October 18, 2007 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Good Old Lower East Side, a 30-year-old New York group that works to protect tenants, has long sought to
reflect the diversity of the neighborhood that it serves. But that is a challenge since this slice of Manhattan has been home to successive waves of immigrants over the past century and a half and is constantly changing.
Founded by Floyd Feldman, a lawyer and activist, the organization got its start during a period of transition. Gentrification, which had already transformed nearby Greenwich Village, was looming, and there were bitter — even violent — clashes between tenants and landlords, who sought to replace tenants who paid low rental fees with those who paid higher sums.
JoAnn Wypijewski, a writer who moved to the neighborhood in 1979, contacted Goles, as the charity is known, the next year when she learned that her rent was about to be increased by 25 percent, despite her apartment’s designation as a rent-stabilized unit. The group’s staff members helped Ms. Wypijewski and other tenants to conduct research. They discovered that their units were part of an illegal subletting scheme, and Goles helped them begin a campaign that would ultimately lead to the passage of the city’s sublet law, which allows apartments to be re-rented by tenants and lays out regulations for the practice.
The experience left Ms. Wypijewski feeling profoundly grateful — she and approximately 100 other tenants each received a refund check for $1,200, along with proper leases — and appreciative of the charity’s approach to neighborhood organizing.
“I thought, ‘This is some kind of power,’” recalls Ms. Wypijewski, who joined the group’s Board of Directors in 1982 and now serves as its chairwoman. “I really liked the idea that in order for Goles to help you, you had to get your neighbors together and organize.”
Today the charity’s staff and board members include not just tenants of private housing, like Ms. Wypijewski, who organized their apartment buildings to defend their rights as tenants, but veterans of the housing struggles that have defined the Lower East Side during the past three decades.
The goal, says Damaris Reyes, the group’s executive director, is to be an organization that doesn’t just look and sound like the neighborhood but operates like it too.
“It’s important not just to be ethnically representative but sector representative,” says Ms. Reyes, the first public-housing resident to lead the charity. . “We’ve had to evolve based on the emerging needs of the neighborhood.”
‘We Saw the Future’
Of Goles’ 10 full-time employees, more than half have lived in public housing — a reflection of the charity’s decade-long effort to educate residents of housing projects and subsidized-rent buildings about their rights.
The nine-member Board of Directors includes two members who were formerly homeless: Amy Taylor, who serves as treasurer, and Thomas Vance, who once lived in Tompkins Square Park, an emblem of the homelessness crisis that plagued New York in the 1980s. Also represented are small-business owners of the sort that, as retail rents skyrocket, are increasingly being driven out of a neighborhood once known for its bodegas and mom-and-pop shops.
“We’re a neighborhood-preservation organization, which takes on a whole different meaning in this context,” says Ms. Wypijewski. “We’re trying to preserve the character of the neighborhood, which means a place that’s multi-ethnic, small scale, and mixed income.”
Two years ago, the charity took another step in its goal of building an organization that is as diverse as the Lower East Side itself: hiring Ms. Reyes as its executive director. Ms. Reyes, who, like approximately 30 percent of local residents, is of Puerto Rican descent, grew up and still lives in the Bernard Baruch Houses, whose 2,300 units compose the largest public-housing development in Manhattan. “The work we do has a direct impact on my own life,” she says.
The decision to hire Ms. Reyes, who had spent years advocating on behalf of public-housing residents, was a logical extension of the charity’s original mission of encouraging tenants to organize themselves, says Ms. Wypijewski.
“This was about recognizing leadership in the community and fostering it,” she says. “There were people who said, ‘You really need someone who has been an executive director before.’ But there is no one who knows the neighborhood better and understands the overlapping issues of life that affect the clients we serve than Damaris. We looked at her, and we saw the future.”
New Constituents
Ms. Reyes, who first went to work for Goles in 2000 as its part-time public-housing organizer, says that she appreciates the push by board members on her behalf. “I like to be in the trenches,” she says. “It never occurred to me that I would someday lead the whole organization.”
As a lifelong resident of the Lower East Side, she says she is keenly aware of how much the neighborhood has changed, and of the delicate balance involved in reflecting those changes in the composition of the charity that she now heads. Despite the neighborhood’s growing Chinese population, for example, nobody on the board or staff speaks Chinese, something that Ms. Reyes says she would like to remedy.
Another challenge is what to do about the neighborhood’s newest residents: the white, urban professionals who have flocked here in recent years, paying thousands of dollars per month to live in what is now one of the hottest areas of Manhattan.
“All you have to do is walk around the neighborhood and you can see how much it’s changed,” says Ms. Reyes. “The Eastern European immigrants who lived here are mostly gone. The older Polish woman has been replaced by someone who works on Wall Street.”
The charity is unsure yet how — or whether — to assimilate these new arrivals into its board, says Ms. Wypijewski. Goles’s leaders recognize that the presence of wealthy newcomers at the table could certainly help keep the organization financially healthy, she says. But while the group is happy to provide information about tenant rights to anyone who asks, in the battle between haves and have-nots on the Lower East Side, it clearly sides with the latter.
Says Ms. Reyes, “We’re on the side of the people who are being forced out.”
