NEW YORK | Shortly before May 1, his rent payment deadline, Sean Reilly heard a knock on the door of his apartment: it was the manager of his small building in Brooklyn, demanding payment of his April rent.
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Lost sentence: like several thousand New York tenants, this 25-year-old researcher is taking part in a “rent strike”, in reaction to a pandemic that has turned into unemployed more than 30 million Americans, who fear in the wake of lose their home.
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As Sean Reilly and other tenants unfurled protest banners in their building in the Crown Heights neighborhood on Friday, others marched from their cars outside the New York State governor’s residence in the capital Albany for apply for financial assistance.
Similar actions were planned, on this symbolic date of May 1, across the United States, which had not experienced such a movement of tenants since the crisis of the 1930s.
Some 12,000 tenants, representing some 100 New York buildings, took part in the action, according to preliminary estimates from the organization Housing Justice for All, at the forefront of this movement.
“Stomach ache”
“I’m not going to lie, it’s scary to tell your landlord, ‘We don’t pay the rent,'” Mr. Reilly, an activist of the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America, who with his four co-tenants pay monthly rent of $ 3,100.
“I had a stomach ache sending the email, but it’s the right thing to do now.”
Mr Reilly is still working – he prefers not to do exactly what he does, for fear of reprisals – but points out that many colleagues have lost their jobs, and that he fears the same fate.
Living in New York since last summer, his neighbor Stephen Henderson, who is also on a rent strike with his co-tenants, lost all his freelance contracts for television and cinema with the pandemic.
He has been receiving unemployment benefits since last week, but is still awaiting the $ 1,200 in aid promised by the federal government to all those on low incomes.
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“A lot of us are trying to figure out how we’re going to find the money to buy food, so let’s not talk about the rent,” said Stephen Henderson, who wears a bandana as a mask against the virus.
Almost two-thirds of the 8.6 million New Yorkers are renters, in a city where the average price of a three-bedroom apartment ranges from $ 2,500 in Queens to $ 4,000 in Manhattan.
Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a moratorium in mid-March that bans all evictions until June 20, but that only “postpones the problem,” Reilly said.
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“People will not recover lost wages,” he said, noting that his co-tenants were hoping to negotiate a repayment plan, but without government help, the situation looks difficult.
Asked by AFP, the manager of their building, which has five apartments, did not immediately react.
Cheers from Bernie Sanders
But Kalman Zimmerman, owner and real estate agent who manages many apartments in the area, said giving up rent was “very difficult” for landlords, who too are struggling to pay their bills, mortgages and taxes.
For him, a rent freeze can only come from above: “I am all for a rent freeze, if the government freezes tax payments and loan repayments for homeowners.”
Young representatives of Congress Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, close to Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders who in March spoke of a rent strike, support a bill that would cancel rents and mortgage loans at the national level. But neither President Donald Trump nor the Democratic leaders in Congress have shown their support.
However, Reilly hopes that the longer the pandemic lasts, the more people will “become aware” of the problem.
“Our movement is getting stronger,” he said. “I assure you that we will continue until we win.”
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