West Harlem Pastor Urges Participation in Rent Strike

The pastor of a West Harlem church urged church members and local residents to support a rent strike he hopes to launch early next year at the ATLAH World Missionary Church on Thursday night.

The strike, which Dr. James David Manning calls “No Dew, Nor Rent,” links to the “No Dew, Nor Rain” which he has also helped to spearhead. The previous boycott has called for residents to cease shopping in Harlem, except in stores deemed necessary for daily life. For the rent strike, Manning encouraged tenants to withhold payment from their landlords with the goal of rolling back rents to 1991 levels. Both the rent strike and shopping boycott are attempts to localize economic power in an area many see as undergoing rapid gentrification.

According to Manning, each building would select a representative to open an escrow account where he or she would deposit the money normally paid to the landlord. Funds from this account would be used to maintain the property. “The tenants will essentially take over the building,” he said.

“A lot of folks believe a rent strike is a rent holiday,” Manning said. “No, it’s not that. You still have to pay rent.”

The strike would require the participation of 12 to 17 percent of apartment renters in the Community Board 10 area to succeed, Manning said. He described the strike as a three-year endeavor, marking it as the same length of time as the proposed shopping boycott. “We’re not going into this thinking that we’re going to get results in just a few months, or in six months,” he added.

He framed the rent strike and boycott as steps towards homeownership, a goal to which he said more black Harlem residents should aspire. "We expect to own this community lock, stock, and barrel," he said, by the end of the three-year period.

Manning also linked the need for the strike to race. Rents in historically black Harlem are rising, he claimed, because of an influx of whites in search of cheap housing, a trend he called the "Harlem Gold Rush."

He said that the mostly-young whites moving into Harlem are “alienated to the struggles of black people.” Older whites who witnessed the mid-century Civil Rights movement, he said, are “more aligned with the struggles of black folks.”

“These young white folks from Columbia University and other city universities are spoiled rotten,” Manning said. “They just want their way.”

Yet Manning realizes that his plan is not without opposition, he said. He admitted to the audience that he has received “so many e-mails—people calling me a racist, calling me a pig.”

Although Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in West Harlem, said that Manning has “put his finger right on it” in linking the rent problems to race, Manning’s meeting drew a small crowd of around 45.

Manning admitted he was disappointed by the small size of the group and said he regretted the decision to disband a Dec. 14 meeting due to poor attendance, which he credited to that night’s sleet and snow. He noted that the second meeting’s crowd was thinner. “It looks like Santa Claus was more powerful than the snowstorm,” he said.

Attendee Charles White, a Harlem resident, said he was “not encouraged” by the low attendance. “There’s possibilities,” he said afterwards of the rent strike, “but it’s going to be like climbing a mountain.”