Democratic Candidates Tour Decrepit City Apartments
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Early yesterday morning, two of the Democrats running for mayor climbed the stairs inside a building on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx and walked into the cramped apartment that Xiomara Mejias, her common-law husband, and her three daughters call home.
As a pack of television cameras moved into position, Ms. Mejias, 33, explained to Fernando Ferrer and Anthony Weiner how she keeps the lights on in the bathroom to scare away the water bugs and rodents, and showed the two candidates the other problems she said her landlord has failed to repair.
“Has there ever been a lead paint removal in this building?” Mr. Ferrer, the former Bronx president, asked.
“Has the landlord ever been in here to see these conditions?” Mr. Weiner, the congressman from a Queens-Brooklyn district, said, shaking his head in disgust.
The visit was part of a pre-election tour organized by Housing Here & Now, a coalition of 120 tenant organizations, unions, and activists. It hit several of the city’s most poorly maintained apartment buildings, starting in the Bronx and ending in Harlem, where the two other Democratic mayoral candidates, Gifford Miller and C. Virginia Fields, joined the event.
With only two weeks until the September 13 primary, the four Democrats competing for the party’s nomination have ramped up efforts to present their proposals for solving the city’s problems – including housing – as best.
All of them have released multi-billion-dollar proposals to increase “affordable housing” and all said yesterday they would add to the number of inspectors to crack down on slum landlords. Their plans all cost more than the five-year, $3 billion plan the Bloomberg administration announced in 2002 to create and preserve 65,000 units of housing. That plan was called ambitious when it was unveiled.
“There is a tier of housing that is teetering on the point of third-world status right here in New York,” Mr. Weiner said as he leaned back in a coach bus on the way to Harlem to tour another building.
“We have to stop patting ourselves on the back about how great things are when so many people are living in such terrible conditions,” he said.
Though yesterday’s campaigning was not without sparring – Messrs. Weiner and Miller exchanged jabs over the positions the congressman has taken since 2002 on the Iraq war – the candidates struggled to distinguish themselves at yesterday’s event and even presented a united front at times.
Mr. Weiner said the city could be issuing arrest warrants to landlords with fire-code violations, rather than fines; Mr. Ferrer called for charging delinquent landlords triple damages if the city incurs costs to make overdue repairs; Mr. Miller vowed to pass the Healthy Homes Act, which strengthens tenants’ rights, and the Fields campaign sent out an e-mail that said, among other things, that if elected mayor she would end rent subsidies to bad landlords.
Mr. Miller, the City Council speaker, even devoted a portion of his brief remarks at a rally on West 150th Street to praise of his opponents.
“I want to thank my colleagues in this Democratic primary, all of whom are here to show our united support for enforcing the law and protecting tenants in this city. And I want to say the shame is that Mike Bloomberg is not here,” Mr. Miller said.
Later in the day, the mayor’s campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, said: “Under Mike Bloomberg, New York City has more housing code inspectors than at any time since 1991. All the candidates on that bus today have one thing in common – tens of thousands of dollars or more in campaign cash from landlords with multiple housing violations. Unlike them, Mike Bloomberg has never taken a single penny from a shady landlord.”
A professor of public administration at Columbia University, Steven Cohen, said that with 1 million city residents in rent-regulated apartments, 600,000 in public housing, and much of the Koch-era housing that the city was able to gobble up gone, there are problems to be solved.
But, he said, housing is probably not the winning political issue that will draw voters to the polls for an election they seem to be only partly tuned into.
“It’s not going to be a ‘smoking gun’ political issue that’s going to turn around the election for anybody,” Mr. Cohen said. “It’s too hard to articulate anything that’s going to be coherent and persuasive enough.”
Last month, Mr. Ferrer proposed raising almost $1 billion in taxes over 10 years as part of an $8.5 billion affordable housing program. Mr. Miller proposed a $7.2 billion housing plan to build 84,000 low-cost homes and preserve 85,000 units over the next decade. Ms. Fields, the Manhattan president, has proposed building 100,000 low-cost homes over 10 years, and preserving 80,000 existing ones. She has called for creating 40,000 low-cost homes for the elderly.
And Mr. Weiner said yesterday that if elected mayor he would spend $7.62 billion over 10 years to build and maintain 168,000 units, including $2 billion for new homes; $1.2 billion to house seniors, the homeless, and the infirmed; $2.6 billion for new rent subsidies, and $1.75 billion for preserving existing units.
Whether voters will be able to digest all of that is unclear. One tenant, Doris Scott, said she was glad the candidates came to see the housing conditions first-hand. But she did not seem to have firmed up a decision on which candidate she’ll vote for in the primary.
Mr. Weiner, who was sitting next to her on the bus, leaned over, pulled out a blue-and-orange sticker from the inside pocket of his blazer, and said: “Can I interest you in a Weiner for Mayor sticker? This might be a good time to put it on.”