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- Sep 30, 2011
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In Spanish, the word is “el acoso.” Harassment.
Last October, when Wanda Perez paid the rent for the Bronx apartment she’s lived in for 20 years, the superintendent handed her a receipt with “When are you leaving?” written on it.
Perez, a fortyish woman wearing a denim vest over a gold T-shirt, tells the story again June 18th, at a rally in a church gymnasium a few blocks away from her building at 2200 Aqueduct Avenue, a few blocks south of Fordham Road on the last ridge before the west Bronx slopes down to the Harlem River. “But I’m not going!” she says in Spanish, setting off a chant of “No Nos Vamos” to the beat of plaster buckets, drums, and pot lids.
The 56-apartment building is a blocky U-shape with a rectangular courtyard leading to the doors, typical of 1920s Bronx architecture. Its residents went without cooking gas for 18 months, getting it turned back on in March after a settlement between the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the landlords, Charles Rosenwasser and David Pilch of Brooklyn. HPD violation records for the last year show multiple complaints for no heat and no hot water in the entire building, and no electricity in several apartments.
There are huge holes in the walls with rats coming out, Sandra Rodriguez says in Spanish, and a neighbor has had to put nylon over the hole in her bathroom ceiling so her six children could take baths during the last six months. The front-door lock has been broken for more than 2½ months, in the police precinct that had the sixth-highest murder rate in the city in 2015.
“We don’t feel safe inside,” Wanda Maldonado, a Mexican immigrant holding a baby, says in Spanish. She says her cousin was stabbed in the hallway, and the door to a nearby apartment was set on fire. (In the last two years, police say, two grand larcenies have been the worst crimes reported in the building.)
Harassment is the biggest complaint neighborhood residents have about their housing, say organizers from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which coordinated the rally and a march to 2200 Aqueduct afterwards. Typical tactics include fraudulent rent surcharges and eviction attempts, failing to make repairs, threatening to call immigration enforcement agents, and, increasingly common recently, simply demanding that they leave.
People in 2200 Aqueduct have also been told that repairs wouldn’t get done if they called 311 to complain about problems in the building, says Marika Dias, a lawyer with Bronx Legal Services, which, together with the Legal Aid Society in a citywide project called the Tenants Rights Coalition, has been working with tenants there since September.
Bronx Tenants Battle Rapacious Landlords Over Rat-Infested, Run-Down Apartments
Rats coming out of the ceiling. Yeah...........
Last October, when Wanda Perez paid the rent for the Bronx apartment she’s lived in for 20 years, the superintendent handed her a receipt with “When are you leaving?” written on it.
Perez, a fortyish woman wearing a denim vest over a gold T-shirt, tells the story again June 18th, at a rally in a church gymnasium a few blocks away from her building at 2200 Aqueduct Avenue, a few blocks south of Fordham Road on the last ridge before the west Bronx slopes down to the Harlem River. “But I’m not going!” she says in Spanish, setting off a chant of “No Nos Vamos” to the beat of plaster buckets, drums, and pot lids.
The 56-apartment building is a blocky U-shape with a rectangular courtyard leading to the doors, typical of 1920s Bronx architecture. Its residents went without cooking gas for 18 months, getting it turned back on in March after a settlement between the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the landlords, Charles Rosenwasser and David Pilch of Brooklyn. HPD violation records for the last year show multiple complaints for no heat and no hot water in the entire building, and no electricity in several apartments.
There are huge holes in the walls with rats coming out, Sandra Rodriguez says in Spanish, and a neighbor has had to put nylon over the hole in her bathroom ceiling so her six children could take baths during the last six months. The front-door lock has been broken for more than 2½ months, in the police precinct that had the sixth-highest murder rate in the city in 2015.
“We don’t feel safe inside,” Wanda Maldonado, a Mexican immigrant holding a baby, says in Spanish. She says her cousin was stabbed in the hallway, and the door to a nearby apartment was set on fire. (In the last two years, police say, two grand larcenies have been the worst crimes reported in the building.)
Harassment is the biggest complaint neighborhood residents have about their housing, say organizers from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which coordinated the rally and a march to 2200 Aqueduct afterwards. Typical tactics include fraudulent rent surcharges and eviction attempts, failing to make repairs, threatening to call immigration enforcement agents, and, increasingly common recently, simply demanding that they leave.
People in 2200 Aqueduct have also been told that repairs wouldn’t get done if they called 311 to complain about problems in the building, says Marika Dias, a lawyer with Bronx Legal Services, which, together with the Legal Aid Society in a citywide project called the Tenants Rights Coalition, has been working with tenants there since September.
Bronx Tenants Battle Rapacious Landlords Over Rat-Infested, Run-Down Apartments
Rats coming out of the ceiling. Yeah...........
