Eviction Anxiety Rattles a Formerly Subsidized Upper Manhattan Building

By Timothy Williams, the New York Times

October 15, 2008

This summer, James Russell Outlaw, a disabled World War II veteran, received a letter from his landlord saying he would be evicted from his apartment after 32 years.

Mr. Outlaw, who turns 83 next month, was losing his one-bedroom apartment, at Broadway and 135th Street, because the city had terminated his monthly housing subsidy after finding evidence of a vermin infestation, as well as a nonworking oven.

Though his landlord had failed to carry out the needed work, it became Mr. Outlaw’s problem when eviction proceedings began. He was required to report to Housing Court in Lower Manhattan, but Mr. Outlaw — who uses a walker and says he did not fully understand the paperwork — missed each date. 

Mr. Outlaw is among hundreds of residents at 3333 Broadway — which until three years ago was in the state’s Mitchell-Lama program for moderate-income housing but is now charging market-rate rents — who say the new owner is systematically harassing them in hopes of replacing them with higher-paying tenants.

“They’re doing different things to get people out,” said Mr. Outlaw, who has not fully recovered from bypass surgery after a heart attack three years ago. “Scare tactics, I call them. People are scared to complain.” 

Thursday, a group led by the Legal Aid Society of New York plans to file a class-action suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan against the building’s owner. The group argues that a provision requiring that the property remain dedicated to low- and moderate-income housing had been removed recently without proper public notice, contributing to the efforts to force residents out.

The current owner of the building, the Urban American Management Corporation, a real estate investment and management company based in West New York, N.J., acknowledged that it might have made mistakes with some of the building’s tenants but said it had not sought to force people out unlawfully.
“We own over 18,000 apartments — there are mistakes made,” said Doug Eisenberg, Urban American’s chief operating officer. “But we should be judged on how we act when we make the mistake, and we are making every effort to solve them.”

There is perhaps no other place in the neighborhood where fears about gentrification and displacement are as deeply felt than at 3333 Broadway — a building so large that it not only makes up its own census tract, but is the most densely populated tract in the nation — where residents have expansive views of the Hudson River, but can also hear the clattering of the No. 1 subway line. 

“The building is almost like the Alamo,” said Keith L. T. Wright, who represents the area in the State Assembly. “It’s the last big, standing edifice that represents the way the neighborhood had been, and what urban America still wants it to be.”

The 35-story, red-brick building, which has 4,000 residents, has changed hands three times in the past three years. The current owner has sought to evict more than a third of the tenants, according to its records. And Columbia University’s planned $6.3 billion campus expansion will reach across the street. 
A siege mentality has set in among tenants, who gather in the building’s long, winding corridors, and while waiting for its slow elevators, to brood over how and when they might be “put out.”

The advocacy group Eviction Intervention Services says as many as 300 people have left 3333 Broadway since 2005 after the building’s original owner opted out of the Mitchell-Lama program and rents more than doubled — to $1,800 a month from $755 for a one-bedroom apartment, and to $2,300 from $897 for a two-bedroom. 

“You see furniture that’s been put in the hallways, vans outside loaded down, people leaving all the time,” said Mildred Branch, 79, a retired city employee who has lived in the building since its construction 32 years ago, and who faces eviction herself. 

Like most other tenants, Mrs. Branch was able to remain at 3333 after the building left the Mitchell-Lama program with the help of the federal housing subsidy program, Section 8. 

But then, last year, Mrs. Branch needed surgery and months of rehabilitation after a heart attack. She returned home to find that the landlord was seeking to evict her, saying that she owed $11,300 in back rent. Mrs. Branch said that while she had been hospitalized, her portion of the rent had been paid by her daughter, but that neither of them had been aware that Mrs. Branch’s Section 8 voucher subsidy had expired.

“They want to put an old lady out,” said Mrs. Branch, who uses a wheelchair. “I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life.”

On Wednesday, after hearing about Mr. Outlaw and Mrs. Branch, Mr. Eisenberg said he would halt eviction proceedings against them and make the necessary repairs to Mr. Outlaw’s apartment so he could stay.

Urban American acknowledges that it has sent out 633 eviction notices to at least 500 tenants — the building has 1,192 apartments — although 75 tenants have received 176 of the notices because of habitual late payments, Mr. Eisenberg said.

He said the company had evicted only 18 tenants since buying the building in April 2007 — 17 for nonpayment of rent and one for dealing drugs.
Mr. Eisenberg said that contrary to rumors among tenants, there were no immediate plans to sell the building or to otherwise try to make a quick profit. He said that Urban American, a family-owned firm, was trying to be a good landlord for the working families that live there, and that it planned to make $10 million in improvements.

“We really felt that if we put some money into the building, invested in it, and then did all our work on the legal side to get rid of a few bad apples, it could benefit everyone,” he said. “The premise was that we could make a difference, and make a little money for our investors.”

Mr. Eisenberg’s brother, Joshua Eisenberg, who is the company’s general counsel, said it troubled him that their ownership of the building had led to so much fear.

“It goes against everything we’re trying to do,” he said. “We’ve tried very hard to make our intentions clear.”

Opposition to gentrification has been spurred by fears of the widespread displacement of the neighborhood’s residents, who are predominately poor and working-class African-Americans and Latinos. 

But academics and advocates for the poor say — and city records tend to confirm — that this has not necessarily been the case. While in earlier eras in the neighborhood, evictions were often performed illegally, and residential buildings cleared all at once, recently displacement has been taking place a few tenants at a time.

Housing subsidies have helped stabilize neighborhoods in New York, preventing some evictions, Derek S. Hyra, an adjunct professor of urban sociology at George Washington University and the author of a recent book about gentrification called “The New Urban Renewal.”

“That’s not to say that it’s not a problem,” he added. “Displacement is going on — it’s just not on a massive scale.” 

After Urban American bought the building for $277 million in 2007, two years after it had been sold for $85 million, the Community Service Society of New York concluded in an analysis that given the high purchase price, a move to evict current tenants was a logical next step.

Meanwhile, even tenants who do not face eviction have complaints: The building has 410 unresolved code violations, including mice, mold, broken windows and water leaks, according to city Department of Housing Preservation and Development records. Doug Eisenberg said he was “fairly confident” that the problems had been fixed, or scheduled to be fixed.

Alicia Barksdale, 47, who has lived in the building since the 1970s, says gusts of wind whip into her 35th-floor apartment because no one has ever sealed the hole in the wall from an old air-conditioning unit. Doug Eisenberg said building maintenance had installed a cover, but on a recent visit no cover was in place.
Doug Eisenberg said there had been several attempts to make repairs in Ms. Barksdale’s apartment, most recently on Wednesday. 

Ms. Barksdale said she had been to Housing Court five times to try to have the cover and other repairs completed and believes the landlord is seeking to get her out. 

“I’ve been here 30 years — I ain’t going anywhere,” she said, looking out her living room window at the Hudson River. “With this view? Please."

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