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Housing
Contents
Apartment Houses > Before
the Tenement Housing Options in the 1860s > Tenements
> Public Housing > Housing Abandonment
> Gentrification >
Homelessness > Immigrant
Housing today > Housekeeping in the Tenements
Housing Abandonment
During the 1970s, New York City plunged into
a fiscal crisis. Manufacturing that had provided jobs for so many
Lower East Siders moved to other parts of the nation and the world
in search of cheaper labor and less expensive real estate. Between
1971 and 1974, the neighborhood lost thousands of residents and
businesses. With few tenants, landlords could no longer afford to
maintain their buildings. Hundreds abandoned their tenements or
burned them to the ground for insurance money. The result, especially
in the area above Houston Street, was a landscape littered with
empty lots and abandoned buildings, what one observer called a "vast
wasteland." By default, these lots and buildings became the
property of the city.1
Groups of Puerto Rican activists initiated a movement to reclaim
those buildings as livable, affordable housing. Activists in the
community took over abandoned structures and fixed them up, painted
murals on broken walls, and planted community gardens in empty lots.
To motivate this effort, they named the neighborhood north of Houston
Street Loisaida, and promoted the slogan, "I'm staying (me
quedo)." Soon the city realized it could turn over the task
of developing low income housing to immigrant and migrant residents
themselves. It offered community groups materials and technical
assistance to renovate deteriorating tenements, which they could
then own and operate. As one "homesteader" put it, "To
live through the winter in the burned out shell of an abandoned
building gives you a kind of crazy lesson in history-each of these
apartments once was filled with life: children laughed here, couples
fought, old men died, smiling and praying, people talked about their
jobs and moaned, celebrated weddings…An abandoned apartment is an
abandoned dream," and he vowed to rebuild the Lower East Side
on a new generation of dreams.2
1 Christopher
Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and
Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
2 Mele, Selling the Lower East Side;
Mathew Lee, "History is Now," Loisaida Vol. 10, no. 4 (July-August,
1987), pp. 12.
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