By Monika Plocienniczak

When Zbigniew Karpowicz, 54, walked into Jacek Bikowski’s Huron Street office recently, he appeared shocked that he had come across someone willing to hear his story. Like many Polish immigrants in Greenpoint, Karpowicz said he had dealt with his housing problems on his own for years—with little success.

The longtime Brooklyn resident told Bikowski, a housing advocate, he received an eviction notice from his landlord after he spoke up about the older parts of his three-story home: an old, unsafe balustrade and chipping paint.

“The landlord is screaming at me to move out,” Karpowicz said in Polish. “He is a hard man, I do not know what to do in such a short period of time. I have a child in school.”

Bikowski listened intently and nodded often. He has heard this many times before.
Over the past decade, Bikowski has established himself as the chief go-to person for the countless Polish immigrants in Greenpoint mired in housing woes.

Bikowski is the only Polish-speaking advocate for immigrant housing rights in Greenpoint. He works for the North Brooklyn Development Corporation, a non-profit that seeks to promote neighborhood stability and build affordable housing in the area.
“Things were quiet in the community 20 years back,” Bikowski said. “Today it’s mayhem out there.”

Like many working-class neighborhoods in New York City, Greenpoint faces a severe, low-income housing shortage. This is in part due to sluggish rates of housing production, increasing immigration from Manhattan and a growing immigrant population.

The area’s housing shortage is leading to rising housing costs and an affordability crisis for the district’s low and moderate income households. In Greenpoint, rents are already higher than what most households can afford. Over the last 10 years, Greenpoint lost 5,500 rental units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Bikowski is used to being swarmed by dozens of non-English-speakers, each with a different story. They seek his expertise on what to do when landlords threaten to evict them, or when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents come knocking on their door.

“I’ve seen a lot of people that have been harassed, just recently,” Bikowski said. “Fifteen years ago [a landlord-tenant harassment case] was a rare thing to happen.”

In the past five years, he said he’s seen a 50 percent increase in Polish immigrants seeking his help. Bikowski has heard everything: from landlords threatening deportation to landlords cutting off telephone lines and throwing tenants’ personal belongs out on the street.

“I guess the economic gain that the landlord achieves from evicting people in a short period of time is big,” said Bikowski.

After the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning in May of 2005, Bikowski saw rent jump by 70 percent.

“You can imagine the pressure the landlord had to put on a tenant, who was paying $800 as market rent, five years ago,” said Bikowski. “Today, the landlord weighs the possibility of someone who is willing to pay $1,500. He puts unnecessary pressure on the low-income, and the low-rent paying.”

Bikowski said that 30 percent of rental housing units are unregulated and therefore vulnerable to rising rents.

Karpowicz’s plight is typical.

He said his landlord raised his rent to $1,000 a month and ordered him and his family to move out at the end of October. Karpowicz’s landlord could not be reached for comment.

Karpowicz was advised to hire a lawyer to postpone his move-out date. Bikowski was willing to work with Karpowicz to find him the help he needed, but most Polish immigrants “are too afraid to go to court or any higher authority,” Bikowski said.

Karpowicz, like many working-class, Polish immigrants, plans to move to the Maspeth or Ridgewood neighborhoods. Some even move out of state to locations including Pennsylvania because housing is more affordable than Greenpoint.

Michael Ellick, a member of the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of houses of worship that shelters immigrants in danger of deportation, said the problem of sustaining affordable housing for Polish immigrants is pervasive.

“The nature of these stories is not talked about,” said Ellick, an associate minister at the Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square Park.

“So many of [these conflicts] are dealt with underground. [The landlords] make caricatures out of these immigrants.”