Taking tenant fight to the top
NYCHA leader gets meeting with Prez
A NYCHA tenant advocate from Harlem took her fight for improved public housing straight to the top Thursday, earning face time and a handshake from President Trump.
Frederick Douglass Houses Tenant Association President Carmen Quiñones met Trump briefly in the Oval Office — the climax of a whirlwind week during which she hosted regional Housing and Urban Development administrator Lynne Patton in her uptown Manhattan apartment.
“I’ve been meeting very good people and getting my point across,” Quiñones said before she met Trump. “It’s awesome. They’re listening.”
During her monthlong tour of NYCHA buildings, during which she’s overnighting in tenants’ apartments, Patton has seen peeling paint, leaky pipes, a stuck elevator and a rat the size of an obese cat.
During her Washington trip, Quiñones was treated to something different: a fourstar hotel stay and a White House reception where she sipped champagne and calmed her nerves. She met with Trump and First Lady Melania Trump after a White House celebration of Black History Month.
Patton posted video on Twitter of Trump shaking Quiñones’ hand. Trump asked Quiñones to look out for Patton. “Take good care of her,” the president advised the NYCHA tenant leader.
Quiñones said she also got a chance to talk with Vice President Pence. “I think he understands,” Quiñones said. “We had a very good conversation.”
Ahead of her Oval Office meeting, Quiñones said she wanted to start a conversation with Trump about public housing, and the deplorable living conditions at NYCHA, the nation’s largest public housing authority, which Patton has repeatedly called “a humanitarian disaster.”
Days earlier, Patton said Trump called her to get a progress report on her visit.
Patton’s stay in NYCHA housing falls against the backdrop of a looming appointment of a federal monitor to overhaul the troubled housing authority. Multiple reports Thursday said the monitor would be Bart Schwartz, a former U.S. attorney who headed the criminal division of the Southern District of New York under then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Patton moved into the Frederick Douglass Houses Tuesday. She spent the previous week at the Patterson Houses in the Bronx, where she slept on an air mattress in a tenant’s living room.
Patton plans to spend her NYCHA tour staying at apartments around the five boroughs. She said she wants a firsthand look at the problems that have plagued the nation’s largest public housing system, and wants to hear from residents about how to fix the broken boilers, leaky pipes and moldy walls that have become so bad a federal monitor was deemed necessary.