Multi-Racial Unity Needed to Fight Gentrification

NEW YORK CITY, January 14 — Gentrification is a racist policy used by real estate profiteers, landlords, bankers, investors, educational institutions and government politicians to transform mostly black and Latino low-income neighborhoods into high-rent, mostly white enclaves. Landlords empty buildings, abandon them and declare neighborhoods “blighted.”
Columbia University is currently building a satellite campus in Manhattan’s West Harlem that will raise rents in the surrounding areas.
Landlords spread racist lies, saying black and Latino tenants in low-income neighborhoods are “dirty” or “criminals,” or that too many people and children live in the apartments and destroy property. Facing harassment, tenants move, seeking a better situation but where conditions turn out to be worse, crowded and neglected. The new neighborhood is often further from workplaces and has large numbers of unemployed.
The average price of condos here is 1.4 million dollars. Monthly rents run from $2,000 to 10,000. Condo prices in lower and mid-town Manhattan can reach as high as $90 million. Meanwhile 60 percent of NYC tenants earn $50,000 a year or below, and 30% of those earn under $30,000.
Such tenants are forced to flee these high-rent areas.
Neighborhoods change, become “hip.” Businesses cater to high-rent tenants, opening pricey markets and stores. Williamsburg in Brooklyn has been gentrified and now it’s spreading to surrounding boro neighborhoods, especially Bushwick. Bushwick’s white tenant population has grown by 19.7 percent. Agencies sometimes no longer rent to Spanish-speaking tenants.
PL’ers are helping to build a fight-back in Bushwick. We must unite black, Latino, Asian and white working-class tenants.
Demand:
Only low-rent housing
Turn vacant buildings into good low-income housing
Take over expensive condo buildings and change them into good low-rent apartments
Immediate low-income housing for families and individuals in shelters and for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
Lower rents now! Low-income families can’t pay $1,200 to $2,600 and more in rent. There are thousands of multi-millionaires and scores of billionaires in NYC. Landlords and their agents are raking in obscenely high rents on the backs of the working class.
Capitalism can not and will not provide decent affordable housing for the working class, only profits for the capitalists. We need to overthrow capitalism with communist revolution.
Communists believe that consciousness of how capitalism works is a powerful tool in the hands of the working class. We believe it’s not for the working class to make reformist compromises with the capitalists. It’s our job to unite and fight for what we need. The working class must be bold and purposeful.
Communists believe that, over time, workers will join PLP in ever greater numbers and build the fight for communism, a society in which the working class will hold all power. We will provide housing for the working class in an egalitarian society. To this goal we dedicate ourselves now in the fight against racist gentrification.