Brooklyn housing organizer Yolanda Coca, who personally advocated on behalf of hundreds of tenants for nearly 20 years, died Dec. 9 at the age of 60. As an organizer with the Fifth Avenue Committee, the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, and Catholic Migration Services in Bushwick, she often worked 12 to 14 hours a day, juggling hundreds of tenants’ cases, building meetings, and Housing Court appearances.
“It was great to see Yolanda working,” says Aura Mejia, of Neighbors Helping Neighbors, who worked with Coca in the Fifth Avenue Committee’s Anti-Displacement Zone campaign and later succeeded her as the group’s tenant organizer. “She always had a very warm smile, but her character is very strong, and she secured people. The tenants were going through all sorts of problems, and she was backing them up 100 percent, and they were not going to get evicted.”
“She made people see themselves as part of a community,” says Samuel Chiera, an attorney with Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A. “She spoke with a warmth and authority that bound people together and made them see themselves as more than a group of individuals facing hardship, but rather as part of a larger struggle, as a people facing injustice in common.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Coca immigrated to New York in 1981, and soon afterwards moved to Bushwick with her husband and two children. She began her career as a tenant organizer in 1997, as a VISTA volunteer with the Fifth Avenue Committee. She was hired as a full-time staff organizer, and played a key role in deepening the organization’s engagement with the immigrant community in Sunset Park.
In 2004, Coca took a position as housing specialist with the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, a group headed by Monsignor John Powis dedicated to preserving affordable housing in the neighborhood. As gentrification and displacement increased, she represented anyone who walked through her doors, recruited anyone willing to volunteer and help, and invited everyone to her monthly tenant meetings at the St. Joseph Patron Roman Catholic Church, taking time to translate the all-Spanish meetings into English even as she facilitated them. Although Yolanda was very aware of the deep divisions in Bushwick across race, class, and language, she always worked to unify the neighborhood in the fight against landlords and speculators.
“Yolanda was God’s servant first, not an organizer or abstract social-justice champion,” says Brooklyn Legal Services A lawyer Gregory Louis. “She knew that her community had great need. So she went there.”
A devout Catholic, she viewed her work as a tenant organizer as a religious calling. “What permeated everything that she did was her faith,” says Artemio Guerra, her supervisor at the Fifth Avenue Committee. “She would tell me, ‘oh I’m praying for that landlord,’ or ‘I’m praying for those tenants,’ and her faith was very, very important to her. It drove what she did, and that’s why she was invincible. There was no path to defeat there: We were going to win, we were going to prevail.”
Coca also was a core leader in uniting Brooklyn’s tenant-advocacy groups and the campaigns to lower the Rent Guidelines Board’s annual increases—she considered the rent freezes in 2015 and 2016 one of her proudest victories—and to reform Housing Court.
When she advocated for tenants in Brooklyn Housing Court, recalls Adam Meyers of Brooklyn Legal Services A, “though she sometimes presented herself as soft-spoken and polite, Yolanda was always willing to dress down owners without compunction about harassment and necessary repairs. The landlords never knew what hit them.”
“She always had the best smile in Housing Court, while being the most fierce advocate over there,” says former Legal Services attorney Brent Meltzer.
In these campaigns, Yolanda was well known for her ability to mobilize tenants. “Yolanda moved people—in our hearts and in the streets,” wrote Michael Grinthal of MFY Legal Services. At a press conference and rally outside Brooklyn Housing Court one cold morning, he remembers, “just as we were counting heads for the nineteenth time, obsessing over turnout, hesitant to begin, Yolanda marched up around the corner, leading an entire bus’s worth of Bushwick tenants, signs held high and proud, calling for justice. Yolanda marched straight to the center of the milling, disorganized crowd and arrayed her people like a general (or a choir director)—families together, kids in front, signs where they could be seen from the courthouse across the street. The rest of the crowd fell in around them.”
“What I remember from her is that she was just full of happiness. She was so uplifting to people,” says Rolando Guzman of St. Nick’s Alliance in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. On a bus trip to Albany with the Real Rent Reform Campaign, he recalls, “we had to leave at six in the morning, so most people in the bus were all sleepy and tired. Yolanda had a drum and she was chanting and drumming and totally full of energy. She invigorated everyone that early in the morning and people were chanting all the way to Albany.”
“I think it’s her dedication that really stands out to me the most,” says former RGB tenant representative Ronald Languedoc, now with the Himmelstein, McConnell law firm. “She just did everything she could possibly do to help people. I’ve met a lot of great tenant organizers, but she was certainly one of the best.”
She is survived by her husband, Nonito Coca, and two children, Erys and Erica.