“It’s a nasty habit. I hope to give it up one day. But, under the situation that I’m dealing with … For the landlord to get me out of this apartment, they would give me the money, and I would give them the key — that simple. So I figured the agreement we had was imminent and I moved all my stuff out of here. But, they kind of, like, reneged on the deal. I can’t believe I’m still here. They keep on selling me a dream that’s not happening.” Ray Tirado lives in the heart of New York City’s largest Puerto Rican neighborhood, East Harlem. “Excuse the conditions right now.” It’s one of the last affordable neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the country. And it’s changing right before his eyes. In 2015, new owners announced a plan to tear down Ray’s 70-year-old walk-up and replace it with a bigger building with a much higher rent. Ray, a 58-year-old construction worker, has been living here for five decades. It’s the only home he’s ever known. And now he’s the last tenant left in the entire building. The last holdout. “I did my living room floors, wooden. I’ve done everything here expecting to retire here.” His apartment is rent-controlled, which means he’s only paying $110 a month. “This is what’s actually causing the fly infestation.” Ray says the building’s owners have tried to force him out by letting his home fall apart. “O.K., I don’t want to go any further than that, because that’s going to take, like, a week to go down.” But Ray’s not leaving. “This used to be a great view.” He’s one man fighting a real estate boom sweeping across Manhattan and New York City. The landlords didn’t wait for him to leave. They’ve already started demolition around him. “There’s lots of methods that owners are using to try to get people like Ray to no longer want to stay in his apartment. There’s buyouts and push-outs, there’s harassment by construction.” Harvey Epstein represents tenants who, like Ray, are fighting to stay in their homes. “What we see more often than not is owners who continue to engage in this type of behavior and get away with it because there’s really little punishment for them.” “He is living in a building that’s 100 years old, all right? And, in order to correct it we’d probably have to renovate the whole building.” Yi Han co-owns the property and said she’s been very fair with Ray. Her company offered him $800,000 to move out — an unusually high amount for the neighborhood. “So the profit margin is not that big. But we’d really like to build something that will fit the demand of the neighborhood.” But even with that much money, Ray feels conflicted about leaving. He can continue fighting to hold on to a crumbling apartment, or he can take a check and say goodbye to his family home. “That just didn’t affect just the residential neighborhood. It affects the entire character of a community. I mean, a buyout is how a neighborhood changes.” East Harlem is a 2.4-square-mile district in Upper Manhattan and home to New York’s largest Puerto Rican population. “This is like the hall of fame of graffiti. Your neighborhood guys that are graffiti artists and they come and push their tags over here.” There’s always been a sense of community, family and familiarity. But Ray says that’s all changing, fast. “This here in the corner was at one time a grocery store where I used to buy my sandwiches. And then it turned into a pizzeria place where I could buy my pizza. Now it’s a hipster spot where it’s so expensive that you couldn’t … even happy hour is not a happy hour. One of the things that we’re trying to protect in this neighborhood now is some of the small-business owners that are being pushed out because of the rent. Even some of the supermarkets are being pushed out.” “This is a big day today. I want to have my normal life back.” In September 2016, Ray’s one-year battle against his landlord came to a head. He went to court in a last attempt to hold on to his home. “I’ve been living in my apartment for over 50 years. The only solvent thing that I know is my home. And I know what I have there.” He just wanted his landlord to fix the apartment. But the judge was unsympathetic to Ray’s arguments and pressured him to take a buyout: $800,000 to walk away. “I can’t believe this. He told me, ‘That’s more than fair.’ This is not the way I wanted to end this fight. Definitely not the way I wanted to end this fight.” After more than a year of resisting, Ray surrendered. “I’m thinking about leaving the furniture behind. Take the nightstands and probably take the love seat or something like that, I don’t know. Take something here. We’ll feel that out and see how that goes.” “All these buildings here, I know. I grew up, I used to play in the backyards in these places. In the summertime we used to have people with bongos playing, singing some songs. It was a pretty good childhood. I don’t know what’s going to happen to that. If you look further down Third Avenue, there’s a bunch of buildings there. They’re all boarded up. I mean, there’s housing that’s being needed out here. But the greed is saying keep it shut until the gentrification is here. And we’ll make this all high-rise. It takes the flavor away from this neighborhood.” But while Ray’s neighborhood transforms around him, he’s been stuck in limbo. In the 18 months after he packed up his life, the debt-ridden landlord never came through. They’ve only paid Ray $50,000 of the $800,000 agreement, and he’ll probably never see the rest of the money. Now the bank has moved to foreclose on the building, one of the worst maintained in the city. “I just wish there was more laws to protect the tenants out here, I don’t know how long this is going to go on. I don’t know how long I can hang and hold on. But my inner being and my stubbornness can’t allow me to move out of here.