In 2000, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a powerful national community organization, showed a hundred or so tenants in El Barrio the benefits of direct action to avoid being evicted from their apartments.

For months, groups of the tenants took part in protest actions, sought support from politicians, and pressured the federal government so that they would not lose their homes.

Thanks to this fight, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), instead of evacuating the four dilapidated buildings, repaired them and took over their management until they were bought by ACORN, the nonprofit association which fought alongside the tenants, in December, 2004.

Nevertheless, since that time, the residents of Pleasant East have had bitter confrontations with ACORN. The neighbors, for the most part low-income and Hispanic, complain that ACORN has cut security and maintenance services in half, and adopted the tactics more typical of a for-profit organization.

The neighbors believe that ACORN used their cause to gain control of four buildings in one of the parts of the city that is most desirable to real estate interests.

“We feel like we’ve been manipulated, but we didn’t used to feel this way; we were loyal to the organization and spoke well of ACORN to others,” said Carmen Pichardo, president of the Pleasant East Tenants Association.

ACORN’s role in the Pleasant East campaign was fundamental in acquiring the building in 2000, in the face of dozens of private promoters.

In the case of Pleasant East, HUD brought to bear an old formula: to sell the buildings, with the city’s help, at minimal cost to a non-profit organization that can count on the support of a strong neighborhood association. ACORN paid $17 million for the apartment houses, but the sales contract stipulates that for 20 years the tenants must be people who earn less than $54,000 per year.

“They got a bargain,” says ex-Assemblyman Nelson Denis, who fought alongside the tenants in 2000.

A recent study by the real estate consultants Miller Samuel Inc. states that the cost of apartments above 96th Street has risen by 334 percent during the past decade.

Although the tenants and ACORN have met on three occasions during the past three months, they have not been able to reach an agreement. Questions of economics stand in the way. When HUD took over the buildings, it installed two armed guards in each of them and opened an office for the payment of rents and the management of complaints. After buying the buildings ACORN cut the security squad by half and proposed installing cameras in the hallways. ACORN also closed the management office and turned over the buildings’ management to a Yonkers company, Norwax Associates, claiming that ACORN lacked the funds to budget the old services.

Most of the tenants pay 30 percent of the rent, and the rest is covered by federal subsidies. The amount the tenants must pay varies from $24 to $300 dollars per apartment.

“The former security services cost $1.5 million a year,” explained Peter Santiago, political director of ACORN in the Bronx and Manhattan and the former organizer of the Pleasant East campaign. “HUD has got billions to work with, but we don’t.”

The tenants and some local politicians believe that ACORN is compromising its principles in moving from organizing tenants to being a landlord. The ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) owns 500 apartments in New York City.

One of the questions that faces ACORN and the tenants of Pleasant East is the future of the vacant apartments in their buildings. Pleasant East consists of 111 apartments divided between two blocks on East 117th Street and another two blocks on East 119th Street. Of these, 25 are empty.

The tenants think that the apartments should be for their relatives or residents of El Barrio, but ACORN has so far not explained what its criteria for renting them will be. Some of its apartments in the Bronx have been rented to ACORN volunteers.

Santiago promised that the 25 vacant apartments in Pleasant East will be used for the present to house current tenants while repairs are made to their buildings beginning next month.

ACORN’s political director added that in other areas of the city “there is a list, and we are calling people on that list,” but he claimed not to know what the applicable criteria are, since these are set by the organization’s Housing Division. Two calls to Ismene Speliotis, who is in charge of ACORN Housing, were not returned.

At least five Pleasant East tenants claimed in interviews that Santiago, while he was an organizer at Pleasant East from 1999 to 2002, promised them apartments in association buildings for themselves or their relatives, if they became members of ACORN and paid the annual dues.

They all paid annual dues of $60 during one or two years. Sometimes, relatives who lived with them did the same.

One of these tenants, Gloria Irizarry, 43, who lives on a disability pension of $600 a month, said she became a member of ACORN in 2000 and did volunteer work with the organization until December of 2004, occasionally putting in 12-hour days. Among her assignments were recruiting new members door to door, passing out the organization’s leaflets, and participating in its demonstrations.

Irizarry, who lives on 119th Street, stated that she took part in more than 10 ACORN demonstrations, partly because Santiago promised her an apartment for her daughter, a promise that evaporated when ACORN bought the buildings. “One day I asked him, ‘When does my daughter get the apartment?’ And he told me, ‘No, she’s got to pay dues and join in with us to get it.’ ‘But, what more do you want of me, that I go to work?’ I said to him.”

The president of the Pleasant East Tenants Association claimed that Santiago also made promises to friends of his who did not live in El Barrio: “He said they were going to grow fast in El Barrio.”

Santiago denied these charges in a telephone interview, “because I don’t work for ACORN Housing, and they are the only ones who can grant apartments.” He emphasized that his organization always tells its allies “to become members because they want to make positive changes in the community and not because they want to get an apartment.”

Nevertheless, Santiago admitted that support for Pleasant East was conditional on the payment of dues and the tenants’ membership in ACORN.

“Yes, we said that clearly; we’re a membership organization,” stated Santiago, “ and we depend on this money to do our work. Nothing gets done for nothing.”