Fighting to Win in East Harlem and Beyond

This press release from Movement for Justice in El Barrio lays out, amongst other things, their intention to travel across the Atlantic, from East Harlem to London, to bring the fight to the steps of their neighborhood's new, would-be gentrifiers...RJ
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Movement for Justice in El Barrio

For Immediate Release
Contact Juan Haro,  (212) 561-0555

Immigrant Tenants Fight Back Against the Displacement Plan of their New Multi-Billionaire Landlord

July 30th—In March of this year, the London-based investment group and multi-national company, Dawnay, Day Group, paid $250 million and exposed its plans to raise rents tenfold by displacing long-time low-income tenants. Since then, they have implemented their displacement plan by doing the following:

1. Bribing tenants with money to get them to abandon their apartments.
2. Failing to make repairs as entire ceilings fall on tenants resulting in emergency medical care.
3. Attempting to collect more money from tenants by making false charges for repairs and legal fees.
4. Sending threatening letters falsely accusing tenants of overcrowding.

The tenants and members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio representing 20 buildings in East Harlem have a plan to counter the attempt by Dawnay, Day Group to force tenants out of their homes. After having organized two demonstrations to address the problem, Movement for Justice in El Barrio will do the following:

1. Tenants and members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio will file a lawsuit against Dawnay, Day Group because of their illegal attempts to collect false charges.
2. Movement for Justice in El Barrio is organizing a neighborhood-wide “March to Save Our Homes and Our Barrio”
3. Movement for Justice in El Barrio and the Data Center are conducting a research study on the history of Dawnay, Day Group and will release a report to expose the multi-national company.
4. Movement for Justice in El Barrio will travel to London to organize with anti-gentrification groups on the ground to challenge Dawnay, Day Group at their central headquarters.

Driven by profit-seeking landlords and multi-national corporations, and facilitated by the city, gentrification has swept New York City and with it has come the grand-scale illegal eviction of low-income immigrant families. The Dawnay, Day Group has made it explicit that they plan to bring gentrification to El Barrio. In an interview with The London Times Phil Blakely, director of Dawnay, Day Group, exposed a plan to take advantage of lax tenant protection laws in NYC to raise rents tenfold.

“East Harlem is the last area of the whole of Manhattan being gentrified.” He said. “A typical two-bedroom flat taking $150 per month in rent can see the rents rise 3 per cent to 4 per cent each year without doing anything. As soon as you take vacant possession, the rents will typically rise 17 per cent when re-let without doing anything. But with renovation, a flat could well take $1,700 a month once re-let on the open market.”

The multi-billion dollar Dawnay, Day Group, formed an American Subsidiary, Dawnay, Day U.S. Real Estate Management LLC, to take their global financial ambitions to the streets of El Barrio. Let them be warned, Movement for Justice in El Barrio is dedicated to fighting the ambitions of greedy slumlords and profiteering global investors and will not standby and let landlords neglect or destroy this community of low-income immigrants in El Barrio.  

Dawnay, Day bought these buildings from one of NYC’s worst landlords, Steve Kessner. Tenants and members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio began their struggle against this landlord through protests, street marches, and court actions, tenants forced Steve Kessner to make hundreds of repairs and, finally, forced him out of El Barrio.  With their fight with the abusive slumlord Steve Kessner behind them, tenants and members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio are ready and willing to fight back against the worst. But with $250 million mega-purchase made by Dawnay, Day Group, Movement for Justice in El Barrio knows that the threat of gentrification is not gone. You can be sure, tenants stand strong and united, ready to defend themselves against the next multi-billionaire landlords, and if need be, are ready to send them packing as well.

Here is a message from Movement for Justice in El Barrio seeking support in completing their "Consulta del Barrio"...

Hi all,

As the summer wraps up, we are in the final stages of our “Consulta del Barrio” through which we have been consulting with the community here in El Barrio to figure out what issue to take on as an organization in addition to continuing our work organizing for housing justice and against gentrification. (For more info on the “Consulta del Barrio” see below) Through this entire process we hope to practice true democracy by going out and consulting directly with the community.

This summer, we hit the streets and did 600 one-on-one interviews in the community. It is now time to analyze what we learned from these interviews but we need all the information entered into a database before we can do that.  

We are looking for volunteers to help us do the data entry for the information collected in our one-on-one interviews. We know it is not glamorous but is an essential piece of a true in-depth consultation with the community that is slow and time consuming, and lots of hard work, but the only way we feel that we can practice true democracy here in El Barrio.  Due to limited staff capacity we are in real need of this form of support.

Please contact us if you may be able to help us out!

Limited Spanish is required.

Thanks so much for your support!!

Movement for Justice in El Barrio

As always, you can support us financially at:  

http://www.nycharities.org/donate/charitydonate.as p?ID=1865

Or send a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, ST. CECILIA’S CHURCH, and mail it to:
Movement for Justice in El Barrio
125 E. 105th St.
New York, NY 10029

“La Consulta del Barrio”

After almost two years of organizing around housing issues, both achieving their own victories and supporting their neighbors and new members, members started to push to take on another issue affecting the community. As part of our community driven issue identification program, “La Consulta del Barrio”, our members identified the eight most widely experienced problems in the community and created a ballot to take to the community for a vote. Over the summer of ’06, we hit the streets and set up “Las Urnas del Barrio” (El Barrio’s Ballot Box) on 116th St. and Lexington Avenue. We collected 782 ballots and identified the top-three most voted issues. The top three issues were: minimum wage violations, the proposed immigration laws, and the Mexican consulate. We conducted research on each of the top three issues to share with the community and we held a series of town hall meetings to listen to the voice and the experiences of the community and hear what they had to say on each of the issues.  These meeting involved massive outreach—for each of the three meetings we passed out 6,000 flyers--and served to gauge community interest in organizing around each of the issues. This summer, we took to the streets once again to listen to people affected by these problems and collected 600 one-on-one interviews documenting their experiences.

Writing about our issue identification process, Albor Ruiz from the Daily News proclaimed, “It is real grass-roots democracy, and it is being practiced by the immigrants who live in East Harlem.”

Through this process we will take the lead from the community to identify the next issue we will take on as an organization.

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