General News
UFTers join throng at affordable housing rally
Jun 7, 2007 12:52 PM
UFTer Stephen Fink of West Side HS was part of the contingent rallying for affordable housing.
More than 7,000 New Yorkers, elected officials and scores of UFT members assembled May 23 for a “New York Is our Home” affordable housing action. They linked arms around Stuyvesant Town, the giant post-World War II, East Side Manhattan residential complex, a bastion of affordable housing but whose market-rate rent policies for new tenants threatens to take more than 10,000 affordable housing units out of the hands of working families.
Rally organizers estimate some 1.5 million affordable units in the five boroughs are at risk of being lost. That would make much of the city unaffordable to working families who, one organizer noted, “have just as much right to live here as hedge fund managers.”
UFT President Randi Weingarten told a press conference preceding the event that “something’s very wrong with the quality of life in a city when more and more renters are paying half of their income for rent.”
She noted that one of the goals of the UFT “is to ensure that the best teachers come to New York and stay in New York to educate our children.” But how can they, she asked, when rents are so high? “How can they stay when so many units of affordable housing are at risk of being lost?”
The rally was organized by the New York Is our Home: Affordable Rent Campaign, which wants vacancy decontrol repealed, city Home Rule over rent regulations restored and Mitchell-Lama and Section 8 Housing preserved.
UFT President Randi Weingarten with elected officials.
