NEW YORK CITY — Phara Souffrant Forrest is joining a rent strike Friday because she’s seen too many rats in the homes of newborn babies, the Crown Height visiting nurse said.
“We have enough to worry about,” Forrest said. “Now they’re trying to slap us with rents when they know we can’t make it? These landlords are making us sick.”
Forrest, currently running for the State Assembly, is one of an estimated 20,000 New York tenants participating in a massive May 1 rent strike in hopes of pressuring Gov. Andrew Cuomo to cancel rent for the duration of the new coronavirus pandemic.
Strikers hope Cuomo will issue an executive order to halt monthly rental payments, issue a rent freeze for 2020 and housing for about 92,000 New Yorkers currently without homes.
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Housing Justice For All organizer Cea Weaver estimates between 30 and 50 percent of New York renters will not pay rent Friday, not just because of the strike but because Cuomo’s stay-at-home order has cost tens of thousands of New York workers their jobs.
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Economists estimate 475,000 New Yorkers could lose their jobs in a financial crisis akin to the Great Depression.
“We can’t go back to the world that we lived in before COVID-19,” Weaver said during a virtual organization meeting Wednesday night.
“We demand a housing system that prioritizes people’s homes over people’s profits.”
The governor — who put a moratorium on foreclosures and banned landlords from evicting tenants between April and June — has showed no enthusiasm for the idea.
COVID-19 and the resultant shutdown triggered a $7 billion budget deficit in New York City and a $13 billion deficit in New York State, which Cuomo said Thursday meant he could not afford to provide rent assistance.
“You should pay the rent if you can pay the rent,” Cuomo said. “You don’t want to have a situation where landlords walk away from buildings; that would make the situation worse.”
Housing advocates hope to change his mind through six actions:
“Politicians listen to money, and that’s who we need to listen right now,” Forrest told the rent strikers. “We need to use our power to make our voices heard. And that power comes from the rent we pay.”
Peggy Perkins of Hemstead in Long Island said she’ll join Friday’s rent strike because of a notice her landlord put up in the hallways of her building.
The notice told her fellow low-income tenants that the media misinformed them of their rights and that those without cash should use credit and debit cards to pay him, Perkins said.
“This is a slap in the face,” Perkins said. “I’m standing in solidarity with my brothers and sisters because I’ve had enough.”
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