"We Will Not Be Moved!"

[Joanne98]

El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification
By MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY

From London’s Grosvenor Square you can’t see East Harlem., but you can buy it. For £250 million. 47 buildings and 1,137 homes at a time. That, at least, was supposed to be the deal for UK-based investment bank Dawnay, Day Group when it reached across the ocean last March and snatched up entire blocks of this historic neighborhood of low-income immigrants—one of the last such communities left in Manhattan.

Dawnay, Day Group’s plan follows the typical logic of displacement for “development,” a logic well known both to real estate profiteers and to the poor people they displace. East Harlem tenants like Carmen Sanchez know the game: “The only purpose is to take us out of our homes. So they can renovate our apartments and then rent them for ten times what we are paying now.” Director Phil Blakeley has publicly pledged to do as much, saying the company is doing its part to “bring along Harlem’s gentrification” as a beachhead in its bid to build a $5 billion real estate empire here.

Yet Dawnay, Day may have gotten more than it bargained for in East Harlem, known as El Barrio to those who call it home. Here, the powerful multinational corporation has run into a different kind of power, the power of a community ready to defend its right to exist.

For tenants, the company’s offer to “bring along Harlem’s gentrification” can be translated to mean harassment, eviction, displacement --experiences all too familiar to the people of Harlem, if all too invisible to the media. For every time we hear of the deepening housing crisis facing homeowners, we hear nothing of the other housing crisis—the perpetual crisis that low-income renters face every day in cities like New York, in neighborhoods like East Harlem.
http://counterpunch.org/gould04222008.html