and completely out of the landlord's control). For those tenants whose rent is way below market value, this presents a great deal for them and, accordingly, make them targets for some landlords looking to force them out and replace them with higher paying tenants.