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Saturday, December 11, 2004
Tenants Make Their Case 
Uh-oh. Any time you see hand-written signs posted on a building you know there must a serious dispute going on. This is a five-story, 21-unit apartment building at 532 West 163rd Street (between Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue) that looks like a New Law Tenement. Here is a map showing the location of the building, a graffito, and three of the signs:
The signs in English read: "We Don't Want 'NRP' We Want Ownership Tenant Assoc." and "An organization named Community League wants to take us out of our building but we're not leaving." Unfortunately, my Spanish isn't good enough for a reliable translation. Can anyone help? (Click on the images for full-scale versions.) Before getting into the nature of the dispute, here is a narrative timeline of what lead up to it. According to PropertyShark.com, the building was built in 1906 and fell into city ownership sometime between 1976 and 1980, no doubt due to the former owner's failure to pay property taxes as was common in those bleak years. In 2001, four tenants attended a meeting at which representatives from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development encouraged them to start paying rent to a community-based nonprofit organization, the Community League of West 159th Street, which has been managing the building since that time. In October 2003, the Community League was granted a permit for "rehabilitation of existing multifamily building to a 19 unit building including joist replacement, new partitions, new roof, new mechanical systems" at a cost listed at $1.15 million. On Aug. 14, 2004, a neighborhood resident who goes by the handle Futurebird posted a blog entry about the building. Ten days later, HPD sold the building for $6 to the Community League, which took out a $7.4 million mortgage on the building that day from HPD. The Community League does not have a Website, but it seems the group is responsible for good things. HPD is known to have brought about tremendous revitalization throughout the city as vacant, city-owned buildings have been restored into habitable buildings and new buildings have sprouted on vacant lots. However, that does not make them immune to controversy now and then. The tenants are upset that the building was entered into HPD's Neighborhood Redevelopment Program, which "conveys clusters of occupied and nearby vacant City-owned buildings to selected community based not-for-profit organizations for rehabilitation and operation as rental housing." Instead, the tenants want to be a part of HPD's Tenant Interim Lease program, in which they would form a co-op and own the building. They feel the city steered them away from the TIL program at that meeting in 2001 by failing to mention that TIL was a possibility. HPD says it notified the tenants of their options multiple times before the August 2004 sale and that TIL is generally well-known to people in Washington Heights. The Community League says it managed the building for two and a half years and never heard any complaints about NRP before it was too late. The important question is whether the tenants would be allowed back in the building once any renovations are completed, and at what rent level. Renovations might not be a bad thing as some of the apartments are reportedly uninhabitable, but looming over this episode is the dreaded G-word. Finally, as you can see below, the adjacent building to the west, owned by HPD, is being renovated, while a vacant lot sits to the site west of that building. Given the nature of NRP's mandate over "clusters of occupied and nearby vacant City-owned buildings," perhaps the fates of these two parcels are tied to what happens at No. 532.
i think the Spanish on the wall may say: By Jason Solarek, at 12/12/2004 3:00 PM |
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