Per the Facebook invite:
SHAOUL AND HIS REAL ESTATE COMPANY HAVE BEEN AN EVIL CORPORATE REAL ESTATE WRECKING AND GENTRIFICATION CREW IN THE EAST VILLAGE. THE WORST OF THE WORST !!!!
While Shaoul has been a widely criticized developer in the East Village for years, the recent revelations about actor-poet-writer Taylor Mead's living conditions were the impetus for this event.
Articles in The Villager and the Post and at BoweryBoogie have outlined the 88 year old's current living conditions while the Shaoul-owned building on Ludlow undergoes a gut renovation. (Mead, a former Andy Warhol star, had lived in the rent-stabilized apartment for 34 years and didn't want to leave.) According to the account in the Post, "Plaster falls from his walls and roaches crawl up his legs. The kitchen sink doesn’t work."
"It’s going to kill him,” said Clayton Patterson, a neighborhood activist and longtime friend. “This is elderly abuse. It’s pretty Third World when you think about it."
As Curbed put this particular episode, Shaoul is "up to his old tricks. Or, more specifically, his old trick — forcing stubborn, rent-stabilized tenants out of the apartments he owns by having their buildings demolished around them."
Penley had this to say to us via a message on Facebook:
"I am demanding at the protest that he give Taylor a renovated ground-floor apartment in Taylor's building rent free for the rest of his life and provide Taylor with home-care assistance. He just made so much cash speculating and flipping buildings on the LES that doing something humane like I suggest he do would be a very small gesture."
Shaoul has recently sold large parcels of his East Village buildings to developer Jared Kushner. Shaoul is currently converting the former Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on Avenue B and East Fifth Street into residences.
Penley recently held a campout to call on NYU to help house the homeless.