HARLEM — A housing rights group wants to teach you how to get a rent freeze, find out if your landlord is overcharging you, get the city to repair your building and much more.
Pa’Lante's “Demystifying Housing” conference will have more than 30 informative sessions on topics ranging from how to establish credit to buy a home to writing your will and securing succession rights for your family, said founder Elsia Vasquez.
“Nothing like this, in terms of scale, has ever been done in Harlem,” she said of the June 12 and 13 conference at the State Office Building.
The tenant advocacy organization has been doing an annual housing conference for the last five years. Usually they delve into specific topics like co-ops or rent stabilization.
Because the tenant advocacy group has grown in the last year, it believes it can now cover a variety of topics, Vasquez said.
"We are bigger now, we can handle this," she said.
Housing experts from city agencies like NYCHA, HPD and OEM will be at the information session.
There will also be lawyers ready to talk through cases with attendees for free one-on-one sessions.
While the event is free, space is limited so people are encouraged to RSVP.
The goal of the conference is to give New Yorkers more control over their housing situation whether they rent, are members of a co-op or own a condo, Vasquez said.
“Our goal is to teach people how to get things done,” she said. “We want to drive results.”
Pa'Lante started off as a tenant association in 2006. Vasquez, who neighbors used to call "the lady in the suit," worked in finance and had no interest in housing issues.
But the conditions in her building's lobby, stairwells and hallways were so bad that an animal got inside her apartment and bit her cat, she said.
"I dropped off my cat, I took a shower, I went to work the next day and I called my landlord," she said. "He basically told me to f--- myself."
After that phone call she organized her neighbors, set up a rent strike, took the landlord to court over repairs and eventually got the building from the landlord, she said.
She and Pa'Lante have been fighting for tenant's rights ever since.
