Monday, Oct. 26 2009 @ 12:35PM
By Aaron Howell.
Followers of the Times' City Room blog may have seen that the United Nations has dispatched Raquel Rolnik (pictured), its Special Rapporteur for housing issues, to America. She'll visit various U.S. cities on her trip, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans.
Right now she's in New York. Runnin' Scared caught up with her as she toured The Bronx, where tenants and organizers prepped her on what they described as the newest phenomena of housing woes, "predatory equity."
At an hour-long presentation at the Sedgwick Branch Library on University Avenue and 176th Street -- a futuristic 90's building that looks part space shuttle and part Star Wars, -- the rapportuer was told that in a four-square-mile area of the North and South Bronx, six private equity firms have officially driven 2,738 apartment units into foreclosure or risk of foreclosure.