Stuy Town to Tishman Speyer: We're as Mad as Hell and We are Not Going to Take This Anymore!

I was going to write about something else today, but as I was going through the latest postings on the PCVST Tenants Association message board, I began to see a pattern emerge, a pattern of unified simmering rage against our landlord, Tishman Speyer, and the way things are being run (badly) in this complex. In one thread, fed-up market raters had enough of the administration not responding to their calls and e-mails about the pressurized wall debacle and were threatening a lawsuit. In another thread, an exasperated poster wondered why nothing was being done about a dumpster nearby his building, a dumpster the contents of which are removed at odd times in the night, including 3AM--this after Tishman Speyer promised to remove the dumpster in February 2008! In yet another thread, the renting of apartments to corporations was raised with outrage. Apparently this "hotel/motel" rental is generating the presence of company transients who are here one week/month and gone the next. Still another thread had an increasingly heated debate on the outcome of Tishman Speyer's overall plans for this community. Are we seeing the guaranteed end of affordable housing here and the lifestyle many of us knew or is there still hope in a fight against the overwhelming powers that be?

I have lived in Stuyvesant Town for a fairly long time. Not all my life, but for a good chunk of it. I and my neighbors who have lived here more than few years have never seen this place look so bad. We have never experienced this place so noisy, so filthy, so lawless. We have never seen a landlord either so ignorant of what is going on here (and how is this possible?) or so arrogantly disdainful of the complaints and numerous sufferings of his tenants.

Many of us have had enough. We are as mad as hell and we are not going to take this anymore.