Flipped Off

Early in March of 2021, Anh-Thu Nguyen called her Brooklyn landlord to add a new housemate to her lease. It was a mundane request, one that the 39-year-old labor organizer had made a handful of times since moving into her three-bedroom apartment in Park Slope on the heels of the last financial crisis.

Nguyen’s home is on the second floor of a prewar building directly across from one of the borough’s largest parks and surrounded by houses worth between $3 million and $5 million. The spot had become a financial refuge for Nguyen and various roommates over the years—creatives, advocates, and other strivers like her whose salaries didn’t keep pace with the city’s soaring cost of living, but who could afford to stay by living there together.

For a couple of weeks, Nguyen’s landlord avoided her calls and emails. Then someone slipped a letter under her door stating that their building was under new management. When she dialed the number on the letter, the person who picked up—someone named TJ—told her that he represented the new landlord, and they were refusing her housemate request. It didn’t make sense to add someone now, he said, because the new owners—a mysterious LLC named after the building’s address—wouldn’t be renewing their lease, even though the housemates had never once missed a rent payment or caused any trouble. A written notice came by email the same day. They had 90 days to vacate the premises.

It was the one-year anniversary of the pandemic’s start in New York City—one year since panicked shoppers emptied grocery shelves of basic supplies and the shock of silence pierced by ambulance sirens overtook the city’s soundscape. The coronavirus was once again raging in New York, and eviction protections remained active. While this was not technically an eviction, it would amount to the same thing: displacement in the middle of a pandemic.

All of this—the appearance of a new corporate landlord and the abrupt end of Nguyen’s lease—was part of a shift that extended far beyond her apartment walls, and even her building. As Covid held Americans hostage, the nation’s private equity investors were trying to capitalize on the distressed New York City real estate market. The same cruelty that awakens after every financial crisis had reappeared: Everyday people suffer while a select world of financiers use the crash to acquire greater wealth.

Nguyen knew none of this yet. But she did know that she didn’t want to leave her home at 70 Prospect Park West. So she did what she’d been trained to do in law school and during her decade of working with employee co-ops and labor advocates: She researched, compiled information, and then hollered from every possible platform until somebody finally listened.

that Nguyen received in March 2021 was signed by a man