Chelsea tenant forum sizes up the market

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Jefferson Siegel
Benjamin Dulchin, of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, talks about the threat to tenants posed by landlord harassment at the Hudson Guild Elliott Chelsea Center last Wednesday night.

By Chris Lombardi

Tenant advocate Benjamin Dulchin looked across the room at the Hudson Guild Elliott Chelsea Center and longed openly for the good old days of the Giuliani era.

“It used to be that landlords expected to make a profit. If it wasn’t big enough, the landlord got upset and wouldn’t make repairs, and we’d fight about it,” explained Dulchin. “But now, they don’t expect a profit—but a PROFIT. The people buying these buildings expect to make a tremendous amount of money, like they would in the stock market.”

Dulchin, who is deputy director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), was one of the featured speakers at Chelsea Tenant Action Committee (CTAC)’s annual spring housing forum last Wednesday. The impact of such real estate deals was clear: Vacancy rates for Manhattan apartments hover at fantastically low levels, recent court decisions allow landlords to vacate entire buildings for personal use, and real estate trends have made the purchase of Manhattan real estate a better bet than the stock market, provided the buyer can then empty the building of its rent-regulated tenants. The result, as explored at the forum, was the escalation of aggressive strategies employed by building owners, from “phony demolitions” to repeated spurious lawsuits against tenants.

But Dulchin and other speakers—from Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and the Citizens Committee for New York City as well as CTAC—stressed equally that even these new tactics aren’t infallible, and that if tenants are willing to put in the hard work of organizing, they can get results. They also stressed that at this vulnerable time, with New York State’s rent-stabilization law set to expire this June (and come up for renewal thereafter), the Rent Guidelines Board nearing its decision on this year’s rent increase for rent-stabilized apartments, and new legislation on harassment and illegal hotels in development, there is more need than ever for tenant organizing.

As the evening began, Chelsea Housing Group/Tenant Action Committee founder Rosa Maria de la Torre looked around at the near-empty room in the Elliott Center, populated mostly with familiar faces like celebrity tenant Daniel Peckham, longtime Chelsea activist Gladys Almendros, and other veteran activists and their interns. “In years past,” sighed Torre, “I would estimate that 100 to 150 people would definitely be here for an event like this. But in the current conditions,” she shook her head, “I just don’t know.”

By “the current conditions,” Torre, who has been organizing tenants in Chelsea for more than 20 years, meant New York real estate trends, which advocates said has given buildings owners far more motivation to harass and intimidate tenants. Every year, according to figures from the state’s own Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), 13,000 apartments are removed from rent-stabilization because of “high-rent vacancy decontrol.” That figure has swelled, say Dulchin and Torre, because of aggressive and illegal tactics employed by landlords. “Tenants are so isolated, so discouraged,” added Torre.

In addition to painting a vivid, specific picture of how New York has changed since rent-stabilization began, the April 25 forum outlined the newest strategies being used by landlords, and urged tenants to become involved in preserving a system that currently protects tenants in 1.5 million apartments from being priced out of their homes.

New York State’s first rent laws, passed during World War II, once held more than 2 million apartments under rent control, which prohibits rent increases except when needed to cover repair costs. There are now fewer than 50,000 rent-controlled units, all in buildings constructed before 1947. An additional million-plus units, built later, fall under the rent-stabilization laws introduced in 1969 and allow gradual rent increases only as determined by the state, and guarantee that a tenant has the right to renew her or his lease every year unless they break the terms of the lease. When the rent for such apartments reaches $2,000, those protections may become moot if the household income exceeds $175,000 for two years. If the apartment becomes vacant, the sky’s the limit.

The NYC Housing Vacancy Survey reported that between 2002 and 2005, 44,000 apartments were dropped from rent regulation; last year, more than 13,000 rent-stabilized units left the system. “The long-term trend is toward zero rent-controlled apartments,” says the state’s Rent Guidelines Board on its Website; given the $2,000 cap, some advocates fear a similar fate for rent-stabilization.

Wasim Lone of GOLES, the forum’s first speaker, first offered a snapshot of the changes in the East Village/Lower East Side since 1969. As white urban professionals “discovered” the area, he said, the demographics shifted, until now the Puerto Rican population of the former “Loisaida” has dropped by 70 percent and the African-American population by 20 percent, with significant declines in other immigrant groups.

Meanwhile, Lone added with feeling, “every single rent-regulated tenant I know of is subject to some kind of harassment from a landlord who wants to deregulate the apartment through vacancy decontrol.” One newer tactic, he said, is phony “demolitions,” in which a landlord can merely gut the interior (rather than demolish the entire structure) to empty a building of tenants and rent it anew for whatever the market will bear. Since 1997, he added, it has not been necessary to actually tear the building down; owners just apply to DHCR, with no hearing required.

“While the landlords were before satisfied with one or two apartments, now they’re emptying whole buildings,” said Lone.

The demolition option was made easier just two weeks ago, when the New York State Supreme Court ruled that landlords were free to claim an entire building “for personal use.” Last week, GOLES held a protest at one such building, 47 E. 3rd Street, and got the landlords to “back off”—which was both “good news” and doable, said Lone. In the past year, he added, 12 building owners have withdrawn their applications to have their “demolitions” approved by DHCR, all because tenants banded together, demonstrated and contacted their elected officials and the media.

“Landlords do not want to be exposed,” said Lone. “They want to do these things without anyone noticing.” This fact gives tenants power, he said, if they can organize their buildings, though it may not spare them day-to-day harassment from landlords who would rather see them go.

Harassment, and new legislation to combat it, was the main focus of the talk by ANHD’s Benjamin Dulchin. But first, he reiterated why things are bad for tenants: now people are buying New York City buildings instead of investing in the stock market, while expecting a similar rate of return.

“Say you’re a landlord, and you buy a building for $35 million. But the tenants are rent-stabilized, paying about $700 a month each, which only supports a mortgage of $5 million.” Under such pressure, he said, landlords either buy with the expectation of emptying the building, or otherwise act to maximize their investment. “At the very least, they harass the tenants.”

Dulchin told the forum: “It’s not just about denial of services, which is illegal.” Harassment also includes threats, pressure to accept a buyout, and persistent lawsuits, like the ones experienced by those in February’s Chelsea Now story about illegal hotels. “They just keep suing, until the tenant gets tired or makes a mistake…and agrees to move.”

But harassment is hard to address, according to Dulchin and others. Housing court, the court used most frequently by low-income people, excludes all mention of harassment, while DHCR’s rules tend to minimize individual complaints, demanding evidence of “a pattern or series of actions.” When tenants at 93 Ave. A found a bomb in their foyer last year, Dulchin said, they contacted his agency. “But DHCR said it wasn’t harassment, because it was only one bomb!” he said, to laughter at the forum.

The solution, according to advocates, was simple: Allow the issue of harassment to be raised during housing court proceedings. A bill is currently being developed by ANHD in the wake of their January forum on tenant harassment and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s promise in her February State of the City Speech that such a bill would be passed this year.

Dulchin told Chelsea Now that sometime in the next few weeks, they hope Speaker Quinn will introduce a bill that amends the city housing laws against illegal evictions, to add “harassment,” carefully defined, as an area under the courts’ purview. At the April 25 event, Dulchin urged participants to get their representatives on board with the bill, “because the landlords are fighting back.”

Fighting back was certainly the theme at the forum’s end. Lauren George, community organizer with the Citizens Committee for New York, gave tips on forming your own tenant association, while others lauded the start of the citywide “New York is Our Home” tenants-rights campaign, with a first meeting on May 5 at Middle Collegiate Church and a May 23 kickoff rally at Stuyvesant Town. And all knew that at the same time, in a series of public hearings (mostly at Cooper Union), the Rent Guidelines Board is deciding how much to raise rents next year in stabilized buildings, with a final decision on June 26. By then, if Assembly Democrats have their way, the trigger for apartments to be considered for conversion will be well above $2,000. (“You can’t get a studio in Manhattan for $2,000,” Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told the Journal News, an Upstate newspaper, last week.)

“We have to be involved with these things,” Rosa Maria de la Torre implored the group at closing. “No one ever said it would be easy.”