First-year Senator Zellnor Y. Myrie on Thursday, May 9 held a Housing Forum in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with the goal of connecting tenants to officials at city agencies and nonprofits who can help resolve their housing issues and build awareness of the effort to reform the rent laws in New York State.
“We wanted to give the community an opportunity to ask questions not just about the rent regulation fight, which I care very deeply about, but about any other issues people felt need to be addressed,” Myrie, who represents the 20th Senatorial District, told Caribbean Life afterwards.
Myrie, a Costa Rican American, whose grandmother hails from Jamaica, said the panel that he assembled included Housing Justice For All; Community Service Society; New York City Housing Authority; New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Department of Buildings, and Department of Finance; the State Attorney General’s office; Brooklyn Legal Services; and NHS Brooklyn.
Additionally, there were resource tables set up by NYC’s Public Engagement Tenant Support Unit, NYS Division of Human Rights, CAMBA, IMPACCT Brooklyn and Empire State Indivisible.
“We were proud to bring many of the agencies and groups who work on housing issues assembled in the same place,” Myrie said. “As a rent-stabilized tenant, I learned a lot from these groups myself.”
The Housing Forum was the latest in a series of events the senator has organized on housing issues in Brooklyn.
In the last couple of months, he said he has held several “Know Your Rights” trainings for tenants, and partnered with Assemblymember Diana Richardson’s office on a housing series.
