BAD CHOICE FOR CHANGE

By Melvin Redman

OBAMA CHOICE FOR


SECRETARY OF HOUSING UNDERMINES CHANGE

President elect Obama selected Shaun Donovan for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He is a disciple of Harvard Professor Howard Husock who wrote, America’s Trillion Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of America’s Housing Policy. Once Mayor Bloomberg, who is no friend of the poor, appointed him Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner, he sabotaged affordable housing in New York and masqueraded as its friend. Shaun Donovan’s history of destroying affordable homes, bodes ill for the majority of Americans.

As Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development he destroyed affordable housing. He acted as an ice breaker to open “frozen” poor and lower middle class communities in New York City. Provincial politicians created economic undeveloped frozen zones nationwide. They built public housing, or vertical slums, to isolate, not house the poor. Their decisions stifled development and cooled neighborhoods. He and other bureaucrats blamed the poor for destroying neighborhoods and conspired to remove them.

He also cooperated with deceptive landlords and managers to illegally remove tenants. Instead of using his agency to protect the weak, he closed help that centers other H P D commissioners opened to defend tenant rights. An honest cooperative under his department’s supervision is rarer than hens’ teeth. HUD officials exposed corruption at Lenox Terrace, Coop City, and other developments that they investigated before Alfonso Jackson and other corrupt reactionaries took over the agency.

New York State Attorney General Cuomo, Manhattan District Attorney Morgenthau, The Department of Investigation, The Department of Housing and Community Renewal, and black politicians refuse to protect tenants. They sell out their constituents for a trifle. Harlem residents re-elected Charles Rangel eighteen times but he did nothing to protect residents from avaricious landlords.

New York City Housing Court judges also abandoned housing residents during the Bloomberg years. The landlords/tenants court has become completely one sided under the jurisdiction of Administrative Judge Fern Fisher. She refused to post a Bill of Rights in courts. She rationalized that posting it took sides in landlord-tenant cases and denied the posting of any information to help tenants.

I appeared before housing court Judge Marcia Sikowitz after I implored Commissioner Donovan to adhere to the law. She never listened to my case, illegally charged me lawyer fees, and allowed the management at Franklin Plaza to steal my late father’s apartment which could have been prevented if Commissioner Donovan, or Attorney General Cuomo properly protected the public’s interest. Instead, they conspired to rid New York of undesirables and exposed thousands of tenants to intolerant judges.

As the Secretary of HUD, Donovan will push the poor into the streets throughout America in order to build shining cities on hills and create decaying slums in hidden valleys.



mlvnrdmn@yahoo.com