Disaster In Morningside Heights

WE ARE TALKING About Homes is a story of people banding together to save their homes in the face of malign indifference from their landlord, Columbia University. Like most true stories, it is not glamorous, and it does not have a happy ending. What author Lynne Schwartz offers instead is a perspective on urban housing problems which cuts through statistics and policy issues to get to the heart of the matter: people's lives.

In March 1985, the apartment building at 547 Riverside Drive where Schwartz had lived since 1964 was severly damaged by a fire, leaving a dozen apartments in the building's north wing uninhabitable. And it left several tenant families--including her own--without a roof over their heads.

Columbia University, the building's owner, ignored an order from New York City building inspectors to repair the fire damage and subsequently evicted tenants from the 12 apartments in the undamaged south wing, closing the building indefinitely.

A few tenants affiliated with Columbia were quickly relocated to other apartments in the Morningside Heights area--where the university owns 4800 units of housing, more than 200 of which were vacant at the time.

Meanwhile, tenants not related to the university were left out on the street. With their homes and most of their possessions destroyed, they lived out of friends' apartments and hotels for months, waiting for some word from their institutional landlord about returning to their burned-out homes.

Under New York City's stringent rent control and housing preservation laws, Columbia's tenants were entitled to have their apartments rebuilt and their leases renewed at the same rent level. But even after months of negotiations and a successful lawsuit against Columbia, the landlord continued to let the building deteriorate without regard for the tenants still out on the street.

WHAT IS STRIKING about Schwartz's account is the contrast between the urgent needs of dozens of tenants and the glacial indifference of their monolithic landlord. Some of the tenants lost everything in the fire and were struggling just to keep their lives together. Others were evicted from undamaged apartments that were slowly deteriorating as rainwater filtered through the north wing of the building, which remained unrepaired and unroofed for almost a year after the fire.

Columbia ignored its unaffiliated tenants for obvious reasons. Housing around Morningside Heights is in very high demand and the university lacks both adequate dormitory space and housing for its own faculty members. Schwartz reports that in the six years before the fire, Columbia's housing stock in the neighborhood grew from 3000 to 4800 units. And for years, she writes, the university has tried to evict unaffiliated tenants.

It has even, according to the book, advocated a policy of "surveillance," asking tenants to inform the university if their neighbors become unaffiliated. For example, if a woman who worked for Columbia for 15 years and lived with her family in a university-owned building were to die, her husband and family would be evicted from their home--that is, if their neighbors informed on them. More recently, Columbia has tightened the net by computerizing housing and personnel records to catch "illegitimate" tenants.

Schwartz describes a situation in which neither Columbia affiliates nor neighborhood residents have any real control over their own homes. Unaffiliated tenants are forced out, unless protected by rent control laws. Meanwhile Columbia, which has special status under housing laws, charges its affiliated tenants much higher rents and evicts them as soon as they stop working full-time for the university.

For Columbia, the fire was a fortuitous opportunity to rebuild 547 Riverside as a dormitory. The longer the university could delay repairs, the better the chance that extensive rain damage would provide an excuse for rebuilding as a dorm--and the better the chance that evicted tenants would give up and relinquish their rights to apartments in the building.

The story of Columbia's hegemonic real estate expansion is old news. Where Schwartz lends novel insight is in describing the situation in terms of people instead of issues, laws, and impersonal housing units.

SCHWARTZ BEGINS BY introducing the people who live in 547 Riverside. Eighty-year old Diana Stamoulis, who moved into the building in 1958. Blair and Bob Birmelin, who moved in the same year as the author and her husband and who seemed to take turns with the Schwartzes having babies. In just a few pages, the list of names becomes a group of people--raising children, helping each other when the elevator breaks down, making their apartments part of their lives.

These introductions are neither particularly moving, nor particularly dramatic; they are actually rather matter-of-fact. These are ordinary people. And when disaster strikes, their plight is all the more understandable and poignant. The real issues at stake become eminently clear. Without homes these people struggle just to keep their families and careers going.

On the one hand, it seems the tenants had a clear-cut case. Some had been illegally evicted and Columbia had been ordered by the city to repair the others' apartments in the north wing, but continued to stall. After tenants filed a lawsuit, Columbia offered to negotiate. But the university refused to commit itself to a date for completing repairs. Columbia officials insisted that tenants simply ought to trust the university to act in good faith. The tenants were not convinced. Still homeless, they went back to court. And won.

On the other hand, unfortunately, a court victory did not translate into housing. While Columbia merely appealed the court's decision, the tenants remained in limbo--just as hopeless, helpless, and homeless as they had been for seven months already.

The tenants negotiated with Columbia once more. This time they settled. Columbia could do what it wished with the north wing of 547, but promised to restore the rest and to reinstate some displaced tenants in newly-vacated apartments. Columbia also agreed to reimburse some of the tenants' relocation expenses and to provide temporary housing until the building was renovated. The south wing was to be finished by Oct. 31, 1984, and the north wing 14 months later. The tenants would have to wait, but at least they would once more have a place to live.

Predictably, the north wing--which was renovated to become a Columbia dorm--was renovated first. The south wing was not ready until December--three months late and with haphazard, peeling paint jobs and already crumbling plaster. Only after more wrangling and meetings with Columbia was the building finally habitable in March 1985, two years after the fire.

THE TENANTS NEVER really won. They lost most of their possessions and two years of their lives. Half of their building became a dormitory. All they gained was frustation, anxiety and unsavory memories. But their story is not told cynically. Rather, We Are Talking About Homes is a lesson about the human costs of corporate decision-making. There is no happy ending; the insensitive, big bully escapes unscathed, and the tenants only win back their housing after a long struggle. As one tenant says,

the irony is that by the time you're ready to get it back, you feel like saying, You can keep your goddamned apartment.

Schwartz's story paints a vivid picture of the real-life meaning of concepts like tight housing markets or rent control.

The irony of a vastly wealthy and powerful educational institution--tax exempt by virtue of its altruistic mission--encroaching on neighborhoods and displacing people's lives is not unique to Manhattan. The contrast between a university's role as a center of enlightenment and its insensitive treatment of tenants in its community is as obvious and painful for many Cantabrigians as it is for Schwartz's neighbors.

The plight of tenants in university-owned properties is made doubly infuriating by their landlords' claim to a higher purpose. We Are Talking About Homes sends a clear message: there is no higher purpose to owning real estate than making sure people have a place to live.