United Nations Special Rapporteur for adequate housing Raquel Rolnick is in New York this week. In addition to her duties at the UN General Assembly, Rolnick focused on the issue of affordable housing in New York City. Rolnick contacted community groups in Harlem, Brooklyn and Chinatown to have them show her low-income housing in New York.
On Tuesday, Oct. 29, the Chinatown Tenants Association took Rolnick and the press on a tour to view units in each of the two buildings, both owned by Madison Capital, a real estate and development company based in New York.
Mrs. Zhu, 83, lives with her children and two grandchildren in a two-bedroom apartment at 55 Delancey St, a 15-unit building. The cluttered household is strewn with red plastic Lunar New Year streamers hanging across the ceiling, a shrine to an ancestor, and large poster calendars. The Zhu’s have been living there for over 20 years; the rent is $1,100 a month.
Mrs. Zhu and her caretaker converse with each other in a Huzhou dialect of China's Zhejiang province. The caretaker, who preferred not to be named, showed Rolnick and the reporters some of the things ailing the apartment.
Above a family collage is a hole in the ceiling, the boards bending at the weight of a black garbage bag from the unit above. A lid from a disposable soda cup clings between the garbage bag and the ceiling.
Mrs. Zhu's caretaker held up a gallon of vegetable oil, the top and handle of the plastic jug bitten clean through by rats. “We can't leave anything out,” she said in Mandarin. “We left some food on the table one night and it was all gone by morning.” She also said they have cockroaches.
In one of the bedrooms a line of sunlight is visible through a slit in a wall, about a foot from the ceiling. “Every time we call [maintenance] they say they'll fix it tomorrow,” the caretaker said. “They've said that for two months.”
The buildings' owner, Jason Enters of Madison Capital, tells a very different story.
“I have spent over a million dollars in the last six months fixing the building, putting in all new windows with zero cooperation from the tenants,” Enters said. “The tenants have been sent certified letters asking if there are any issues in their apartments that need to be fixed. I get no responses. When we try to get in, they do not let us in.”
So why would tenants refuse maintenance offered to them? “I would love to have the answer to that question,” Enters said.
Enters said he has sent translators to the apartments and sent notices in Chinese, also to no avail.
Esther Wang of the Chinese Tenants Association says she's received reports from tenants of someone entering apartments without notice and taking photos. Tenants have also showed her the notices that the landlord sent, but the “Chinese translation was done badly and the tenants couldn't understand what the notice was saying,” Wang said.
In a unit at 61 Delancey St., a few doors down, Cheung Yuh Ying says the landlord has been refusing her rent checks since May, though she's been paying by that name for 18 years. Her passport bears a similar name, but spelled differently under the phonetic system of Mainland China. “I've photocopied my green card and passport but they tell me I have to change my name,” Cheung said in Mandarin. Now, due to accusations of non-payment, some tenants have been taken to housing court and may face eviction.
Enters purchased the building seven months ago, in March. Tenants suspect that the new attention to the spelling of a name is an excuse to push them out in favor of new tenants that will pay market rates.
Zhang Zhiqin of the Chinatown Tenants Association says a few apartments that had been vacant are now rented to new tenants at market rates, which according to one tenant, is $3,600 a month.
