Squatting the Grove

And other stories from Jamaica Queens organizing, 1993

Helene O’Brien told me one day we were heading out to Jamaica, Queens to start a new office.

Helene was my supervisor at New York ACORN. Later, she became the national field director. She was a beautiful, polished woman, and she knew how to use that. She got us office space at the IBEW hall—the electrical workers’ union. The guy who ran it got dropped off in a limo every day. I thought that was strange. But it worked.

When Helene said we were going somewhere, we went.

This sucked for me. I was living in Flatbush, Brooklyn at the time. Jamaica Queens meant a long ass train ride every single day.

But I wanted to be an organizer so I sucked it up.

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Jamaica, Queens, was a low to moderate-income community. A mix of houses and apartment buildings. Working people. Families trying to hold on. People owned homes there. People rented. People were getting squeezed.

There were crack vials on the ground everywhere. That’s just the truth. But Jamaica was thriving. Almost everyone in the neighborhood hustled and worked to stay alive. I got tired of taking the buses and started taking dollar vans—immigrant drivers hauling ass down the streets blasting loud Jamaican rap music. That’s how you got around.

I organized the neighborhood around a lot of issues. We’d go after landlords. Push for services. Do the standard ACORN playbook—knock doors, sign up members, find leaders, run campaigns.

But the biggest issue was housing. People needed places to live. Poor conditions. Buildings falling apart. Landlords who collected rent and fixed nothing. And everywhere you looked, empty units. Abandoned buildings. Places that could’ve been homes just sitting there. Vacant buildings weren’t just wasted space—they were dangerous. Kids were playing in them. Lead paint was peeling off the walls. Crime was the number one complaint.

The math didn’t make sense. Families doubled up, paying too much for barely livable apartments. And right down the street, buildings sit empty and poison the neighborhood.

Banks and slumlords owned a lot of these buildings. They’d foreclosed, taken the property, and then just let it rot. Nobody was living there. Nobody was maintaining it. Dead weight on the block.

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ACORN wasn’t about protests for the sake of protests. We did innovative organizing that won actual things for people. Real victories. Concrete changes.

111-15 Merrick Boulevard was two buildings. Project-based Section 8. Owned by a rabbi named Landau, who had bought them as an investment and let them rot.

The tenants on Mereick Boulevard were mostly immigrants—Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans. The Jamaican community in particular, was tight. They knew each other. They talked. When we started organizing, that network became our backbone.

We set up floor captains. When it came time for a meeting, they mobilized everyone in the building. Whole families came pouring down the stairs. Neighbors knocking on neighbors’ doors. That’s how organizing is supposed to work—you find the natural leaders and let them lead.

The conditions were brutal. Rats. Roaches. Pipes that leaked. The heat didn’t work. And then a sink fell on a child. Seriously, maimed the kid. That’s when people stopped being scared and started being angry.

We ran the full playbook. Got Archie Spigner, the councilman, to do a building tour. Walked him through the hallways so he could see it himself—the holes in the walls, the exposed wiring, the shit that Landau had let slide for years. Television showed up. Newspapers wrote about it. That was my first experience with media and how it could shape a story. For organizing, the media was mostly a friend, shedding light on issues that were being ignored. Then we hit the Housing and Public Development offices with an action. Showed up with tenants, made noise, demanded they do something.

HPD referred us to a legal program, and they stepped in and began enforcing the laws through their legal department. Now the landlord was in court facing serious violations. The sink that fell on the kid’s head. The rats. The roaches. All of it documented. All of it on the record. HPD was taking action.

That’s when Landau decided to negotiate.

We won a tenant-union agreement—one of the first of its kind. Landau didn’t just fix the building. He paid dues, the same as a company would pay to a union. Instead of cash going to a union fund, he discounted everyone’s rent. The tenants had power. Written into a contract. Enforceable.

The fact that he was a rabbi shook me. I’d been raised on tikkun olam—the Jewish call to repair the world. Here was a rabbi profiting from suffering. He was collecting Section 8 checks while kids got hurt and families lived with rats.

We beat him anyway.

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Crossland Savings owned a building called the Grove. Beautiful building. Right in the middle of Jamaica. Beautifully renovated. And it had been sitting there empty for years.

Empty. Renovated and ready. While families in our membership were doubled up. While people paid too much for apartments with rats and roaches. This building just sat there. Bank property. Doing nothing.

We tried the normal route first. Did a series of actions at Crossland’s offices. Our members went in with pennies and lined up demanding to exchange them for dollars. Then went back in line and asked for their pennies back. Meanwhile, other members chanted and disrupted the business. Classic ACORN. Make it impossible to ignore us.

It didn’t work. The bank refused to talk about the building.

So one day Jon Kest told me and fellow organizer Fred Simmons it was time. Jon was ACORN’s head organizer in New York and one of the key mentors in my life. When he said it was time, it was time.

We were going to squat that building. Prepare to turn out hundreds of people to Queens.

I had a church lined up as a staging area. They backed out at the last minute when they realized what we were about to do. So we met at a train station in Jamaica instead.

At least 500 ACORN members gathered. We divided them into two groups. They’d march on the building from two different directions.

You could hear them coming down the street. The sound of fired-up ACORN members. Chanting. Moving together. It was clear justice was on its way.

A moment later, an ACORN member cut the chain on the fence.

Another threw a cement block through the front glass door.

And the members streamed in. Carrying their belongings. Ready to squat the building and make it a home.

The hair stood up on my neck. That was the moment I knew I was an organizer. Not because I’d won an argument or signed a petition. Because I felt what happens when people move together. When they stop asking and start taking back power.

The police came. Of course they did. But we had an agreement—a friendship—with Dinkins and his administration. Jon Kest was brilliant like that. Nobody got arrested. Nobody got charged.

We didn’t win the Grove for our members. The building was eventually sold.

That’s not the point.

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The point is what I learned from those campaigns.

I learned that banks had power in low-income neighborhoods. Real power. By discriminating against poor people, they made sure these neighborhoods never built the type of wealth and systems needed to thrive. No loans for small businesses. No mortgages for families, even those who could generally afford them. Just disinvestment, year after year, until the whole block looked like nobody cared.

Banks weren’t just landlords. They were the reason things stayed broken.

If you wanted to change anything, you had to go after them directly.

I learned that hundreds of people moving together can do things that seem impossible. Cut a chain. Break a door. Walk into a building that doesn’t belong to them and say: This should be a home.

I learned that power never gives itself up. You don’t ask for it. You don’t petition for it. You take it.

The Landau campaign taught me you could win real things—tenant agreements, rent reductions, repairs—if you organized smart and hit hard.

The Grove taught me something else. Sometimes you don’t win. But you move. You show what’s possible. You put the banks on notice that people are watching, people are organized, and people aren’t going to wait forever.

It would turn out that ACORN went on to win all kinds of agreements with banks and develop many of the nation’s most effective fair housing programs. The experience taught us how to run banking campaigns—challenging mergers, using legal processes, and wielding the Community Reinvestment Act as a tool to bring CEOs to the table. When banks wanted to merge, they needed approval. And we showed up at those hearings with documentation of their discrimination. It worked.

Unfortunately, those tools have been weakened under past administrations and the current administration. But many of the programs that ACORN started and grew like loan counseling and down payment assistance, remain core features of housing assistance programs in cities today.

When I left for Atlanta the next place I would be an organizer, the ACORN members made me a jacket that said Queens ACORN on the back. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever got from anybody.

I left the jacket on a plane a few months later by accident.

But I went on organizing.