Ballantyne Garden Apartments on the Southside of Syracuse has all the time been infamous for awful housing circumstances and aggressive property managers. Because of Ballantyne’s status, The STOP! Coalition–Syracuse Tenants Organizing for Power–has begun working with tenants, organizing a tenants’ affiliation to face as much as the advanced’s administration.
Tenants have revealed simply how hideous the property and its administration are. The Coalition canvassed the advanced and held a pop-up occasion simply outdoors the property, discussing housing circumstances with tenants and setting targets to struggle again in essentially the most highly effective methods.
While organizers had been chatting with tenants outdoors of the house advanced, the property supervisor, Jackie Kowaleski, accompanied by an armed safety guard, ordered the Coalition members off the property. In spite of the truth that tenants have a authorized proper to prepare an affiliation (and to work alongside activists in doing so), the property supervisor relied on a mixture of outright lies and intimidation to drive the tenant organizers away.
“The property supervisor advised us that she supported our mission and that the administration wasn’t a slumlord,” Liam Hines, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and a STOP! Coalition organizer, defined. Immediately after Kowaleski made this assertion, the safety guard demanded that the group depart the premises, putting a hand on his holstered weapon to sign violence if the activists didn’t comply.
Several days later, tenants who spoke to STOP! Coalition organizers reacted strongly to Kowaleski’s assertion that administration was “not a slumlord.” Tenants laughed bitterly at this remark and shared tales of rodents, bugs, and trash unaddressed in the advanced, regardless of calls to administration. Though tenants had been indignant, additionally they talked about fears of retaliation from administration, together with evictions or additional abuse.
Kayla Johnson, a STOP! Coalition organizer and candidate for political workplace, visited with tenants of Ballantyne Apartments. These tenants confirmed Johnson insulting and offensive letters despatched to them by administration. In these letters, administration refused to take care of the disgusting housing circumstances and threatened eviction.
The property supervisor wrote in a mass letter to tenants, “If you see bugs in your house, how about cleansing it?? Most of you don’t work and reside like pigs…AS FOR THE GARBAGE IN THE HALLWAY, WE WILL NOT BE REMOVING AN [sic] LONGER.” The letter additional went on to threaten tenants with calls to Section 8 to disclaim the tenants additional lease cash in addition to to the Department of Social Services to sabotage tenants’ capability to entry public help and SNAP advantages (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). In yet one more letter to the whole advanced, Kowaleski listed the names of each tenant behind on lease together with the quantity of lease that the tenant owed.
For too lengthy, slumlords in Syracuse have acted like managing residences is a supply of passive earnings with no actual work required to take care of the properties. Slumlords, just like the administration of Ballantyne Garden Apartments and Jackie Kowaleski, abuse and mistreat tenants as a result of they assume the tenants don’t have any technique of preventing again. But a brand new motion in the town is starting to take maintain–tenants will stand up collectively and demand an finish to horrible dwelling circumstances, evictions, and abuse from landlords!
What will we do when our houses are below assault? Stand up, struggle again!
https://www.liberationnews.org/ballantyne-slumlord-abuses-and-intimidates-tenants-organizers-in-syracuse-ny/
