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 Photo by the City of New York.
Our Slumlords
The owners of our home, 500 West 140th Street,
Sugar Hill, Harlem, New York, New York 10031-6139, are:
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Philip Tager
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Steven E. Carter
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Their business address:
Perseus Capital Management, L.L.C.,
a tenants-only front for the
slum-investment brokerage,Urban Housing
G.P., L.L.C.,
the lease-signing front for the
slum-investment brokerage,
Cronus
Capital, L.P.
275
Madison Avenue 39th
Floor New
York, NY 10016-1101 Phone:
(212)774-5900 Fax:
(212)774-5919
The venerable law
firm Sherman Feigen Slivka lives there. Cronus may just rent
space for voicemail and fax.
Mr. Tager and Mr. Carter are real-estate investment brokers. They
find money to buy up low-priced "distressed"
properties in upper Manhattan. It appears that they
invested their own funds in our home. Using dummy LLCs or LPs,
they hold on for not more than five
years, when they hope that The Market will double the
selling price.
"The Market" is jargon for "forces beyond the
owners' control." The community controls The Market. Only we
tenants and our neighbors have our hearts in the hood. While stifling
us in squalor, our slumlords seek succor from the sweat of our struggle to survive.
Rather
than hiring an experienced slumlord manager, like Solar Realty
Management Corp., which unloaded
our home on them, Mr. Tager and Mr. Carter are themselves trying to manage the
properties they bought or brokered. They hire agents and
invent a management-company alias, like Perseus
Capital Management, to hide
their own and their investors' identities. A mail drop takes
rent from tenants.
Why can't tenants know who
their landlords are? Well, New York still has
housing laws and enforcement, such as they are, and
it's less pricey in the long run to hire stooges to take the
heat. Besides, their cocktail-clubbing chums think the stars
of their posse are "in
real-estate." They don't know that
means slumlords.
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Philip Tager:
(212)774-5901
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Steven E. Carter:
(212)774-5909
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They make their livings by buying and selling
us. They play vulture capitalist with our lives, our families, our ability to
go to work and contribute to our community. Living in
decaying ghetto tenements, inadequate for civilized
habitation since the days they had been built, we have a stake
in knowing what sort of familial lifestyles our rents are
enabling. Like running for
public office, the slumlord scam removes its
players from putative privacy
protection. We must know who owns us. Protect a
tenant at home; then protect a slumlord ad hominem. Slumlords' innocent victims have a right to know. Their home
addresses:
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500 East 77th Street
Apartment 1019
New York, New York 10162-0004
(212)744-8016 Mr. Tager has an elegant apartment in a
new high-rise managed and largely occupied by
members of the Lebanese diaspora. In 1997, he and his wife,
Joumana Adjadj Tager, founded Social
and Economic Action in Lebanon (SEAL) to raise funds for the
ravaged victims of Israeli shelling — "Operation Grapes of Wrath." Mr. Tager is a
real-estate broker and speculator, formerly with the
Praedium Group, the principal financier of the Pinnacle
Group. Mrs. Tager, a 1984 graduate of the
famed American University at Beirut, is the treasurer of
SEAL and the gracious hostess of its many fund-raising
social events. She contributes her time and
considerable talent to such worthy institutions as the
Metropolitan Museum.
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Broadway 98 Condominium, "The Sabrina Condo" 240 West 98th Street / 241 West 97th Street
Condo 13M New York NY 10025-6266
The 97th Street entrance is better
for picketing. After flipping his Chelsea condo last year,
Mr. Carter moved to a century-old luxury high-rise on upper
Broadway, newly converted to a condominium. Its Board of
Managers uses the office of its developer, Jacob Weinreb, an Upper West Side
fixture at 276 Riverside Drive, New York 10025
(212-865-5858). Mr. Carter's co-owner is his wife, the
clinical psychologist Catherine F. Eubanks-Carter. Widely published in the academic press, often on gender
and sexuality, she earned her
Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook with her dissertation "Clinical Consensus
Strategies for Interpersonal Problems" in 2008. Both Carters have donated
to SEAL.
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The New York Times has
described Beirut as "the
Provincetown of the Middle East," an international center for gay night life, a
sought-after gay tourist spot, a home for gay Arabs. As
both Tagers and both Carters have contributed to
SEAL, the American charity assisting war-torn Lebanon, Casey
and Vicki can bestow on our slu^H^H^Hlandlords only our heartfelt
thanks and hopeful inspiration that they continue their courageous
support of our trannie, lezzie, and queer Arab
sisters and brothers amid hostility.
They bought us on May 3, 2007, for about $6.5
million. Washington Mutual holds the mortgage.
Less than two years earlier, on July 28, 2005, our previous
slumlords bought us for $2.25 million. That's
a profit of close to 100% per annum, precisely matching our home's rate of depreciation.
Tenants, organize now!
Sugar Hill,
Harlem, USA,
August 2, 2009 June 6, 2009 April 26, 2009 June 4, 2007
Solidarity, Vicki Richman, Acting Secretary Eileen
V. Casey, Acting President
500W140 Tenants Association (212)926-1345 (212)926-9846 fax
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