Matthew Lee's Love Affair with the Bronx, and Battles to Save It, Continues

In the late 1980s, a lot of people looked at the hundreds of abandoned apartment buildings in the Bronx and saw a wasteland. Matthew Lee gazed in wonder and saw the motherlode for homesteaders. I met with Matthew Lee, 36, last week on 187th St. in the Belmont section of the Bronx. It's the neighborhood he calls home?with his wife and child?and he is in love with his adopted hometown.

Lee is an affable moonfaced man with a pleasant manner and fast speech. I sat down with him at the Roma Luncheonette over a cup of espresso.

"Look at this place. Italians once owned it and then Mexicans bought it," said Lee. "They still make the good coffee and kept the Italian theme, only now with a Mexican twist."

Matthew Lee comes from an eclectic background?he's one-quarter Chinese, a quarter Welsh, a quarter Italian and the other quarter he says is "unknown?all I know is that they lived in Kentucky." As a child, his family moved quite a bit. His father was a businessman, "something to do with oil, which is how I wound up living two years in the Arab Emirates when I was a kid." Lee's parents divorced when he was 10 and Matt went to live with his mother, a schoolteacher, in Massachusetts. He went on to college at Harvard but after two years, in 1985, decided to drop out and move to New York to work in the soup kitchen of the Catholic Worker.

"I thought I would learn more there. It was a good place to work but they paid you no money. You lived there in a dorm room and they fed you and gave you rolled tobacco, but no money, so when you left you had nothing. That was tough."

In 1987 Lee quit the Catholic Worker and hooked up with the squatters and homesteaders working the burnt-out housing stock of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He also took on day-labor jobs for cash. On one job he was sent to 136th St. in the Bronx and saw the plains of abandoned housing.

Lee: "On the Lower East Side people were fighting like cats and dogs for a dwindling stock of buildings to repair. Then I saw the Bronx and couldn't believe it. There was block after block of empty buildings, and many of them were in decent shape. You'd have a block with three burnt-out buildings and five decent ones that the landlord just walked away from. The boiler broke down and the apartments emptied, and they just put some cinderblocks to block the door and walked away. Some of the buildings were in amazingly good shape."

Lee knew he had found a new frontier. In 1987 he started the Inner City Press?which he still publishes on the Web at innercitypress.com?to get the word out and see if he could attract others who would join him in reclaiming the Bronx's abandoned buildings.

"I published it with photocopies and put it in every check-cashing shop I could find in the city. I had no phone, only a P.O. box, but I got an overwhelming response from people in the Bronx. They were looking to organize, and we held our first meeting in Crotona Park."

Lee was now living as a super in the Bronx. He'd gone from Harvard to Brooklyn Technical High School to get his boiler maintenance certificate.

"That's some story, huh?" he says. "From Harvard to high school. Then the homesteading took off in the Bronx because there was a real need. Two or three families were living together in one apartment and they needed their own place. We built up our first building near Crotona Park East and had 23 families working on it. There were 23 apartments that could be restored."

To keep the building safe, a homeless man named Ali volunteered to live in the building and work as the security guard.

"Ali would sell oils on 125th St. and then come home to the Bronx with his Final Call newspapers and watch the building."

As New York operates, once word got out on Lee's building the city came knocking to evict the homesteaders.

"Right down the hill there were 200 empty apartments and they pick the one building people are trying to rehab. I knew this might happen. I told the people doing the work that the whole thing was a crapshoot. This was the Wild West. It was a desperate move to get housing. They knew we had no real rights to claim the housing but their situations were so bad that people gambled."

When city construction crews showed up, Ali and three families barred them from entering. The cops were called and Capt. Gilroy of the 42nd Pct. told the homesteaders that if they could prove that someone had been living in the building for at least 30 days the cops would not evict them.

"That was where Ali was invaluable," Lee remembers. "He had Final Calls in his apartment going back for months. There is no law about the 30 days but the cops were using common sense. They knew the deal."

The construction crew was sent away, but the city took Lee and his homesteaders to housing court. There Bronx Legal Aid defended them and they were able to hold the city off for a while.

By 1990 Inner City Press had sponsored 12 apartment buildings in the Bronx that were built up by homesteaders. "We should have known that this couldn't go on forever," says Lee. "The Bronx is off the city's map, but not that far off. Once they knew we had 12 buildings they sent out a series of city agencies to stop us."

What the city did was declare the buildings unsafe, which meant eviction could be immediate. "The city bypassed housing court and wrote vacate orders even before they inspected them," Lee tells me. "Once a building is declared unsafe they can get you out very fast."

Lee took the city to court, but before a restraining order could be signed the city was ripping down two of the buildings.

"We sued them in civil court over the loss of personal property that was in those buildings. People had tv's, clothes and radios. The civil suit stopped them from destroying more houses."

Lee and his band of poverty lawyers fought the city by researching the city's plan for the buildings. They were able to prove that the Long Island developer who was going to get the contract to rehab the buildings had scores of safety violations against his company.

"During a hearing I unrolled that old computer paper of all their violations. It was huge," said Lee.

Inner City Press and the city finally worked out a deal so that the homesteaders were not evicted but relocated. "I have to tip my hat to them. They did find housing for the homesteaders. Decent housing, too. But most of the homesteaders missed the old buildings because they were like little villages."

Lee's methods of research and resolve impressed enough lawyers that they all told him he should go to law school. Yet there was the small problem of Lee having dropped out of Harvard and never graduating from college. But he found a loophole?as he would. The combination of his college classes and life experience was enough for Fordham Law to give him a shot. He attended from 1992 to 1996 and passed the bar on his first try.

Through his research Lee found the answer to why the Bronx had had so many abandoned buildings: "We looked back in the public records and saw all the canceled mortgages in the Bronx. No one in the Bronx could get a loan. The banks and insurance companies literally drew a red line around most of the Bronx and said they would not deal or do any business with the people that lived in this area. If you can't get a loan for housing, that is the death knell of a neighborhood."

In 1996, armed with his law degree, Lee began fighting banks. He used a very simple law passed in 1977 called the Community Reinvestment Act: "The law simply states that banks have a duty to serve the banking needs of the whole community. I was able to use it because whenever a bank merges, the bank's former record of redlining can be used against them and a public hearing can be demanded."

The one thing the banking industry did not want was public exposure. Inner City Press was able to cut deals for four new banks to open in the Bronx with each bank to lend $15 million to the people in the community. News got out on Lee's banking successes and now he is representing community groups in 28 states.

For a community activist Lee is refreshingly free of political ideology. He cares more about results than ideas. He's like an old-fashioned Social Democrat: homes for those willing to work hard, a decent wage for a good job done and banks that will give people a fair shake.

I asked Lee what the hardest part of running a law firm/community outreach/newsletter in the Bronx was. He laughed and said, "I don't want to sound like some yuppie, but did you know there is not one FedEx outpost in all the Bronx? There also isn't anywhere to make copies. We need a Kinko's. The only place to make copies is the little place on Kingsbridge Rd. that does them for a quarter. It's hard to do arcane banking law when you don't have resources.

"But I love the Bronx. It is much maligned but there is a lot of good in it. There's innovation here. This place grabbed me and I felt like it was worth fighting for. There is a higher integrity quotient here than in Manhattan."

[sullivan@nypress.com](mailto:sullivan@nypress.com)