OPENING ADDRESS GIVEN AT 1ST HARLEM TENANTS CONVENTION, JUNE 1, 2007

Welcome to everyone tonight to this very important event: the First Harlem Tenants’ Convention.
Fausto, one of the organizers for this weekend event put together by the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center, was telling me today that there are daily more and more cases of people being evicted in our neighborhood.
He talked about how the landlords have no respect for some basic social values and no qualms about throwing elderly people and kids out into the street.
In school I learned that in other times and places people had some basic human rights that were respected. For example in England and France in the 17th & 18th centuries the townships had to guarantee its citizens who were unemployed food and shelter. They set aside monies to care for everyone in the village.
Those values are gone now. Someone once remarked that the number one law of the capitalist economic system is “you OR I, not you AND I”.
There’s a big gap between the brutal, heartless profit orientation of the for-profit system we live under and Human Rights.
Housing, economic security, education, healthcare are some of the values that are presently threatened.
One of our members, Epifania, said it clearly at one of our meetings: we are living under a roof that’s not guaranteed or secure.
In the history of New York City there have been politicians who fought for the people.
Fiorello LaGuardia was one, a populist mayor from the 1930’s who fought for the people, for immigrants, for workers. He tried to solve the problems of affordable housing and social security.
Rent control and rent stabilization came out of that period.
But now we tenants are alone. We have nobody under this current administration really fighting on our behalf. Manhattan is turning into an playground and enclave for yuppies and the present city government is completely in favor of it.
The landlords and developers we face are powerful. They have financial power and laws in their favor and the most of the politicians and they are organized.
Their gentrification plans to remove working people from their neighborhoods can only be resisted when we organize and unite.
We have to count on ourselves on our efforts, our organizing. This weekend is an important part of that effort. We are the majority of this city.
Our challenges:
1) to bring in young adults with families that are just starting out.
2) make solidarity links with other tenant groups throughout the city—East Harlem, the Bronx, other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn

THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE THIS WEEKEND AND KEEP FIGHTING FOR WHATS RIGHT.