Thursday, November 19, 2020

Good "End Warehousing" rally - with photos

There are some 60,000 homeless people in New York City shelters, many of those people working families.  There are some 70,000 vacant rent-regulated apartments.   What's wrong with this picture?!  Stellar is warehousing 7 vacant rent-stabilized apartments in this building alone - refusing to offer them for rent even as it offers bonuses to tenants who refer applicants to market-rate apartments. 

The BrooklynPaper reports, 

Ever since the state legislature passed a package of tenant-friendly bills in Albany last year, real estate bigwigs have been keeping more units empty in the hopes that politicians will undo some of those laws, and the consequences could be lethal for the unhoused facing down the pandemic without shelter, according to Manhattan Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal.

“People who are homeless will get sick and they have nowhere to go, this spells death for them and their families,” the Big Apple lawmaker said at the protest last week. “What [landlords] hope — although this won’t happen — is that we will roll back some of these tenant protections and they will once again be able to increase the rent and be able to take apartments out of rent regulation.”

So we had a rally on Wednesday. It was a companion to the larger End Warehousing Coalition rally in Brooklyn that same day.  Here are some great photos. Thanks to Laura Koulish,John Rodriguez, and Frank Leonardo for their photos, and to State Senator Brian Benjamin, whose aide Neil Douglass Reilly can be seen in the bottom-most photo on the left.