Why These New Yorkers Stopped Paying Rent
The New York Times
The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has placed the city’s housing woes in stark relief. But one group of Brooklyn tenants has been fighting back.
It has been years since Patricia Edwards’s top floor apartment in Brooklyn has felt like an acceptable home. When it rains, water leaks into the kitchen and living room. It also pours through a crack in the bathroom ceiling so big that Ms. Edwards needs an umbrella just to use the toilet.
Still, at around $1,100 a month, the rent-regulated one-bedroom unit in Crown Heights is relatively affordable in a rapidly gentrifying New York City neighborhood where the median rent is more than twice as high. For 20 years, Ms. Edwards, 63, said she had almost never missed a rent payment.
But when the pandemic hit last year, leaving many of her neighbors struggling financially, Ms. Edwards, a retired bank employee, decided to do something she had never done: She refused to pay.
