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:

	Philip Tager	Steven E. Carter
	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.
	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 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.

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.