Alone, Aged, And To Be Evicted
Carmen Rodriguez, a resident of a NYCHA building that transitioned to private ownership under the Rental Assistance Demonstration, received an eviction notice during the pandemic despite filing for rent recertification.
Carmen Rodriguez is a woman of many identities, none of which she’d choose for herself. A recent survivor of three heart attacks in the last year. A widow and childless mother who lost her two children within three years. A rheumatoid arthritis patient who is supervised by her caregivers but experiences loneliness on most days. A woman who loved to garden and grow a variety of plants, but is now immobile. And, she fears another homeless New Yorker after receiving an eviction letter that gave her 60 days to vacate the home where she’s lived for over 30 years. This is the story of one tenant’s experience in a pool of 140,000 residents, as her building transitioned from public to private under the Rental Assistance Demonstration policy.
As a resident of Hope Garden, a former New York City Housing Authority building in Brooklyn that underwent privatization under the RAD policy in the winter of 2018, Rodriguez received three eviction notices from the new private owners of the building. The RAD policy hands over the ownership of public housing to private developers, which is now Pinnacle City Living in the case of Rodriguez’ building. Under the Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations, the residents of Hope Garden are required to file for rent recertification a year, once to NYCHA and once to Pinnacle City Living, which now renews all leases with tenants when they’re set to expire. A tenant who does not complete the annual recertification or fails to provide necessary documentation like tax returns, utility bills, bank statements or proof of employment by the deadline risks eviction from their housing unit.
With Rodriguez, the concern wasn’t failing to file for recertification or missing a rent payment, it was the unfortunate case of one missing signature that led to the ultimate eviction notice, she said. Angst fills her pale face as she remembers the cold morning she received the letter last year. It was dated December 15 and Christmas was right around the corner, which was a needed time of celebration for Rodriguez after trudging through the pandemic.
“I had nowhere to go. I felt like they were going to throw me on the streets,” she said.
The 60-day notice period to vacate felt like a final nail in her coffin. The eviction notice took her back to the time that everything began to fall apart.
“It all started around summertime last year when I had my first heart attack,” she said.
As the world transitioned into a lockdown, her knees gave out, too. One week, Rodriguez struggled to climb the stairs of her three-story building, the next she needed a wheelchair to move around. As her health deteriorated, her grandson Jason, his girlfriend Teresa, and her power of attorney, Amada Sepulveda, decided to take her to the doctor where she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune disease that can cause both joint pain and damage throughout the body. Her doctor would have recommended a detailed scan of her bones and tissues, but her medical team wasn’t doing them because of the concern of COVID-19 spread.
And while all were compelled to stay within the four walls of their residences, Rodriguez slowly but indefinitely became confined to her bed.
Rodriguez is used to being tough. Born on March 21, 1943, in Puerto Rico, she came to New York City with her parents at the age of 12. She remembers her childhood being a little sad because her family came to the city with very little money. “But I had really good parents,” she said. The majority of her childhood in the city was spent babysitting neighborhood children to earn more income for the family. Eventually, Rodriguez married her neighbor and had two children from that marriage. “I don’t remember the year, exactly, but I remember that Kennedy was the president when I got married,” she said, trying to recall. That marriage lasted for eight years. “He used to beat me. He was very violent,” she said. Myra and Efrain, the daughter and son she had from that marriage, stayed with Rodriguez after their separation. Rodriguez said she loved being a mother, even if it was more difficult as a single parent.
Rodriguez lost her adult son to AIDS in 2013 and her adult daughter to a fatal heart attack in 2016. On a recent sunny March day, tears slowly escaped the corner of her eye as she thought about the loss while lying on the couch in the small living room of her apartment. “Oh my God,” she sighed, slowly shaking her head from left to right, trying to suppress a memory she dreads reliving: the most important part of her identity was snatched away from her: motherhood.
She struggled to speak. She couldn’t. The silence spoke for itself.
The English vocabulary has words that define the loss of a partner or a parent, like a widow or orphan, but what do you call a mother who loses her child? There’s yet to be a word to describe this loss.
“I didn’t believe it then. I still don’t believe it now,” Rodriguez said, pausing a moment. The memories of her children are framed in pictures on the chipped walls of her home. Rodriguez, in many of those pictures, looks unrecognizable, emanating an exuberance that’s now swallowed by physical and emotional pain. Now as she sprawls out on her sofa and stares out the distant window, her wrinkled skin cascades down her face, her frail, dainty fingers motionless. She looks as if someone sucked out her energy and left behind a lifeless body.
In the fall of 2020, Rodriguez had another heart attack. The first time, her then-partner Juan was around to call the ambulance and take care of her. By the second time, Juan had a devastating stroke and was sent to a rehabilitation center in Coney Island and this ended a relationship of 40 years, one that Rodriguez remembers as toxic, verbally hostile and emotionally abusive toward the end.
After Juan had the stroke, Rodriguez appointed Sepulveda as her power of attorney.
“I call her my aunt. She’s known me all my life since I was a child. My mom and she were co-workers and knew each other for over 40 years,” Sepulveda said. She visits Rodriguez several times a day to check up on her, prepares her favorite lunch of beans and rice, and to give her medication and check her blood pressure.
It was smack in the center of grief — over the end of her relationship with Juan, over the loss of her mobility and health, and the lingering grief of her son and daughter’s deaths — that Rodriguez worked with her neighbor Anthony Sanchez and Sepulveda to file her lease paperwork in time. Rodriguez said she was shocked when she checked her mail and saw an eviction notice. She visited Pinnacle City Living Center headquarters in Manhattan with her family to understand the situation better. Her grandson’s girlfriend explained to the workers about Rodriguez’ chronic health conditions and left with the notion that everything was sorted. A week later, they received yet another eviction notice and Rodriguez said she was asked to come to the office again to sign the necessary documents. In the end, they requested the workers at Pinnacle City Living to send someone to get the signature.
The internal miscommunication at Pinnacle City Living percolated further. Rodriguez said the company never sent a worker to her house to obtain the necessary signature, and instead sent Rodriguez a third and final eviction letter stating “a 60 (sixty) day notice to vacate” her apartment. This time, Sanchez sent a letter to Pinnacle City Living senior vice president David Sorise, along with Ramon Pebenito from the New York Senator Julia Salazar’s office, drawing out the serious nature of Rodriguez’ health and Pinnacle’s mismanagement.
“The lack of respect, consideration and courtesy, it’s astounding,” Sanchez said. “It’s kind of unbelievable, actually. I’m tired of contacting them. Their lack of empathy, their lack of understanding and cooperation just leaves me to believe that they absolutely don’t care about any of the residents.”
Sanchez moved into the building about five years ago. His earliest memory of Rodriguez is of her tending to the flower garden outside the Hope Garden building. “It was like somebody decorated our building in spite of the building being in [dilapidated condition] and needed repairs,” he remembers with a smile.
Sanchez said he’s troubled to see Rodriguez go from an energetic, upbeat person to someone now dormant. “The bible talks about treating older people like spiritual parents. And also, we all will end up needing help at one point in our lives,” said Sanchez. “So, when a neighbor gets into this situation, you have to extend yourself.”
And, as a resident of the same building, Sanchez understands the rigmarole of filing the recertification papers to guarantee housing. But the internal lack of communication and what feels like harassment in the form of incessant eviction notices anger him. “It disgusted me. And if I could punch somebody in the face, I would, because I take it personally,” he said.
Pinnacle Living City uses email to communicate which is problematic for residents like Rodriguez who do not understand technology. “For those elderly people who aren’t tech-savvy, why don’t you have a system in place for those residents? Right now, there is so much ambiguity with how they’re handling everything,” said Sanchez. Pinnacle Living Center did not respond to requests for comment.
A survey of Ocean Bay Apartment, the first NYCHA building to undergo a RAD transition from public to privatization, conducted by Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. a nonprofit organization, found that Rodriguez is far from the only puzzled resident. The survey concluded that “despite a long-term and varied engagement strategy, resident focus group findings indicate that confusion and misinformation about the RAD process and resident protections remained.”
While Sanchez’s letter did not spark any specific intervention, the letter and Sepulveda’s efforts as her power of attorney appear to have been successful. Sanchez eventually signed the lease agreement as Rodriguez’ proxy in January, lifting the threat of eviction, at least for now. She is relieved that she can retain her home for another year, but the hassle of recertification and miscommunication under RAD has saddened Rodriguez, who wishes for an easier living situation.
But neither Sepulveda nor Sanchez are in favor of the public-private partnership.
“The RAD program is a scam. You can look around, they haven’t come yet to plaster the edges, they haven’t come yet to do the repaint. Mice walking through the ceilings. If you remove the light fixtures all the rodent feces fall down,” Sepulveda said, describing the run-down conditions of Rodriguez’ home.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University and Director for Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, said there’s no simple alternative to RAD. “RAD may not be perfect — but NYCHA needs all sources of capital it can get to stabilize buildings and improve quality of life. The status quo is certainly NOT good for residents,” Ellen wrote in an email.
While the future is uncertain, Rodriguez is sure about relocating to a better house with Sepulveda’s help. They have begun the process of searching for an apartment in the nearby senior buildings. “It was much better in the beginning here. It started deteriorating when Pinnacle took over,” she said.
The eviction debacle was a wake-up call for Rodriguez. She doesn’t think she’ll ever regain mobility, and she needs to live in a home that’s more accessible.
“Sometimes, when you get a certain age, you don’t want to leave your home. You know it’s like starting over again and you don’t really want that. But for her safety and her wellness, it’s better for her to go in a building which is wheelchair accessible and has an elevator, where she can be taken out for a stroll, and get some sun,” she added. “Get some fresh air, ’cause this situation is not very healthy for her.”
A woman who learned resilience as a means of survival from her destitute childhood days to her miserable, forlorn old-age, Rodriguez has the opposite of Midas’s touch; everything she lays her hands upon is awfully taken away from her. A failed abusive marriage, the death of her children to vicious diseases, the end of a loving relationship in her most critical hour, the (almost) loss of her life-long home; she carries the baggage of these losses with valor on her delicately framed shoulders.
As she lives her days recovering from one loss to the next, Rodriguez talks with God every night. These conversations give her a little life and a little strength to make it through each day, she said.
“I pray for healing. I pray for happiness. I pray for a better place to live,” Rodriguez said, hoping for a new beginning at the end of her journey.
Note: Carmen Rodriguez’s first language is Spanish but understands English. This interview was conducted in English by the reporter and Rodriguez responded in both Spanish and English. Anthony Sanchez, her neighbor, acted as a translator throughout the interview.
