"We Lived as Do Spouses": AIDS, Neoliberalism, and Family-Based Apartment Succession Rights in 1980s New York City

Abstract

O n 31 O c t O b e r 1989 , members of the Housing Committee of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power/New York (ACT UP/NY), dressed as witches and ghouls, led a Halloween-themed protest in front of the Trump Tower. In addition to candy and condoms, the protesters offered a message for the City of New York: Do not give Donald Trump a forty-year tax abatement to develop the Grand Hyatt while thousands of people with HIV/AIDS sleep on the streets. The protesters explained that a previous tax abatement to build the Trump Tower cost the city $6,208,773—money that could have rehabilitated approximately 1,200 city-owned apartments (fig. 1). “Instead,” a flyer explained, “the apartments remain vacant. And sick people [with AIDS] remain on the streets.” At the time, the city offered a mere forty-four beds through an institution called Bailey House for “people who [were] too sick for the shelters but too healthy for a hospital.” The small fortune the city kicked back to Trump, AIDS activists insisted, should be, in their words, going to “housing for people with AIDS, not condos for people with maids.”1 In that year alone, ACT UP and the Partnership for the Homeless estimated, there were more than ten thousand people with HIV/AIDS who were unhoused in New York City.2 Scholarship on the AIDS epidemic routinely focuses on very public grassroots activism—like that in front of the Trump Tower—and often frames it in opposition to the state. The battle for housing rights and care that erupted in 1980s New York City, however, defies these assumptions. The Halloween protest of 1989 garnered headlines for a day, but AIDS