City Council Candidate Rick Echevarria is announcing the launch of his campaign for the 37th District into hyperdrive, following his steady outreach in the community this weekend.
Echevarria, a lifelong resident of Bushwick, walked the community handing out fliers and conversing with residents on their porches and in stores to get the word out about upcoming events. He and his colleagues started at Cleveland and Fulton Street, under the J line, and made a loop through the Cypress Hills neighborhood.
“The reason I’m running is because of the experience I had working in senior management at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In the span of the year that I was there, I got a bird’s eye view into how almost all of the city’s housing programs, covering nearly 600,000 units of housing, are plagued by mismanagement, neglect, and corruption,” began Echevarria.
He said he reported a senior manager for which he directly worked for misusing housing units and was allegedly fired for it.
“Definitively across this city, since the days of ‘the Bronx is burning,’ and the abandonment, and the Blackout in Bushwick, and things like that, people have been organizing, around the HIV/AIDS issues, the heroin epidemic, just multiple crises,” said Echevarria.
Echevarria said his main platform is to “end the long era of administrative housing corruption that has dominated the city, HPD, NYCHA, and even the Department of Homeless Services (DHS). All three are plagued by the same types of problems.”
Echevarria said that the agencies should be doing more to defend against predatory lending practices and deed theft in a neighborhood that is majority Hispanic and Latinx, at 61.6 percent according to the community profile, and homeowners who primarily speak Spanish.
Many homeowners demanded a cease and desist rezoning of Cypress Hills and nearby East New York in February because of aggressive sales tactics and high foreclosure rates, said Echevarria. “We got over 700 letters from local residents to get support for the state to establish the zone, and hopefully it takes effect November 1st. We got outrageous stories of senior citizens being besieged with solicitation. Six, seven calls a day, people walking onto their property taking pictures, knocking on their doors, and scaring them into financial deals that don’t benefit them,” said Echevarria.
“They don’t have that problem in Maspeth, Queens or Middle Village, in middle-class or middle-income homeowner neighborhoods, so why us? Why are we targeted and what is the city doing about it?” said Echevarria.
He said that everything that affects homeowners and renters, from the tax lien sale to property management companies that owe money to the city, need to be reformed.
