By Nora Bosworth

“Ken told me that he has not seen a room this crowded since the anti-war debates of the sixties,” announced Jason Haber, Chair of Community Free Democrats, who co-sponsored the democratic mayoral debate on Thursday night.
Ken Sherrill, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Hunter College, moderated the panel of five candidates: Sal Albanese, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and former Comptroller Bill Thompson.

Photo by Steven Barall

The event filled the Goddard Side Community Center to its capacity, with an estimated 300 to 350 people, according to Joan Paylo, District Leader of the 69th Assembly District, Part B.
There were “huge numbers of people turned away,” she added. Many attributed the debate’s great turnout to the Upper West Side’s history of passionate advocacy and political awareness.

“The Upper West Side has a long and proud tradition of progressive activism,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal. “This district more than any other, I believe, is the embodiment of democratic values.”
Rosenthal added that her district always votes “in droves.”
Excitement reverberated throughout the Community Center as hundreds of local New Yorkers waited to hear the mayoral candidates address issues close to the residents’ hearts. Topics ranged from proper budgeting, to which Bloomberg policies the candidates would change first, to which borough the potential mayors know best. (Albanese, de Blasio, and Thompson said Brooklyn; Liu said Queens and Quinn said Manhattan).

After a series of playful questions, (when was the last time the candidates paid rent, and how much did they pay?), shouted an audience member: “Let’s ask some real questions!”

Quickly, the conversation turned to housing.

“Can you represent the interests of tenants when you take money from developers?” came the next question.

Applause erupted throughout the room.

Liu reminded everyone that the question did not apply to him, saying, “Sal and I are the only ones who do not accept contributions from people who do business with city.”

Albanese came out more aggressively, per usual, against his opponents.

“If you think [accepting contributions] has no influence, I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge,” he growled. He added that he alone would not be “wearing handcuffs” if elected mayor.

Thompson said his actions spoke louder than any accepted donations. He spoke to his years as comptroller, in which time he brought a spotlight to the failings of the Mitchell-Lama programs, which provides affordable middle-income housing.

“We worked to make sure people weren’t pushed out of Mitchell-Lama,” he said.

Quinn touted her record as Council Speaker, saying, “I can tell tenants I can deliver as mayor, because I’ve delivered as speaker.”

She cited her passing of the Safe Housing Act, which gives the city power to repair New York’s worst buildings, and then bill the landlords for the work. She also praised the Tenant Protection Act that she passed, the first law the city has seen that grants tenants the right to sue landlords over harassment.

“The law was so good it was sued by the landlord lobby,” she said, half-joking.

De Basio came out strongest against private developers.

“The real estate industry thinks it has tremendous power in the election and has played favorites over the years,” he said. He lauded one of his creations as Public Advocate, The Worst Landlords Watchlist, an online tool that reports and allows one to research the landlords with the most violations in the city. De Blasio said the webpage has helped “thousands and thousands of tenants,” and gotten some buildings “out of private hands and into non-profit hands.”

“That’s the kind of leadership I believe in,” he declared.

But perhaps the most fiery housing issue discussed was the New York City Housing Authority’s plans for building market-price condominiums on public housing project land. The Upper West Side’s Frederick Douglass housing would be particularly affected if the plans are realized; the Authority intends to erect four new buildings in that area alone.

The Housing Authority states that by leasing such prized land to private developers, some fourteen parcels in eight different public housing units, they could pay for the thousands of repairs needed throughout the various projects. The deal would grant the private developers access to the land for 99 years.

Among the many concerns voiced by the community and their mayoral candidates was a pervasive skepticism that the Authority is hurting as badly financially as they claim. Adding to this doubt was last year’s discovery that the organization was sitting on almost one billion dollars while petitioning the government for more funding.

In light of this scandal, their upcoming project, widely known as the “infill plan”, has encountered harsh criticism.

“NYCHA was sitting on a billion dollars of capital funds,” said Liu. “Now they’re claiming poverty, that they need a revenue stream; they shouldn’t keep piles of money lying around under the proverbial mattress while they go out and ask citizens to pay more.”

De Blasio, on the other hand, does not doubt that NYCHA is suffering economically. (In his testimony to the New York State Assembly this month, NYCHA Chairman John B. Rhea announced that the organization is currently stuck with “6 billion dollars in unmet capital needs.”)

Nonetheless, De Blasio stated that the proposal “can’t be trusted,” and that “people worried about losing housing have every reason to be worried.”

“Let’s call this for what it is,” said Thompson, echoing his opponents’ views. “A sham.”

Quinn also voiced her agreement, calling the auctioning off of Housing Authority property to the highest bidder “a terrible idea.”

“Stop this proposal and stop it right now,” Quinn exclaimed, “because we will never get that land back!”

The agency plans to sign with developers by November 2014, according to a recently released report.

Based on the Upper West Side’s history of activism, however, it’s safe to say there is more resistance to come.

LES Residents Sue City Over Carrying Charges
Masaryk Towers, a Lower East Side co-op, offer hundreds of New Yorkers affordable housing in its six high-rises. All of its residents are low- to middle-income, and almost half of them are senior citizens. So it came as a shock to many when the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) raised the building’s carrying charges by 11 percent in March 2011, and then 15 months later by an additional 18 percent. New York housing law states that there must be a two-year gap between increases in carrying charges.

According to the Urban Justice Center, nearly 200 residents have now filed a suit against the HPD, saying that not only was the hike illegal, but it occurred without notifying residents or allowing them to partake in a public hearing, to which they have a legal right.

“Masaryk Towers is supposed to be affordable housing. If HPD won’t follow its own laws, what protections do residents have against arbitrary increases?” resident Maria Muentes said in a statement. Under the announced hikes, shareholders of two-bedroom apartments will have to pay $150 more a month, on top of last year’s 11 percent increase.
Attorneys from the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project filed the suit last week in the Manhattan Supreme Court, aided by housing advocates from the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES). GOLES is a local housing and preservation organization founded in 1977. Members of the Community Development Project (CDP) have come out strongly in defense of the residents.

“The Mitchell-Lama corporation flagrantly violated the city’s rules that are supposed to protect certain due process rights,” said Shafaq Islam, a member of the CDP. Shareholders explained in a statement that such hikes were particularly unwelcome amid a recession.

Report on MTA Shows Tough Fare Hikes Planned
The New York State comptroller released a report last week showing that while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s finances are in better shape than they were two years ago, there’s still a long way to go; unfortunately, the MTA’s prospective path to fiscal sustainability will include more fare hikes. In 2010, fares went up by 7.5 percent. The report announced that over the next three years, fares are expected to increase by 14 percent. That means MetroCard prices will reportedly rise at three times the rate of inflation.

The first increase is planned for March of next year, and is expected to bring in an additional $450 million a year. But just to keep the transit system in safe condition, the MTA will need to raise an estimated minimum of $20 billion between 2015 and 2019, the report detailed.

The transit authority will also be cutting expenses by charging one dollar for each new MetroCard, which they hope will be an incentive to refill used cards and waste less material. While the report suggests that the MTA’s budget may require such hikes, it seems many New Yorkers will soon be tightening their own wallets to adapt to the higher costs.

City Celebrates Warship
On Saturday, Oct. 6, the USS Michael Murphy became the Navy’s newest commissioned warship, and the occasion was marked with a week of celebrations including parachute jumps over the Hudson River, cannon salutes at Pier 88 and bell ringing at the New York Stock Exchange.

According to the commissioning committee’s website, the festivities bring the ship to life and mark the entrance of a new man-of-war into the nation’s naval forces.

The name of the warship honors a Navy SEAL who died in 2005 while serving in Afghanistan. Murphy, the first winner of the Medal of Honor for the war in Afghanistan, was shot while trying to transmit a call for help. The crew of the newly launched guided missile destroyer paid respects on Oct. 2 by visiting commemorative sites in Smithtown, Murphy’s hometown.

Murphy is also honored with the name of a park and post office on Long Island, a combat training pool in Newport and a veterans’ plaza at Penn State University, his alma mater.

Redistricting Could Divide Minority Communities
By Nick Powell for City and State
A controversial proposal to redraw New York City Council district lines could violate the city charter and split African-American and Latino communities, critics say.

Community Voices Heard—an organization that advocates for low-income New Yorkers—warned that the proposed redistricting map would create smaller council districts in the Bronx and Queens in favor of larger ones in Manhattan and possibly disenfranchise some voting blocs, such as East Harlem. Under the proposal, East Harlem would be divided roughly in half, with part of it falling in Council District 8, and part in Council District 9.

“When you look at communities of interest and keeping the Latino vote together and the African-American vote together, it seems like the Latino vote here, while on paper it would hit the 50 percent-plus-one mark that meets the Department of Justice standards, it would break up the community in East Harlem,” the organization said in a statement.
Hearings will be held all month, allowing the public to comment on the proposed changes, followed by an up-or-down vote by the City Council in November. If approved, the maps will first be used in the 2013 citywide elections, when many council seats will be up for grabs because of term limits.

Mark Danna shows off the construction thats been going on outside his apartment at 315 W. 103rd Street for years.

SOME OF THE CITY’S WORST REPEAT OFFENDERS

Historically speaking, New York City has come a long way from the days of dangerous, overcrowded and patently unsafe residential buildings that used to mark the landscape of Manhattan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are dozens of agencies and offices in place to make sure building owners and landlords are held accountable for keeping tenants protected. But what happens when certain buildings don’t rise to the level of emergency status and evade the various safeguards that the city has in place? How do buildings fall through the cracks?

Residents of 315 W. 103rd St. have been asking those questions for years, and have received only dispiriting and slow answers. The current tenants of the building have been suffering through a renovation project that began in 2009, when the owner of the building filed a statement asserting that the building was vacant. That turned out to be completely false—several residents were living in the building with no intention of moving—and the building has become a battle zone between the outraged tenants and irritated neighbors and the owner who continues to push ahead with construction, despite numerous violations and stop-work orders from the Department of Buildings (DOB). The owner, Jacob Avid, has attempted to expand and update the brownstone building, but now the construction project languishes in the midst of its latest stop-work order, issued in August for excavation work in the rear of the property that isn’t supposed to take place while people are living in the building.

Nadine Herman, who lives in the front of the building and has been treated to views of decrepit scaffolding and a dead tree outside her window for years now, said that despite the intervention of elected officials and the DOB, the situation has barely improved.

“When you walk down the block and you see this eyesore, you can’t believe it,” Herman said. “The DOB is still trying to help. Why haven’t they said, enough is enough, and it’s time for a restore order to be put in place?”

Many tenants in similar situations want to know why the city can’t simply make a property owner put things back the way they were before illegal construction took place.
The DOB has recourse to deal with owners and contractors who flout the law, but it’s not a straightforward or quick process.

“A property owner is responsible to maintain his or her property in a safe and lawful manner at all times; that includes work being done on the property,” said DOB Associate Commissioner of Communications and Public Affairs Tony Sclafani. “If work is being done illegally in any way, the DOB issues violations, stop work orders and even criminal court summons to hold the owner accountable. But the owner has the right to contest those violations in court.”

In other words, an illegal addition, for example, can be slapped with numerous fines and violations, but it’s not easy to undo the problem once it’s there.

The city does have ways of escalating fines for repeat offenders, but even that isn’t always enough to deter owners who continually allow unlawful work on their properties.
On the Upper East Side, one notorious example is 1374 York Ave., also known as the MacDougal Street Synagogue Hotel. It’s been a target of the city’s crackdown on illegal hotels, but it’s also been a target for DOB violations, receiving a total of 33 Environmental Control Board (ECB) violations since 2000, 20 of which have been Class 1, or “immediately hazardous.” But once each violation is resolved, the DOB can’t do much to prevent them from recurring except threaten to find new violations and impose more fines, which can escalate to $25,000, as well as the criminal court summons, which results in a misdemeanor with fines and possible jail time.

Some elected officials have called for more cooperation and transparency between various city agencies and the public to ensure that owners who repeatedly rack up violations appear more frequently on the radars of enforcement agencies.

“The City relies on self-certified Certificates of Correction as testament that a violation—a potential public safety hazard—is remedied,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, whose office has gotten involved with several problem buildings including 315 W. 103rd St. “The public needs to have the utmost confidence in the veracity of these self-certified Certificates of Corrections that DOB accepts and must be assured that any building owner charged with submitting fraudulent claims in these documents will be exposed and punished.”

The DOB does allow architects and engineers to professionally certify their own work, and routinely audits a percentage of those certifications to make sure they’re following guidelines. In 2007, the DOB gained the ability to suspend or ban an architect’s ability to submit self-certified building plans with the city, a penalty that severely impacts their business. Since then, at least 24 architects and engineers have been banned, and their names are listed on the DOB website. Stringer wants the DOB to go one step further, however, and make the self-certification audits available to the public, which he said would further increase accountability.

Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell, whose district encompasses the 103rd Street debacle as well as a building on Central Park West that has been creating problems for the past seven years, agreed that something needs to change with the city processes, and he’s in favor of drastic measures.

“In the case of 103rd Street, what do you do to someone who files a false instrument, which is a crime, that says the building’s vacant when it’s not? What are the ramifications for that person?” O’Donnell said. “Apparently, according to Mayor Mike’s vision for the city, there are none.”

O’Donnell said that he has written countless letters and even met with the DOB commissioner to discuss that address, and he’s baffled as to why nothing has been done. His office has also dealt repeatedly with 465 Central Park West, a property that has been issued 86 ECB violations and has had an illegally built chimney blowing smoke into the neighboring building for years.

O’Donnell believes that there’s a lack of efficiency and ability to share information within agencies charged with protecting tenants. Upper West Side Council Member Gale Brewer also deals continually with problematic buildings and also said that information sharing is a critical missing piece of the puzzle.

“It’s very dependent on the residents, who have to be so attuned to calling 311, the case number, the follow-up, and then the problem comes back,” Brewer said.

“The agencies don’t coordinate. I have to call DEP, then I have to call HPD, then DOB, then the Fire Department. They don’t have any way of talking amongst themselves,” said Brewer. She has suggested that a massive technology upgrade is in order so that agencies can share databases and information while their inspectors are out in the field, but that’s a move that would require new city laws as well as room in a tight budget.

“On the subways, if you see something, you’re supposed to say something, but that doesn’t seem to apply to city agencies,” she said.

The DOB, for its part, sends out its 300 inspectors on hundreds of thousands of cases each year. In 2011, DOB inspectors conducted 293,000 inspections and issued 56,472 violations, including 5,189 stop-work orders. But in between every inspection is an opportunity for an owner looking to skirt the law.

“It’s a mess that I’m living in, and I never know what I’m going to come home to find. It’s very stressful,” Herman said about the state of her building, even after the intervention of elected officials and the attention of the whole neighborhood. “Basically everything is the same. We’re back to where we were years ago.”

By Megan Bungeroth
Additional reporting by John Friia

Perhaps it’s a sign of relative austerity that New York City’s current most expensive rental listing, a title newly bestowed on an Upper East Side mansion, is actually being offered at a substantial discount—though it’s not exactly a steal at $150,000 per month.

Only a handful of rental listings at any given time rise past the $100,000 mark in the city, and several of them can be found on the Upper East Side, where townhouses and penthouses regularly sell for tens of millions. The Woolworth Mansion, at 4 East 80th Street, made real-estate and price-shocker headlines last week when it was yanked from the sale market and made available for rent. It had originally been listed for sale at $90 million, a record itself, and is now available for a two-year lease term (that’s $3.6 million for those two years, in case you’re counting).

Potential renters would certainly get a lot for their money. The mansion boasts an impressive array of features and has been meticulously restored and decorated in opulent prewar style (it comes furnished or unfurnished). Designed by famed Beaux Arts architect Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, who is known for his townhouses and mansions throughout the city, it was commissioned by Frank Woolworth and is actually the middle one of three adjacent homes that he had built for his three beloved daughters in 1915.
The mansion is 35 feet wide, which is unusual even by luxe Upper East Side townhouse standards. There is a roof garden, a dining room that seats 50, staff quarters, office space, a gym, and 20 rooms on seven floors, covering over 18,000 square feet.

The current owners inherited the massive home from ladies’ fitness mogul Lucille Roberts, who purchased it for $6 million in 1996, and it’s been listed for sale and for rent (previously at a shockingly high $210,000 and then at $165,000 before being placed back on the sale market) several times over the years.

Brown Harris Stevens broker Paula Del Nunzio declined to comment for this story, but hinted at the reason for the extraordinary price in the company’s promotional material for the property.

“While the other great mansions that have come on the market in New York have been shells requiring total renovation, this is the only mansion to be formally available for rent that has been fully renovated in a traditional prewar style,” Del Nunzio said.

But beyond the live-in art museum feel with the hefty rent statement, practical and financial concerns are usually what motivates high-end renters, according to Gary Malin, the president of Citi Habitats.

“There’s always been high-end rental properties; the prices have escalated over the years as the world has escalated over the years. There’s always a market for those properties, although they may take some time to rent,” Malin said. “You don’t have all the headache of the maintenance of it and all that comes with buying; you want to deploy your capital elsewhere.”
Malin said that as unfathomable as it may be for the average citizen, these super-expensive rentals make sense for people with high net worth. Someone in that market will often own several homes around the world, he said, so the prospect of purchasing another—with the requisite taxes, large mortgage, legal fees, upkeep, renovation costs, staffing, insurance and responsibility for yet another property—isn’t as appealing as signing a lease and moving right in. He also pointed out that people who are able to write a check for over $100,000 every month usually spend much more than that on other things, like summer homes and vacations, every year.

“In a city like Manhattan, this is the type of clientele that gets attracted to property like this,” Malin said. “If you’re willing to spend $200,000 a month to live in the Hamptons for three months, $100,000 for 12 months in Manhattan doesn’t sound so bad. It’s very stress-free, comparatively speaking.”

Those shopping in the $100K-plus range have options if they’re not inclined to inhabit a gigantic mansion. The property that previously held the highest monthly rate title is quite different in obvious ways—square footage, type of residence, location, architectural style—from the Woolworth Mansion, though the spare-no-expense restoration and design is the same.

The Astor Suite at the Plaza is now listed for $125,000 with a minimum term of one year, and a few months ago held the high-price crown at $165,000. Dina Lewis, one of the listing agents of the property for Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that the nearly 25 percent price drop was just a reflection of the market.

“We want to find the right person for this, so dropping the price is fine,” Lewis said. “So many people want to rent it for a week here, a month there. At a property at this level of furnish and finish, we wouldn’t want to anyway.”

The suite at the coveted 768 Fifth Avenue address is considerably smaller than the Woolworth Mansion—5,087 square feet, making it 72 percent smaller—but it has some unique features of its own, starting with past inhabitants. It’s named for onetime resident John Jacob Astor and was later occupied by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the recent redesign was deployed by the artisan who rebuilt parts of Windsor Castle after a fire in 1992) and John F. Kennedy.

“It’s pretty spectacular,” said Lewis. “They went around the world literally searching for pieces to bring back to this space. Every single detail, every inch of it, has been thought out and beautifully redone.” The old-world touches—like hand-hammered leather walls from France—combined with the technology-enabled HVAC system, controllable with an iPad, and the location right across from Central Park in the historic hotel all account for the price, she said.

Brokers accustomed to listings in this stratosphere say that price is rarely a factor, however, for renters and for owners, which is why these kinds of properties sometimes go back and forth on the sales and rental markets.

“Owners of high-end properties are not cash strapped, so if they do not get their sale price, they try to rent it, since renting has a number of tax advantages,” said Astrid Pillay, a broker with Halstead Property who has several Upper East Side townhouses listed at over $60,000 a month. “Short-term high-end is also extremely rare and price is not an issue here, since most buildings do not allow short-term rentals.”

Even with price not an issue, who’s renting these types of places? Brokers say that high-end renters are usually either testing the waters of New York or waiting out a renovation on another pricey property.

“The renters of high-end properties are either executives relocating to New York who are not yet ready to jump into the market with such astronomical price tags or they have already bought high-end properties and need the space while renovating,” Pillay said.

Lewis said the same thing of people who have considered the Astor Suite; even the uber-rich are cautious in this market.

“We also have people who are not interested in buying in this market but want to have a place to stay here,” she said. “Not everybody’s looking to commit to a purchase right now.”

Riverside Center South, a project of Extell Development Co., is the planned residential and commercial community that is slated to begin construction this year on a 77-acre site along the Hudson River between West 59th and 72nd streets.

When Extell came to the Community Board in 2010 with initial plans, a move triggered by the Uniform Land Use Review Process, the community demanded several changes. One of the most important was that the company build a new school to accommodate the influx of children, which Extell agreed to. The other community concern, a need for affordable housing, will now become a reality as the development of Building 2 gets under way this fall.

“The way that the deal kind of got struck [initially] was they were offering a certain amount [of affordable housing] that would last only 20 years,” said Mark Diller, chair of Community Board 7. “We wanted more than that—we wanted a portion of it to be on site and we wanted it to be permanent.”

The Dermot Co. has purchased the building rights for Building 2 (which will be at 15 West End Ave., at the corner of West 61st Street) from a joint venture between Extell and the Carlyle Group, and has agreed to an “80/20” market-rate to affordable housing ratio, a move that gets the company a better financing rate. The victory, however, comes from the fact that the company will be building the full 20 percent requirement on the site, instead of putting some of the units off-site, which often happens—legally—with large development projects.

The board resolution approved of the Dermot Company’s plan to make 127 of the 616 units in Building 2 affordable housing units, which will be available to individuals earning $23,000 a year or a family of up to four earning $43,000 (figures that represent 50 percent of the Area Median Income). The company also agreed to certain stipulations about how those units would situated in the building—for example, they cannot all be clustered on one or two floors and must contain the same percentage of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom units as the market-rate units.

Some board members expressed concern that the development leaves out moderate-income housing, which is also in demand in the neighborhood.

“Yes I’m voting for this, I’m very grateful for all the points, but I just want to make it clear that the developer is getting a better rate of interest because these units will be available to what I would call poor people as opposed to moderate-income people,” said board member Helen Rosenthal.

A few others expressed an entirely different concern. Page Cowley, an architect and the co-chair of the Land Use committee, said that she was casting a negative vote not because she disapproves of the affordable housing, but because she disapproves of the building’s new design.

“This community board and subcommittee spent about two and a half years watching the master plan for this amazing parcel grow, and all the sudden … it is being sold on to a developer who is building a differently shaped building,” Cowley said. “It seems petty, but when you looked at the original proposal, it was of a very unique character.”

The original renderings that the board approved during the ULURP process were designed by Christian de Portzamparc, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect.

“We spend a lot of time on the Upper West Side looking at quality of life issues and the way that we look at our buildings,” Cowley said, noting that she would be writing a minority report to include with the board’s official approval. “If we’re worried about flowerboxes on a rowhouse, I don’t understand how this development could not go though another review of how they’re going to divide the parcels up and look so different.”

About a month after two transitional homeless shelters housing 200 homeless families opened on West 95th Street, some residents and local elected officials are still vocally opposed to the facilities.

The two buildings—at 316 and 330 W. 95 St.—are on a residential block between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. They serve as emergency shelters—opened because the city needed more beds to support the growing homeless population.

Local residents argue that housing the homeless is not the intended purpose for the two buildings and that the neighborhood, already home to several other shelters, shouldn’t have to take on another one. A nighttime fire that broke out Aug. 28 on the fourth floor of 316 W. 95th St. has heightened concerns for some about the facilities. Other residents are concerned about the shelters’ close proximity to a school and a playground.

Stephanie Martinez, 19, who lives with her family on the Upper West Side, is one such resident.

“It’s a bad idea,” Martinez said. “I’ve been living here for 10 years, and my brother goes to school at P.S. 75. We don’t know the backgrounds [of the shelter residents].”
But one middle-aged man who was moving into one of the buildings last week with his son said that neighbors should think twice before complaining about the shelters.
“I don’t have empathy for the $100-250,000 per year homeowner,” the man said. “The poor used to be up and down the street here. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
But other residents and local electeds insist that it’s far from a “not in my backyard” attitude that informs their opposition to the shelters. The concern is more about the type of buildings the homeless families are moving into, and who should live there. These are single-room occupancy buildings (SROs)—small individual apartments with a shared bathroom and kitchen. Some Upper West Siders say these buildings should be occupied by low-income rent payers—yet SRO owners and landlords are able to make much more money by renting the space to Homeless Services, which pays a monthly rent of $3,000 for each room.

“The buildings should be for ordinary New York rent-paying people,” said Avi, a neighborhood resident who declined to give his last name. “The buildings should not be fodder for real estate speculators who have managed to raise rents in this city to levels unaffordable to ordinary people.”

Upper West Side Councilmember Gale Brewer agrees, and she, along with other local leaders, voiced her opposition to Homeless Services even before the shelters opened up.
“These buildings we want to be permanent housing,” Brewer said. “We want similar residents who have longstanding community ties to be residents.”

Mark Diller, the chairperson of Community Board 7, said that the use of the SROs as homeless facilities is counterproductive when it comes to solving the overarching goal—reducing homelessness and building up the affordable housing stock for local residents.

“The problem is that by the shelter taking up these units, you’re eliminating 200 units of otherwise affordable housing,” Diller said. “The SRO Law Project tries to make sure that what’s left of the affordable housing stock is preserved. It’s very troubling. … You want everyone to be able to live permanently in the community. [You’re creating] the problem that you’re trying to solve.”

Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, shares Diller’s viewpoint, adding that by placing the homeless in these buildings, the city is rewarding Robert Hess, a former DHS commissioner who now operates the shelters, for his multiple housing violations as a landlord.

“This homeless problem is just made worse by the city recycling people into units that should be permanent housing, and rewarding someone who breaks the law,” Rosenthal said.

The middle-aged homeless man said that this year’s elimination of the Advantage Program, a rental subsidy that helped to pay one or two years of rent support to eligible households, led to a sharp decline in the neighborhood’s affordable housing.

“There is no reasonable housing program, period,” he said, adding that opponents of the West 95th Street shelters should advocate for affordable low-income housing in the neighborhood.

According to the Fair Share Doctrine, each community must do its part in providing for the poor. Diller believes that the Upper West Side has more than its share of homeless residences: In the West 90s, the Narragansett, the Senate, Camden Hotel and Yale/Rose, to name a few, already provide housing for the homeless; and 21 percent of the city’s vulnerable population is housed on the Upper West Side, Diller said. Because the 95th Street shelters are emergency transitional housing, Homeless Services was able to bypass its usual neighborhood Fair Share review.

“This is us saying we’ve done our fair share several times over,” Diller said. “They’re using emergency certification as an excuse not to do the public review.”

Heather Janik, the DHS spokeswoman, said the agency is doing its part in communicating with the community.

“Our Agency has a legal mandate to provide temporary, emergency shelter to homeless individuals in need, and opened a shelter on West 95th Street so that our clients can live and be served with dignity and respect,” Janik said. “We have been actively communicating with elected officials from the beginning of this process and engaged in open dialogue with community leaders, and will maintain positive relations with residents in the surrounding neighborhood.”

After a series of shootings in NYC’s projects, ‘Our Town Downtown’ uncovers life in NYC’s housing complexes

In early July, NYPD Officer Brian Groves was performing a routine vertical patrol in the Lower East Side’s Seward Park complex when he was shot by a man who subsequently fled the scene. A few days later, a 19-year-old was fatally shot in the Chelsea Houses. The remainder of July saw multiple infants, including a 3-year-old Brooklyn boy, caught in the crossfire of project violence.

There were 35 shootings in 28 days in public housing complexes as of early July, according to the NYPD, and reported by the New  York Post. Violent crimes are on the rise in the city this year. According to the NYPD, citywide crime is up 4.2 percent over 2011.

In light of this increase in crime and the number of shootings in complexes this summer, Our Town Downtown examined safety and life in the Seward Park complex and a number of other housing complexes across New York City. Not all housing projects are equivalent, and a significant number of variables influence the culture and safety level of any given project, including location, policing, allocated funding and general conditions. Each also faces its unique pressures and interactions within the surrounding community.

Politicians and community members alike struggle for solutions to what they see as the projects’ central issues, which has led to recent debates over security, including surveillance cameras and controversial stop-and-frisk practices.

Despite the recent shooting of Officer Groves, residents of Seward Park describe the complex as relatively safe. However, in a recent survey of 10,000 homes in 12 housing complexes by NYCHA, the organization reported nearly 60 percent of the respondents said there had been serious crime in their development in the past year, and many reported rarely leaving their apartments out of fear.

This is especially true of the Pelham Parkway complex in the Bronx, where violence is a prevalent factor. City Councilman James Vacca, whose district includes the Pelham Parkway projects, discussed the June murder of an 88-year-old grandmother, Evelyn Shapiro, who was slain in a push-in robbery (where an intruder pushes in the door, usually after it’s been cracked open) in the Pelham complex.

“We’ve seen an increase in crime in Pelham with gangs and drugs,” Vacca said in an interview. “There was another shooting there last week. It’s becoming increasingly unsafe. The Housing Authority says it has no money to make it safer for those in the neighborhoods.”

According to Vacca, locals even refer to a section of the Pelham complex as “Siberia,” citing its apparent lawlessness.

The fact that it’s known by this name, Vacca said, “speaks mountains … that it’s the most crime-vulnerable location” in the complex. He said a bodega directly across the street has witnessed multiple shootings and knifings over the years, indicating how project violence spills over and affects the larger community. “It’s turf disputes,” said Vacca, “it’s about drugs.”

Vacca may point to drug and turf wars in his district, but James Brodick, project director of Brownsville Community Justice Center, spoke to the danger in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn operating on a cycle of fear: “I think there’s two things you can look at … the crime stats and the fear factor, and they go hand in hand,” he said. “People feel unsafe [in Brownsville] even when crime is down.”

Brodick also blames significant overcrowding in the high-crime area: “[Brownsville] is a mile and a half with 100,000 people living on top of each other,” he said. “There are generations of poverty issues among housing developments. Young people are taking out their frustrations, and unfortunately that involves guns and violence.”

In Brownsville, the highly contentious stop-and-frisk practice might be a deterrent for people who would otherwise carry guns, Brodick explains, but ultimately it serves to also raise tensions. Brodick said people living in the projects do not trust authority figures, and would not even step forward as witnesses in many cases. “One of the challenges is a lack of trust with anything government,” he said. “With victims of violence … the instinct in Brownsville is you don’t go to police. People have had a negative experience or response or they’re worried about retaliation.”

Overcrowding also seems an insurmountable problem in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, Queens. Raymond Normandeau, press secretary of the Queensbridge Tenants Council and Queensbridge project resident since 1973, says his complex has 96 buildings, for which the census reports approximately 10,000 tenants. Normandeau said the complex is actually intended to accommodate 8,000 or 9,000, but probably houses closer to 15,000 tenants, many illegally. “The [New York City] Housing Authority (NYCHA) has no idea who’s living in many of the apartments,” he said. “That’s absurd. They should go once a year and make sure it matches with names on the lease.”

Queensbridge, made legendary by rappers like Jay-Z who grew up there, is by many accounts, a notoriously violent project, and is located in a precinct which saw 348 felony assaults (crimes involving infliction of serious bodily injury) in 2011. Normandeau, however, places it “midway” on the danger spectrum, saying it’s not as severe as some in the Rockaways.

Does he feel unsafe? “No, I don’t feel unsafe,” said Normandeau. “I grew accustomed. Even people in Afghanistan grow accustomed.”

While there have been at least two murders in his complex this year, Normandeau and residents in other complexes seem more concerned with living conditions and how they affect safety, which can be attributed to tenants’ carelessness as well as NYCHA’s apathy and a general lack of accountability. Poor conditions seem to simply generate further disregard.

He explained: “We had an unlocked lobby door for several days, Housing Authority will not tell me the reason for the delay. They will not respond … because they don’t have to or they don’t care. If there’s a shortage of manpower, they should concentrate on safety issues.”

“I don’t know if Housing Authority has no money or doesn’t care,” he said. “You think safety issues would be corrected quickly but they are not.”

Normandeau added tenants are equally to blame, pointing to “carelessness and bad manners,” such as leaving trash lying around or allowing dogs to defecate in halls and elevators. Other issues include water leaks and mold running down the walls.

Despite these concerns, Normandeau said safety has actually been better recently, which he attributes largely to hotels cropping up in the area, including one “just a gunshot away” from the complex. These have led to increased police patrols in the area surrounding the projects. “I used to hear three gunshots a week, now I only hear one every two weeks,” he said.

Life, as a whole, seems better in the Seward Park complex, according to accounts by its residents. After the July shooting, police officers were a regular presence around the LES project which, residents report, was never a dangerous spot in the past. Officers are often posted on the corner of Essex and Broome streets, in a van which displays a couple of “wanted” posters on its window, but tenants in the area describe them as more or less fading into the background.

Vertical patrols, like the one performed by Groves at the time of the shooting, have been a routine way of life. According to the NYPD’s description, a vertical patrol is “a process by which [an officer] systematically and methodically checks each building one at a time, covering roof landings, stairwells and lobbies.” During these sweeps of public housing, police are required to stop, question and potentially frisk anyone they encounter, in the manner known as “stop-and-frisk.”

Residents of Seward do not point to vertical patrols and stop-and-frisk as the basis for the project’s safety though. Forty-one-year-old Jessica Baez, who has lived in Seward Park her whole life, since 1972, said: “What makes this building different is the community. There are different races, but we always stick together. If something is happening in the hallway, a neighbor will step outside and ask what’s going on.”

Ronald Anderson, who lived in the complex for 16 years before moving, still spends time there. He said he loves the building and has always felt safe around Seward. “It’s the first time I’ve heard of anything like this,” said Anderson, of Groves’ shooting. “It’s nothing compared to other projects, it’s a calm neighborhood.” Anderson specifically contrasted Seward with certain projects in Brooklyn, and pointed out the complex’s amenities—co-ops and balconies.

With regard to the project’s security, Anderson said: “There’s no cameras but there should be. We see cops every day now, they shoulda always been here.”

Sisters 18-year-old Elissa Febo and 19-year-old Janeece Febo’s grandmother has lived in Seward for 40 years. They said they’ve always felt safe and the shooting was the “one big” criminal incident in their memory. Now officers linger primarily outside complex grounds, but the women see detectives come and go occasionally.

“The building itself is calmer because of the cops,” said Janeece. The locks and intercoms are all functional, according to the sisters, but there are a few unsafe places such as the staircases or elevators, in which people frequently urinate.

Baez and her daughter, 14-year-old Alexandria Ali, call Seward one of the best housing complexes in the city. They say it’s primarily home to seniors, who have been there a long time, though students from the high school next door hang out in the courtyard and leave garbage around. Baez and Ali said the man who shot Groves was most likely “from the outside.” The perpetrator—described as a man in his twenties who stands 5 foot 9, with his hair braided in cornrows—is still on the loose, and the reward for information leading to his arrest has been raised to $32,000.

The two say there is overcrowding, though, and NYCHA only fixes things when the Department of Housing (HUD) is coming around. They added there is a mold problem at Seward, which “makes the walls bubble up and chip away.”
The sense of safety and calm described by residents, the accepting attitude toward police presence and the sense of community described by Baez and her daughter, is far from true of all housing projects in the city.

Authorities struggle with how to move forward security-wise. Since a 1995 merger of specialized housing police under the NYPD, regular NYPD officers patrol the majority of projects (with some exceptions—Vacca points out another project in his district, Throggs Neck, still has a housing police force). Because of high levels of crime and lower access to police personnel, many community members and government officials call for additional surveillance cameras to be installed in projects citywide. Brodick and Vacca insist cameras are a strong, blanket deterrent to crime.

“I’m not saying we should have a police state, but maybe cameras will help by being an eye in the sky and getting some witnesses,” said Brodick. “People say stop-and-frisk makes them not carry guns, cameras are not a deterrent per se, but if you’re filmed and prosecuted, you’re going to think twice. People aren’t thinking about the criminal justice system now when they commit a crime, the camera is one more resource. I hope these types of things prevent crime.”

NYCHA has already earmarked $42 million for surveillance measures, according to Sen. Daniel Squadron’s office, and now projects citywide are just waiting on their implementation, while NYCHA continues to delay the process, citing the need for additional “study.”

One commenter on Sheepshead Bites, an independent weblog that covers news in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead-Nostrand projects, pointed out that installing cameras in only some projects would merely cause offenders to move elsewhere. “Catch-22,” the commenter wrote, “projects that don’t have [cameras] are going to be 10 times worse.” Vacca said residents he’s spoken actually to want to see more police, more stop-and-frisk even.

Brodick disagrees cameras will merely shift crime: “People have always been talking about displacing crime … now it’s territorial, we’re not going to take it to a different development, it’s not drug-trade driven, it’s about respect and that will never change. The root of the violence is generational issues in housing developments, it’s not drugs.”

Politicians and community advocates alike seem to recognize NYCHA’s shortcomings in handling project security and maintenance.

In fact, Borough President Scott M. Stringer recently unveiled a plan to overhaul NYCHA, calling its board “an archaic and confusing relic” in a report.

Stringer’s recommendations have already gone into action, as a few days ago he succeeded in ousting two NYCHA board members. “The mayor’s adoption of many of my proposals for the reform of NYCHA is a significant step toward improving the lives of the over 650,000 New Yorkers who they serve,” Stringer said in a statement. “But more must be done.”

By Paul Bisceglio

“When you see banners that say ‘luxury housing,’ you know something has gone wrong.”

City Council member Dan Garodnick delivered this message in a news conference last week to a crowd of tenants in front of Independence Plaza North (IPN), a three-tower apartment complex along Greenwich Street in Tribeca. Garodnick was one of several city officials gathered to confirm their support of the tenants’ struggle to keep rents stabilized at the plaza, which was built as affordable housing in 1973 but now is leasing one- and two-bedroom apartments for up to $4,500 and $6,500 per month.

“We want the people who have made this neighborhood great to be able to stay in this neighborhood,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn told the crowd.

The long-term tenants cheered in agreement. After decades of petitioning for paved streets, traffic lights and schools in a neighborhood once full of empty factories, these residents say they ended up with a community so vibrant and popular that they can no longer afford to live in it.

The officials—who also included Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, state Sen. Daniel Squadron, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, former Community Board 1 Chair Julie Menin and others—announced their filing of three amicus briefs (unsolicited court documents) to convince the state’s Court of Appeals to consider the request by the Independence Plaza North Tenants’ Association (IPNTA) to return the complex’s 1,349 units to rent stabilization.

The Tenants’ Association has battled the complex’s landlord, Laurence Gluck of Stellar Management, for years. Gluck removed the buildings from the state-subsidizing housing initiative Mitchell-Lama in 2004 to pursue market rates for some apartments, but received tax breaks from the Department of Finance’s J-51 affordable housing program for two more years. He eventually repaid the amount he received in tax cuts plus interest, but the tenants argued that he could not forsake their rents’ stability after he had received benefits to secure them.

A lower-court judge ruled in the tenants’ favor in 2010, but the State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division reversed the decision last May on the grounds that Gluck actually should not have received J-51 tax breaks in the first place. The benefits were “merely the erroneous result of the [Department of Finance’s] failure to adjust IPN’s tax liability,” the judges said. “That error did not create rent stabilized status for a development that was not otherwise subject to the rent stabilization law.”

IPN’s tenants and the politicians supporting them see a dangerous precedent in this reversal. “By essentially making rent regulation optional for J-51 landlords,” said a conference press release, “[the court’s decision] may jeopardize the tens of thousands of New York City residents living in post-1973 buildings that receive J-51 benefits and are currently in any temporary, income-based program.”

Stephen B. Meister, a lawyer for the plaza, though, argues that this worry is unfounded. “The Appellate Division correctly held that IPN became ineligible for J-51 benefits upon exiting the Mitchell-Lama program, and therefore never became rent stabilized,” he told DNAinfo in a recent article.

If the Court of Appeals agrees to consider the tenants’ case, it would be their last chance to change the ruling. While some tenants will be affected differently than others if they fail, because some pay market rates while others’ rents remain protected, all would benefit from stabilized rents, argued the tenants’ lawyer Seth Miller at the conference.

IPNTA President Diane Lapson, a longtime resident of the complex, encouraged her fellow residents to be strong. “We built Tribeca. And we’re still building Tribeca,” she said. “Every great story has a great struggle.”

She said in an interview, “We made the neighborhood so great that other people wanted to move in, but now IPN is the diversity of Tribeca. Without it, this would be white-bread land. Without it, young people no longer have a choice of where to live [in the city] like I did.”

Lack of new development and its popularity has increased rents in the neighborhood, forcing some middle class families from the Upper West Side. Photo by James Kelleher.

The Upper West Side has become known as a bastion of middle-class life, a family-centric haven that, while not cheap, offers an attainable life in Manhattan for average people. But over the past few years, as the economy slowly recovers, middle-class residents are increasingly finding themselves squeezed out of their beloved neighborhood.

“We see it all the time,” said Jason Haber, an Upper West Side resident and CEO of Rubicon Property, which recently opened an office on Columbus Avenue. “These are people who are victims of their own success. The community rises and becomes a more desirable place to live because the people who live there help to build up the community, and then they get priced out of it.”

What Haber described is not an uncommon occurrence in the city, but these scenarios have been creeping into the Upper West Side with more frequency in recent years. Local elected officials and community leaders have been hearing a growing number of complaints about the rising costs of living in the area, and the problem is not likely to be alleviated with any quick fixes.

“The lack of new development on the Upper West Side and its continuing appeal is going to create rent pressure in the neighborhood,” said Michael Slattery, a senior vice president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

The economic crash of 2009 is still affecting the housing market, even as rents and prices continue to climb, Slattery said.

“The other part of it is that five years ago, you saw financing was readily available to purchase [real estate]; there was a lot more co-op and condo development taking place. It was easy for someone to move from a renter to a condo owner with very little change in their cost of living,” Slattery said. “That took some of the pressure off rental housing. Today, it’s harder to get financing to buy.”

With more renters flooding the market, landlords have the opportunity to charge their current tenants more—or simply take their chances with new ones who can afford to pay much more.

Daniel Holt is an Upper West Sider who is desperately hoping he can remain one. He and his wife and their 7-year-old daughter have lived in their building for four years, while Holt has lived in the neighborhood since 1998. When their lease was set to expire this spring, they received a renewal offer—for an increase of over 20 percent. Not able to afford the jump from $3,500 to $4,250 a month, they are waiting to hear back from their landlord about negotiating a lower rate. Holt, an out-of-work lawyer, and his wife, a teacher, are waiting and searching for alternate locations in the meantime.

“It’s impossible to find anything that is in our price range that meets our needs and is in our neighborhood,” Holt said. “We don’t have much hope that [the landlord] is going to turn around and say, ‘OK fine.’” He said that others in his building have already left rather than pay higher rents.

“We’ve been looking at Inwood and we’ve been looking in Hudson Heights, a neighborhood west of Broadway between the George Washington Bridge and Fort Tryon Park,” Holt said. He worries about his daughter switching schools or having to commute on the subway every day if they move north, but he doesn’t see staying on the Upper West Side as an option.

“We’re forced to chose between something that’s outrageous and something that may not even exist,” he said of their futile search.

Other residents have faced even bigger increases—some up to 40 percent—and find themselves in the same situation.

City Council Member Gale Brewer said she hears about this issue constantly from her constituents, and she worries about driving the middle class out of the area.

“The rental or co-op situation is such that people in Manhattan want to raise their families—they get married, they have a kid, they want to stay,” Brewer said. She remembers past decades, when young families would routinely move out to the suburbs because they felt that the city wasn’t safe enough to raise children; now that it’s increasingly safe, it’s also increasingly pricey. “[Now] they’re leaving for the suburbs not because of security issues but because of lack of affordability. These are people who we would really like to stay in Manhattan.”

Brewer said she’s concerned that if the middle class continues to be driven out by rental prices, the neighborhood will lose the very appeal that is attracting the high costs.

“The persons who are involved with the PTA and the police precinct community council and the community board are people who stay for a long time and have a stake in the community, and they have to have an affordable place to live, a job,” she said. “The very wealthy don’t do it. And the very poor, with some exceptions, don’t get too involved either. I’ve been here 40 years; this is how it works.”
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who lives on the Upper West Side, said this is an issue he’s seen in his own neighborhood as well as borough-wide.

“The middle-class squeeze is becoming a chokehold,” Stringer said in a telephone interview. “The skyrocketing rents on the West Side are causing families to look elsewhere, and that’s not good for the city.”

Stringer has advocated for citywide middle-class tax cuts similar to the ones Gov. Andrew Cuomo has championed at the state level, a move that he said wouldn’t solve the problem but could help if combined with more strategic efforts from city government on keeping the middle class in place.

Haber agreed that the city should work more closely with developers to figure out ways to accommodate the rising housing demands. He said that the large swaths of historic districts in the area—one of the big attractions—also limit the ability of developers to put up multiple high-rise buildings to meet the demand for apartments.

“That’s one of the things that makes the Upper West Side great, that we don’t have these giant towers rising up on either side of brick buildings on the avenues like you do over on the East Side,” Haber said. “[But] there’s a scarcity of supply here. And it doesn’t just push one price cohort up, it pushes all price cohorts up.”

While that’s good for his business in some regards, Haber said, it also means there are fewer transactions, and even real estate honchos don’t want to see the middle class disappear from the area.

Stringer said, “You want the West Side to improve and you love the fact that everyone wants to live on the West Side. You also have to make sure that the entrance fee to this neighborhood isn’t a $1- or $2 million condo. You shouldn’t have to choose between a second kid and the suburbs.”

SILVER URGES OPENING SCHOOL FIELD TO PUBLIC
Last week, in an open letter to Department of Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver asked for the Seward Park High School Field on the Lower East Side to be reopened to the public.
The DOE only recently restricted access for nonstudents to the four handball courts, three tennis courts, six basketball hoops and track. In the letter, Silver reminded Walcott that 10 years ago, he helped the school win a “Take the Field” grant. Silver noted the grant “provided for extensive renovations, turning it into a thriving recreational space that served our area so well.” Silver said local communities are suffering from a lack of open spaces that encourage physical exercise and prevent childhood obesity.
“We should be providing more opportunities for our children to engage in safe, healthy physical activities, not shutting down public access to our parks,” Silver said.

CRABS IN CHINATOWN
Wednesday morning, during rush hour, numerous crabs escaped from a bucket that fell on the road during a delivery to a local Chinatown market. Bystanders, shop workers and a deliveryman all blocked traffic on Lower Eldridge Street trying to catch the scurrying shellfish.
Bowery Boogie, the Lower East Side website, reported that about a dozen people armed with plastic bags gathered the crabs on the street. Whether any of these crabs made it to the dinner table or a store shelf remains unknown.

CHANGES TO METROCARDS
This month, the MTA has increased the timeframe in which an unlimited MetroCard can be swiped at the same turnstile in an effort to combat fraud.
Scammers are currently making a profit by buying monthly subway cards for $104 and then selling a single swipe for less than $2.50, the price of a single ride pass. Scammers often jam vending machines, which prevents passengers from purchasing their own tickets. The MTA claims these practices are costing millions of dollars each year.
The Daily News reported that the MTA has changed turnstiles at 28 stations where they found fraud to be especially high. By increasing the time between swipes from 18 minutes to up to 60 minutes, the MTA hopes scammers will have to buy extra MetroCards to rotate during waiting times. With the longer waiting periods, it will be harder for scammers to make a profit.

ANONYMOUS ONLINE POSTING PROPOSAL
Last week, the New York State Assembly and State Senate proposed a bill that would require all New York-based websites to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name and home address are accurate.”
State Sen. Thomas O’Mara, who is sponsoring the bill, said the legislation would help prevent cyberbullying. According to a National Crime Prevention Council survey, about 40 percent of teenagers have experienced some form of cyberbullying.
Assemblyman Jim Conte, a co-sponsor of the bill, said in an online statement that if passed, the bill would also prevent anonymous users from criticizing local businesses.
“The legislation will help cut down on the types of mean-spirited and baseless political attacks that add nothing to the real debate and merely seek to falsely tarnish the opponent’s reputation by using anonymity on the Web,” Conte said.
The legislation would require website administrators to remove any anonymous comments from their pages upon request. Users would not have to reveal their identity when making a complaint for removal.