Young leader from Lower East Side takes on NYCHA and new pet policy

The New York City Housing Authority’s new pet policy is in effect, but one young New Yorker is trying to prevent the drastic rules from affecting him, his neighbors, and more residents of the over 340 densely populated New York City public housing developments. Though seeing obstacles along the way, Marquis Jenkins is still collecting petition signatures, talking directly to NYCHA with City Council members, and persevering to prevent tenants from having to make the decision between their furry family member and their home.

Seven years after officially allowing pets in residences, NYCHA revised the rules for pet owners, lowering the weight limit on dogs by nearly half and banning pit bull, Rottweiler, and Doberman Pinscher dog breeds (read full details of NYCHA’s pet policy here.  Marquis Jenkins, a 26 year old Community Organizer for the neighborhood housing and preservation organization, GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side), started a petition immediately after hearing about the new policy, about three weeks prior to the day it would go into effect. With the help of GOLES and friends, Marquis collected signatures on foot. After the deadline passed and the weight and breed bans were in place, Marquis continued to collect signatures for a NYCHA Town Hall meeting on June 23^rd.   One of his biggest complaints was the way in which NYCHA went about this entire ordeal. “They did not inform people properly nor take the opinions of the residents into consideration,” he says. One of the ways NYCHA did not properly inform people was by not translating into Spanish the initial letter sent to all residences in March, informing them of the impending pet policy change. Jenkins also says that the rule change is a profiling of not only the dogs but of people living in public housing, where the average monthly rent is $394, only a fraction of the average monthly rent for a NYC apartment in a private building, due to city and federal government subsidies.

In addition, the ASPCA, Animal Care and Control of New York City, and the Mayor’s Alliance posted a memo on June 8^th on each of the organizations’ respective websites and kept them on hand at the AC&C shelter locations. The memo states that if a NYCHA resident is told to remove their dog, that resident may schedule a hearing at NYCHA headquarters at 250 Broadway, which will help the tenant at least gain a little time to figure out either what to do with their animal or find a way to keep him or her. The memo explains the full NYCHA policy and tenants’ rights as it pertained to their pets and lists as Darryl Vernon as contact for anyone who has scheduled a hearing with NYCHA. In an effort to reach people before they have brought an animal to the surrender point, the ASPCA and others worked with GOLES and other grass-roots organizations and local community groups to distribute the memos throughout public housing residences. Unlike NYCHA, who printed only an English version of the preliminary letter to tenants, the ASPCA had the memo translated into Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian and published in respective foreign language newspapers. View the entire memo here.