As part of our commemoration of women’s history this month, LISC looks at the work and legacy of Ruth Nazario, a crusader for affordable housing preservation and community control in New York City’s Lower East Side. Her tenacity and devotion to her neighbors was matched by her prescience: Nazario knew speculation and gentrification would eventually come to a neighborhood that capital had abandoned—and promoted resident ownership as a means to forestall it.
Ruth Nazario came to New York City in 1970 by way of an AmeriCorps VISTA position, teaching English as a second language in Chinatown. After struggling to find an affordable place to live in the neighborhood, she got her first taste of organizing for housing rights helping facilitate a lengthy rent strike in her building when the landlord began to neglect much needed repairs. “Of course,” she said, “we quickly got his attention.”
Over the next ten years, Nazario would go on to volunteer with and ultimately lead the community development nonprofit Adopt-A-Building, a city-wide coalition with the goal of advancing tenants’ rights. She worked primarily in what was then the northern portion of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, redubbed the East Village. In those few years, Nazario played an outsize role in helping preserve a vibrant and historic immigrant community, by launching a movement to revitalize neglected buildings through sweat equity, and by going head-to-head with city government to convince them not to tear everything down. All of this she did while helping refurbish and transfer to resident ownership an abandoned tenement where she lived with her young family.
In the 1970s, the Lower East Side (LES) was one of many neighborhoods that fell victim to disinvestment and abandonment by landlords and the city government as New York entered an extreme fiscal crisis. “The neighborhood was suffering in the most critical manner possible,” said Lisa Kaplan, a long-time member of Manhattan’s Community Board 3 and a friend and colleague of Nazario at the time. “Landlords were burning down buildings just to collect the insurance money, and gave up on the neighborhood.” Crime rates rose, many tenants lived without heat or hot water, and the city took over dozens of dilapidated buildings and vacant lots in tax foreclosure.
Adopt-A-Building, where Nazario would come to serve as executive director, was founded in East Harlem in 1968 by volunteers from religious groups who sought to force landlords to provide adequate services to tenants. The group helped neighborhood residents organize to improve their housing conditions and later, with more funding, expanded to other parts of the city. Nazario focused on the LES as Adopt-a-Building shifted its focus to the repair and rehabilitation of abandoned and run-down buildings. These were some of the first community-based planning and housing rehabilitation projects in the country, along others like those led by the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes and Banana Kelly, in the Bronx. “Adopt-A-Building was at the cutting edge,” said Kaplan. “They thought: maybe instead of the city knocking down these old, decrepit buildings, let’s fix them up!”
This new approach to revitalizing tenement buildings was rooted in sweat equity. Participants, mostly tenants already living in the buildings, had to quickly learn building, plumbing and electrical skills – and Adopt-A-Building trained and supported them. As a result, more residents of Loisaida, a name for the area coined by its Puerto Rican residents, lived in safer, higher-quality buildings, and some were able to buy them outright from the city. Nazario, her husband Roberto, a charismatic co-leader of Adopt-a-Building and well-known activist, and their children also lived in a “homesteaded” tenement on East 11th Street, the site of an infamous, resident-built windmill that generated electricity for the building (during the great blackout of 1977, it was reportedly one of the only sites in the city to have power).
“What is extraordinary about Ruth is that she was always really good at crunching the numbers and thinking through practical problems, but she also had a vision,” said Kaplan. “In my experience, that’s a rare combination.” She was passionate about saving her neighborhood from disappearing off the map or, as has partially come to pass, being bought up by luxury housing developers.
Indeed, Nazario was prescient about the speculation and gentrification that loomed in the future. “We saw the writing on the wall and it was scary,” said Nazario. “We knew people with money were going to come in and buy up the property and kick all of the poor people out.” The advice from outside consultants was to buy up as many buildings as they could to ensure resident control, but while Adopt-A-Building had some successes, they lacked the capital to make wide-spread community ownership possible.
Nazario and her family later moved to Baltimore, and eventually, to Berkeley, California where she continued her housing advocacy at the National Consumer Co-Op Bank and the Berkeley Housing Department. When she visits New York now, she marvels at the changes to her old neighborhood. “It’s incredible to see what people’s apartments look like now,” she said. “A lot of money has gone into those buildings.”
Nazario was a trailblazer of the affordable housing movement not only because she supported tenants to revitalize their buildings, but because of the impact her mere ten years of work on the Lower East Side had in sparking tenant organizing and community ownership in that neighborhood and beyond. Nazario’s efforts helped preserve the culture, art and community of the area – the very attributes that people still love about the East Village today.
“Leaders in the community from the 1970s are still there because they were able to have a safe, affordable place to live,” Nazario said. Whether you call it the East Village, the Lower East Side or Loisaida, the neighborhood wouldn’t be the same without her.