BUSHWICK —Luz Yolanda Coca, a tireless fair-housing advocate who fought for three decades for the community she loved, was remembered Wednesday by tenants whom she'd battled to keep in their homes.
Coca, 60, who died last Thursday of cancer, was remembered as a champion of tenant rights in Bushwick as well as a constant source of hope and inspiration for renters in their darkest moments — when landlords had shut off heat or water, demolished parts of their building, or even threatened them with death.
"She always said, 'You have to fight for your rights and not stray from your path for landlords because you're afraid," said Silvia Orea, 40, a tenant who said Coca helped her when she was being harassed by her landlord, offered buyouts and watched as everyone else in their Willoughby Avenue building packed up and left.
"The landlord was always waiting for us outside and knocking on our door. He asked if I wanted to die with all of my family...if I loved my family."
Orea was terrified of calling 311 when the landlord shut off their basic services and started construction in the building, and didn't know what rights she had as a renter, if any. Coca was a soothing presence, who'd educated her and got her legal help to fight her landlord in court.
"They can't kick you out if you want to stay. She taught me not to be afraid of the owner, that as tenants we have powers."
"Thanks to her, we're still here," Orea said, in Spanish.
Coca moved to Bushwick in 1981 from the Dominican Republic and started working in a fabric factory, though she soon earned her GED and later associate's degree from Boricua College and eventually a paralegal certificate from Long Island University, according to an obituary written by the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers.
She was mostly a homemaker until 1989, her 30-year-old daughter Erica said, when she was shot while waiting outside her son's elementary school, P.S. 377. The traumatic event made Coca realize she needed to speak out if she wanted things in her neighborhood to improve.
“When she was going through physical therapy, she realized she needed to stop being afraid and bring about change," Erica said.
Coca began volunteering with AmeriCorp's VISTA program and with housing advocates ACORN, before she eventually earned full time employment with Park Slope based tenant organizers Fifth Avenue Committee, where she worked for eight years.
She left behind that job in 2005 to help the start Bushwick Housing Independence Project, run through her Catholic Church St. Joseph Patron.
"She realized there was a need for her services in Bushwick," her daughter Erica said. "She was leaving a job where she had a steady salary and benefits and coming to her Bushwick parish, not knowing if she was going to have a constant salary, because she wanted to be here, she wanted to help."
Since then she's been a ceaseless tenant advocate in Bushwick. Though her battle with cancer forced her to step down in March this year, she was still making phone calls from her hospital bed up until about a week before her death, friends said.
"She was a warrior, always fighting," said Nelba Maldonado, 60, in Spanish. She assisted Coca for the last two years at Bushwick Housing Independence Project.
"She worked from sunrise to sunset, going from the office, to a house, then another house. We'd get home at 11 to 12 in the night," Maldonado said.
"An incredibly strong leader is leaving us, a mother of the community, because a mother dedicates herself with love."
Andrea Bello had gotten to know Coca after the new landlord of the rent-stabilized apartment she'd lived in for 34 years came under siege.
The landlord told Bello that "this neighborhood was going to change its face," and wanted them out, she said.
Buyouts and intimidation worked with all the other tenants but Bello and her family remained, despite construction and demolition in all the apartments around them in their Hart Street building. Then the landlord had workers hack away at structural beams in the basement, Bello said.
"They wanted the building [to] fall with us inside of it," Bello said in Spanish. "I couldn't sleep thinking something was going to happen."
Bello had just gone through chemotherapy and was living in apartment in the dead of winter without heat, hot or cold water, terrified her building was going to collapse.
"Through all of those problems, all of that pain she was there," she said. "She never left us alone."
When you're in that situation you feel like, "you're not a human being. You're an animal. You're worse than a rat," she said.
Friends said Coca had the ability to pierce through that, put aside her own needs in order to provide emotional support for the tenants she worked with that made them feel human again.
"She stopped caring for herself to take care of us," Bello said. "[She gave] that physical and emotional part of love, that would make you feel like you're an important person."
Coca saved so many tenants in their homes over the years, but she was never satisfied. Many at her memorial Wednesday afternoon worried how they would begin to fill the gaping hole she leaves in Bushwick.
"She was tireless. She thought she had to fight more and more," Maldonado said in Spanish. "Every day there are more abuses, and the only thing she ever wanted was justice."
