500W140 Tenants
Association. Vicki Richman, Secretary.
Photo by the City of New York.

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Our Slumlords

The owners of our home, 500 West 140th Street, Sugar Hill, Harlem, New York, New York 10031-6139, are:

Philip Tager

Steven E. Carter

Their business address:

Perseus Capital Management, L.L.C.,
a tenants-only front for the slum-investment brokerage,

City Life Rentals,
an unregistered doing-business-as alias for Steven E. Carter's vetting potential tenants,

Urban Housing G.P., L.L.C.,
the mortgage-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 intend to hold on for not more than five years, when they hope that The Market will double the selling price. However, they are keeping their hovels longer, spending as little as possible to keep the structures standing. Occasionally they fail.

"The Market" is jargon for "forces beyond the owners' control." The community controls The Market. Only we tenants 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.

Philip Tager: (212)774-5901

Steven E. Carter: (212)774-5909

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:

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.

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 in May 2008, 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.

Perhaps Steve can bring up his penny-pitching incompetence at the next board meeting of The Sabrina. Perhaps the other residents
of his luxury condo will pitch in to remove the stain of slumlord on their otherwise magnificent residence.

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 are pleased to bestow on our landlords our heartfelt thanks for their inspirational and courageous
support of our trannie, lezzie, and queer Arab sisters and brothers forced to live in the midst of 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!

The junction of Sugar and Vinegar Hills, Harlem, USA,

New Year's Eve, 2010
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