Mother Rapers, Father Stabbers, Father Rapers, Real Estate Developers

And in other news, punx not dead, it just evolved into convoluted arguments against people who rehab buildings:

“I am not scum!” exclaims Michael Rosen, a onetime developer and member of the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning task force, who is also the owner of a penthouse at the luxurious Christadora House. It’s a hot July evening, and Rosen is holding a one-man counterprotest outside the home of one of his main detractors, a crusty squatters’-rights activist named Jerry “the Peddler” Wade. “I am not scum, and my children are not scum!” he tells Wade in an outburst provoked by a month of name-calling.

Wade and his fellow neighborhood agitators have been leading boisterous anti-gentrification marches all summer. But no matter what they’re screaming about on any given day — and they do like to scream — all roads eventually lead to Rosen. The marches regularly conclude in front of the Christadora, where they sing their anthem, “Die Yuppie Scum!”, and they’ve taken to calling out Rosen by name, raising questions about his influence in neighborhood politics.

“I really don’t think real estate developers need to be on rezoning plans for communities,” says John Penley, a self-described “slacktivist” who has organized several of the marches. Penley and pals argue that Rosen’s role in creating the rezoning plan — which is meant to protect the neighborhood from aggressive developers — is hypocritical because Rosen lives at the Christadora, one of the first symbols of gentrification here in the late 1980s, and is the developer of Red Square, another luxury-condo building and commercial space built in 1989.

However, Rosen is far from your stereotypical developer. He is a curious study in contradictions that reflect the cliquey politics of the neighborhood. He’s a wealthy man who lives in a luxury building and spent a couple of years buying up East Village properties, but he is also a respected community activist, a former professor of radical sociology, the father of seven adopted children, and a friend to local radicals like Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Although Rosen has gained supporters through his work to save the old P.S. 64 building from demolition, critics have pointed out that part of his passion stemmed from a desire to protect the view from his penthouse apartment next door. Rosen is known as a big promoter of local business; his four-year-old nonprofit organization, the East Village Community Coalition, recently launched a campaign to discourage national chain stores from moving into the area. But he also profits from Red Square’s chain-store tenants.

Some locals are annoyed by these contradictory messages. “Michael Rosen needs to decide if he is a benevolent community person or a real-estate developer,” says Penley.