Michael Grinthal

Moskowitz: Okay, great. So we have Michael here, and I'm just gonna ask, where were you born and where is your family from?

Grinthal: I was born in New Jersey and my family, my parents still live there. I grew up in a town called Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.

Moskowitz: Okay. Alright. And your parents still live there, you mentioned?

Grinthal: Yes.

Moskowitz: Okay, great. And when did you move from Berkeley Heights?

Grinthal: I lived there the whole time I was growing up. I left to go to college and I went to college at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Moskowitz: Okay, nice. And then after Brown made your way to New York right away, or?

Grinthal: No, I… I worked in Providence for a little while and then I actually went to Houston, Texas to be an organizer with ACORN. I was there for a little bit. And then I spent two years organizing in Hartford, Connecticut…

Grinthal: A few more years organizing on the North shore of Boston. And then I went to law school and graduate school in Boston.

Moskowitz: Okay, great. So your background is in law?

Grinthal: Yes, I'm a lawyer.

Moskowitz: Oh, okay. Nice. And what did you… were you pre-Law in your undergrad as well?

Grinthal: No, actually in college I studied creative writing – poetry.

Moskowitz: Wow, okay. Nice. Yeah, that's great. I also thought that I was gonna study English for a little bit in my undergrad. I didn’t though, but considered it for a little bit. . Yeah. In your home growing up, did you speak different languages or just English growing up? Anything else?

Grinthal: Just English.

Moskowitz: Just english growing up. On your journeys through your different work, through community organizing, did you pick up anything else? Or have kind of just…

Grinthal: I tried very hard to learn Spanish.

Grinthal: I'm not very good at languages and did not learn Spanish well.

Moskowitz: Gotcha. Okay. When did you settle in Bushwick? How did you end up there after all your… after all?

Grinthal: Well, I don't, I, I don't live in Bushwick, but I started working in Bushwick after law school when I came to New York and I started working for what was then South Brooklyn Legal Services. And I started doing some work as a lawyer with BHIP, with the Bushwick Housing Independence project. Yeah.

Moskowitz: Okay, great. And BHIP is the organization that we are partnering with. So yeah, we're very excited to kind of learn more about their history in Bushwick and kind of how they're able…. what they're gonna do now, now that they're kind of restarting. I feel like we're excited to learn about that as well. Were you living close to Bushwick when you were working with BHIP?

Moskowitz: Like the proximity in terms of, you know, seeing what was going on in the community and working in the community, or what was your kind of day to day like, in that sense?

Grinthal: Yeah. Well I was, when I first moved to New York City in 2007, I lived in Williamsburg. And then after a couple years moved to Clinton Hill, which is where I still live.

Moskowitz: Okay. Nice. Nice neighborhood.

Grinthal: So I've never been a Bushwick resident. I've just… What connects me with Bushwick is my work.

Moskowitz: And are you still working in Bushwick, are you still working, you know… well, maybe not with BHIP, but have you continued, you know, your work in the community?

Grinthal: Yeah, and I, in fact, I do still work with BHIP. I'm on the board of BHIP and have been for a couple years.

Moskowitz: Okay. So how would you describe the neighborhood, you know… when you arrived there initially, and, you know, seeing changes over time?

Moskowitz: And that could be visually with things that you hear, things that you touch… you know, any of those kinds of senses that we notice.

Grinthal: Yeah. I mean, when I started going to Bushwick in 2007, it was already being beset by gentrification. So, you know, but it was still to the point where you could walk around. I could walk around and it looked like primarily a Latinx neighborhood. It looked like mostly an immigrant neighborhood. The, you know, the, the buildings are small and wooden and a lot of them were in bad repair. There were a lot of absentee landlords, we worked with tenants whose landlords had literally abandoned their buildings, which it's hard to imagine now in Bushwick.

And gradually went from kind of the main issue being landlord neglect or abandonment to sort of more aggressive landlord behavior like harassment, trying to get rid of long-term tenants.

Moskowitz: It's a really interesting transition to hear that, like you said, because I feel like living in almost like a real estate city to hear that landlords were abandoning buildings… And like you just said, going from this transition of that to now like really aggressive behavior of trying to displace people is so interesting. Just because at a time we would never think that anyone would wanna give up their property. Yeah. So that's just such an interesting concept.

Grinthal: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was still… I think what was happening at the time was that there were local owners, who, you know, there were a lot of small owners, small landlords, and they might… the building might be too much for them to handle or they get older or somebody dies and their family doesn't keep up the building. And we're seeing that

Moskowitz: And then more so that you now have more like real estate types coming in to take over the buildings. That's interesting.

Grinthal: Yeah. And you can see, you know, you can literally see a lot more new buildings. There's sort of a cookie cutter way that the new buildings look. They're all gray, they're all boxy, they all have big windows. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Moskowitz: Yeah. You can definitely see it. Your interactions with the people in the community… have they changed at all? You know, seeing as though you're not a resident in the community, but do you find that people are more welcoming to you when you started being involved there more on a day to day? Have things changed now? Any differences there?

Grinthal: Well, the thing is, you know, as a lawyer, I have a really privileged position. Usually when I come in it's because people, you know, really want or need a lawyer. And so I've always, because of that, you know, I get to be welcomed when I go to a tenant meeting or house meeting or when I go to an event, a BHIP event.

Moskowitz: Let's talk about what you do as a lawyer for BHIP and what your kind of day-to-day role is. I'm curious what… I guess this is maybe a couple of questions. What your role maybe was when you started… if it's developed and changed a little bit. Just kind of a background on you and your professional career.

Grinthal: Yeah. So I, you know, when I started I was a staff attorney, which meant I represented a lot of tenants. I went around and did cases, [I] was sort of in the trenches… [I] was in housing court a lot. Represented a lot of people who are facing eviction. [I] Spent a lot of time going to tenant association meetings. So I spent a lot of time in the lobbies of buildings, meeting with tenants. Over time I've become a supervisor, so I'm not as much on the front lines anymore.

I'm more… I work with lawyers who are in the position that I used to be… and I work a lot more, especially at BHIP on things like fundraising and program development. So that might not be as, as good for the oral history 'cause it's a lot less hands-on. Yeah.

Moskowitz: Yeah. What does the fundraising entail? How does… how is it going?

Grinthal: Well, [with] BHIP the fundraising has gone very well. We've gotten a number of grants from some foundations. We just… [We’re] part of a multi organization group that got a large grant for the next three years from the city. And we're just figuring out how to do that, we're just putting that together.

So the fundraising has gone very well. And in fact, you know, BHIP didn't have any staff for a number of years and we've just hired an actual, you know, a professional tenant organizer, community organizer for the first time in… maybe since 2016 or 2017.

Moskowitz: Which is Amy.

Grinthal: Which is Amy, yeah.

Moskowitz: Yes. Which is Amy who's lovely, who's great.

Grinthal: Yeah. Have you interviewed her?

Moskowitz: I haven't interviewed her, but she's with us on all of our trips to Bushwick whenever we go. So we've been with her twice now and she's come to the city once for one of our classes and she has great energy. I mean personally I really enjoy working with her… But, so even though BHIP didn't have staff like that through some time, you remained on the board and [was] still involved in the organization?

Grinthal: I was on the board from 2009 to early 2013, and then was on the board from 2020 until now. Okay,

Moskowitz: Okay, gotcha. Yeah. Okay. In terms of the challenges that the community is facing today with displacement, eviction, are there new challenges that have also come about within the last few years? Or are you really seeing kind of similar challenges that the community has been dealing with since your time kind of began in the community?

Grinthal: I think it's… a lot of it is the same. There was… you know, there are a lot of undocumented people in Bushwick as well, and there was, especially during the Trump administration, not just in Bushwick, but we saw it all over New York…

There was more like… people were hesitant to participate in organizing if they were undocumented. People were kind of trying to keep their heads down and it was a real… people were, people were scared to organize, even just to organize against their landlords.

Moskowitz: And before you were working with BHIP, were you working in other neighborhoods in New York City and doing eviction law, things in other neighborhoods as well?

Grinthal: Yeah, yeah. When I was at South Brooklyn Legal Services, I worked across Brooklyn. I went from there to what's now Mobilization for Justice. And I worked largely in Manhattan, with tenants in Manhattan. And I now work for an organization called Take Root Justice. We work across the city.

Grinthal: So I've worked in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx. The only place I haven't represented tenants is in Staten Island.

Moskowitz: And in your plethora of work, expansive work… the issues that you see in Bushwick, are they so different from other issues in other boroughs? Is there anything that kind of sets Bushwick aside from the other places where you've done your work in the city?

Grinthal: I mean, in some ways tenants all over the city are in the same boat and they're having the same experiences. There's a little bit of difference just in who the tenants are and what the housing is like. And Bushwick, you know, Bushwick is interesting… [it] is sort of an odd neighborhood to gentrify, you know, it's gentrifying because it's next to Williamsburg, but it actually has really, really poor housing stock.

So there's, you know, one thing that is more in Bushwick than in many other places is people are living in deteriorating buildings. It's not the kind of housing stock you would've picked to, you know, to gentrify. So what we see is, even when you've got a building that's like half long-term tenants and half gentrifiers, the newcomers are experiencing, you know, decrepit housing too. Because the landlords have a tendency to just sort of slap up a coat of paint, put in some new tiles in the lobby, but underneath the building is still really old and cheaply built and falling apart.

So we've actually seen some interesting sort of, where you get an alliance between the newcomers who are, you know, younger, whiter, more professional and the long-term tenants because they're all looking at the same decaying building.

Moskowitz: Do you feel a difference in representation, whether it's representing somebody that kind of just came into the community and is dealing with that type of housing, or somebody that has been living there for quite some time and is dealing with that form of housing? Does it change for you based on, I guess, who your client is?

Grinthal: Yeah, I mean we, you know, we typically don't represent the newcomers, the professionals, the gentrifiers… but if we're working with a group of tenants that's organizing, there may be some of both in there and you know, the newcomers or gentrifiers, or however you wanna put it, they usually have the option to move. When they don't like what's going on in their building, they'll often move somewhere else. So they're not as likely to stay and fight.

Moskowitz: Whereas the people that have been living there don't always have the option to move and that’s their home and their community, so they want to stay.

Grinthal: Yeah, Exactly.

Moskowitz: It's interesting that there would be almost some kind of alliance formed between two groups of people. Sometimes even Amy talks about this concept of like “good gentrifiers”, which does exist. I mean, it kind of has to… In New York City people are moving all the time and people are moving to where they can afford and not everybody wants to move somewhere and in return have the people that have been living there [to] not be able to live there. But it's almost like: “what is the definition of a “good gentrifier?”

You know, who is someone that can come into the community and not cause disruption? And if anything, try to do some, some good while they're there, and really fit with the community.

Moskowitz: So it's almost kind of nice to hear that maybe people could come together over something that shouldn't be an issue, but is an issue.

Grinthal: Yeah. I mean, I can think of one building I worked in… the landlord was really neglectful. Everybody was experiencing water leaks and garbage and, you know… and there were some young, I think they were young enough that they were students living there and they… I think they were maybe what you could call good gentrifiers. They stood in solidarity with the longer term tenants. They worked, they came out, they participated in the organizing.

They even put themselves forward at a risky moment and, and wound up getting retaliated against by the landlord. They actually had… the landlord brought an eviction case against them because they had stood up and that was something that they could deal with. 'cause they could just move. Right.

Grinthal: So they weren't as scared of being evicted. So they, you know… they took a lot, they took some of the organizing on their shoulders. But they didn't take over the organizing.

So I wound up representing them in their eviction case, even though they were technically over income because… they're facing eviction because they had stood with the other tenants. And demanded better conditions.

Moskowitz: No, that's great. They made themselves a part of the community. It was almost like an even playing field with themselves, even in every way that they could.

Grinthal: Yeah. I mean they knew they had privilege and they made use of it. Even, a couple of them were designers and they helped design the picket signs and the flyers for the building.

You know, they were pretty aware of themselves. They knew what they brought and they made it useful.

Moskowitz: In what you have noticed in your experience in eviction court, do the bad landlords, I don't know the language, do they end up being punished? Do they end up, like… does anything happen with them? Are there records in New York City, New York State of their actions? I know that there's probably a lot of community resources, even ones that we've learned about in class of things online, you know, of what people in the community can look at. But how often is it that landlords are really, you know, held to responsibility…

Grinthal: It's rare. It's rare. I mean, I could go into, there are a lot of laws and programs and strategies and tactics, and sometimes we're able to hold landlords accountable, but most of the time… No, it's rare.

Most of the fines they pay, even if they get cited for violations, you know, they're low enough to be a cost of doing business.

Moskowitz: Yeah. What keeps you going then, in those moments?

Grinthal: I mean, I get, I get to be there when the tenants win. I get to be there at the best parts, you know, and I get to, you know, it, I get to be there when people are being their best selves, their bravest selves. And we do win. You know, it feels sometimes like a drop in the bucket, but tenants who organize really can win.

Moskowitz: That's great. And what does that organizing look like? Just just so we know?

Grinthal: Yeah. You know, it’s usually tenants in a building… it's often one person who starts it and they talk to their neighbors and they form a tenant association. And what it looks like is, you know… I've been to many, many meetings. You know, people come downstairs to the lobby, the front hallway, or they huddle on the stairs if there's not much of a [space]... and they talk about what is going on in their building and they talk about what they've heard and they talk about their landlord.

And if there's an organizer there, the organizer will talk to 'em about what they can do, and try to help them find their courage to do something. As a lawyer, I'm often sort of talking about… it's a little weird sometimes as a lawyer, I'm talking about what's supposed to be happening. I tell them what the law says, you know, and they can obviously see that the law, that that's not what's happening in their building.

Grinthal: But we might talk about some of, some tools that the law gives them… We might bring a lawsuit… Since the pandemic, a lot more, a lot more tenants have been going on rent strike. There was a real change during the pandemic for rent strikes… In the 13 years I worked as a lawyer before the pandemic, I probably saw one rent strike. We see them all the time now.

Moskowitz: And they are successful? Or mixed? Or?

Grinthal: Mixed? Mixed. But people try. Yeah.

Moskowitz: How long do they usually last? Or just -

Grinthal: That's a good question. I mean… usually after six months or so if they haven't settled, the landlord will start taking people to court. And so, you know, it's got kind of a built in limit that way.

Moskowitz: Even six months though, six months of rent strike. Wow.

Grinthal: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's often possible to settle at that point.

Moskowitz: Yeah. I have a question. You might be familiar, I just don't know - of HDFC [Housing Development Fund Corporations] co-ops? So… is that ever an option for people? I mean, of course a landlord is a landlord… But if there's ever a case that… I'm just not, I'm just curious, honestly, if it comes up.

Grinthal: You know, we don't see it as often as we really would like to because, you know, especially in a place like Bushwick, the landlord can sell a building for a lot more money than the tenants are able to pay for it. We did… you know, our office worked with a group of tenants in the Bronx who just a couple years ago…. I mean, they put up such a fight that their landlord just got sick of being a landlord.

And, they worked with another organization to find financing and they are in the process of buying their building and setting it up to be an HDFC. So it does still happen. But historically, more HDFCs came about during the time when landlords abandoned buildings.

Moskowitz: Yeah, that makes sense. When nobody was around to kind of take claim…

Grinthal: And the, and the city was foreclosing. The city is really reluctant to foreclose on buildings now. They don't want to own them. In the seventies, they got to a point where I think they owned like one out of every four housing units in the Bronx. And so they don't do that anymore. They put a lien on it and they sell the lien to a bank. So it's a lot harder. And of course, again, most landlords, even if they're in trouble, even if they haven't kept up the building for years, they can still sell it for a lot on the market.

Moskowitz: Do you… I'm curious… the younger lawyers coming in and working in housing rights… Are there a lot of them? Like, is the flow of young people coming in… is it a popular avenue for lawyers to go down?

Grinthal: It has become that, because… I don't know if you are aware [that] the city started a Right to Counsel in housing court program in 2017… and it's still got… it has not met its promise. Not every tenant gets a lawyer. But the result is that the city put in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for housing legal services and all the legal services office have vastly expanded.

So it's gone from, in 2007 when I graduated law school, it was actually really hard... I had to get a fellowship to pay for my job when I started. Whereas now, you know, at any given time, most of legal aid society legal services have unfilled positions. So it's a place that students can come out of law school and get a job. So it is. it's become very popular.

Moskowitz: Do you find also that the younger people coming in want to be more involved in the community? Like they want to have like more personal relationships, whether that is like attending community events or just being more on the ground? Just curious.

Grinthal: Yeah. I think they do. I think most, you know, they come in and they… a lot of them have these jobs as right to counsel lawyers, which means they spend all their time in housing court.

Grinthal: [They’re] sort of like public defenders are in criminal court, and they just see person after person and they're always kind of just trying to staunch the flow. And I think there's a lot of pent up desire to be able to do something that feels more proactive… that doesn't feel as much like they're just trying to stop the bleeding. I mean, we give training on community lawyering or law and organizing and tons of people come out.

You know, it's something people wish they could do more of. But it's difficult when there's so many evictions going on, and so much kind of first-aid that has to be done.

Moskowitz: Have the eviction rates increased, would you say, in your time? I mean you've worked in Bushwick a long time, but have they increased so much or like kind of remained?

Grinthal: I’m not sure that they've increased. I mean two things have happened. One is the Right to counsel program,

Even though it's still really short of providing lawyers to everybody, [it] has decreased the eviction rate. But the pandemic and a couple years afterwards increased it because so many people lost their income. And I don't know if you've seen right now the city is at its lowest vacancy rate for decades. So those two things are pushing against each other. And I'm actually not sure statistically whether the eviction rate has gone up.

Moskowitz: Are there other topics that you're passionate about within this world of peaceful protests and other things like that? Other than housing rights?

Grinthal: That's become… I mean, I never meant to necessarily to be a housing lawyer. I just wanted to be able to be involved where people were organizing, and housing makes that hap… housing is the easiest place to do that.

Housing is where people are, you know, literally together. And so a lot of organizing happens there. So that's how I became a housing lawyer. So it's really the organizing what keeps me coming back,

Moskowitz: Like the people coming together.

Grinthal: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Moskowitz: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that the passion for people is really like something that keeps us going like it does. Everybody deserves a right to housing.

Grinthal: Yeah.

Moskowitz: In your world, what do you hope to envision for the future of Bushwick?

Grinthal: Hmm. I mean, I would love to see the people who are there, stay there. I would love to see people, you know, people's kids take over their apartments.

I would love to see BHIP organizing in more tenant associations. And I wanna see the leaders. I want to see the men and women, mostly women who, you know, stand up and sort of realize their power. I don't know if that's too abstract, but that's what I really wanna see.

Moskowitz: How do you, how do you guys go about finding community leaders? Is that, is that something that you wanna take like you take on or other people take on?

Grinthal: Yeah, it's not for me really because I'm not a part of the community and my role in BHIP is really to be building the capacity, raising money and making the organization, you know, sound. So, you know, how does Amy do it? Amy, Amy, you know…

Right now she's holding gatherings every month… Workshops where people can come and, you know, learn about their rights, learn about the history of organizing, learn about, you know, talk to a lawyer.

It's a way of getting people to come out, people who have something that they need. And she's always got her eye out for leadership potential among those people. And as we go forward, another thing that will happen is she'll start knocking on doors, in buildings, she'll identify buildings and go knock on doors and talk to the people and see if they're interested in organizing, because the process of identifying leaders is really a long slow process.

Just, you talk to one person, then you talk to another person, then you talk to another person until you find people who want to go talk to other people too.

Moskowitz: We've been doing our meetings at El Puente and something interesting that we were talking about was

teaching housing rights to young adults in the community, right? Because maybe their parents only speak Spanish. And then that way you're kind of starting a generation of young adults that know their housing rights and then also are able to explain them to their parents that might not know their housing rights because they might be the ones going to eviction court. But they're able to learn from their children, their grandchildren and things like that.

So I thought that that was cool because it's kind of like a trickle down system [of] education and like you're saying future leaders.

Grinthal: Absolutely. Yeah. Agreed. I would love for us to be able to work with like a high school and meet both the parents who are leaders there and the teenagers who are leaders there.

Moskowitz: Yeah, definitely sounds possible. I mean, I think with Amy, I think it's definitely possible.

Grinthal: Yeah.

Moskowitz: I'm curious if you have, you had shared one, but any other like, memorable stories or anecdotes from your time with BHIP? I know it's been a lot of time, but if there are any others that kind of come to mind.

Grinthal: Well, one, you know, a lot of my memories are around Yolanda Coca. I don't know if you've heard her name.

Moskowitz: Yeah, I have.

Grinthal: Yeah. She was an organizer with BHIP for many years before she got sick and passed away in 2016. And I remember back in 2011, 2012, we had organized a Brooklyn wide coalition to reform the Housing Court. To do something about [it]... it's just this horrible, horrible place where people go and are physically uncomfortable and they're, you know, they're humiliated and they're treated poorly, all so that they can get evicted.

And I remember BHIP was a key member of that coalition because so many of their leaders had been through housing court and knew what it was like. And I… this is one of my best memories of BHIP. As I remember, we had a big action press conference and rally across the street from the Housing Court in Downtown Brooklyn. And you know, anytime you have a press conference, I mean, anytime you have an action, there's a lot of like standing around nervously wondering if anybody's gonna come.

And I still remember seeing Yolanda come around the corner walking backwards towards us leading something like 30 tenants from Bushwick who, you know, who had had to come all the way to Downtown Brooklyn. And it was, you know, that was Yolanda. [She] was somebody that people would follow.

Grinthal: I remember that. Very vividly like it was yesterday.

Moskowitz: That's so nice. Wow. How long did you guys work together?

Grinthal: I first met her when I first started as a lawyer in 2007. And I worked with her until my work moved to Manhattan in 2013.

Moskowitz: Gotcha. So she was really, she was like the force in the community, right? Like she…

Grinthal: Was very much a force of nature. Yeah.

Moskowitz: In terms of organizing. That's great. Someone that people could follow.

Grinthal: Mm-hmm.

Moskowitz: Love that

Grinthal: She didn't take no for an answer either from a judge or from, you know, a potential leader who was, who was reluctant.

Moskowitz: It's powerful.

Grinthal: Yeah.

Moskowitz: That was a really great personal anecdote. If you have any more, I'd love to hear them as well, about Yolanda or about anyone else from the organization.

From, you know, kind of this pre time where it's coming back out into, I guess the streets. I would say, you know, coming back out into like the community engagement work or if not, then not, but I'm just curious.

Grinthal: I'm not, for some reason, I'm just not… nothing's coming to mind right now. Yeah. Sorry.

Moskowitz: No, no worries. All good. Okay, then I think we can conclude here. Okay. This has been great. Let's stop recording.