The local paper for Downtown wn THE SHEDEVILS OF COMEDY < P.12
WEEK OF OCTOBER
9 2014
OTDOWNTOWN.COM
OurTownDowntown @OTDowntown
IN UNIVERSITY APARTMENT BATTLE, A SQUEEZE ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING INVESTIGATION How hidden cameras and housing court are used by one West Side landlord to force out rent-stabilized tenants BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
Gloria Mejia has been locked in a long battle with her landlord, who has used hidden cameras in an effort to force her out. Photo by Daniel Fitzsimmons
Gloria Mejia’s son took a long look at the smoke detector in the hallway outside his apartment and knew something was amiss. Smoke detectors run on a battery, he told himself, so why does this one look like it’s plugged into the wall? He and his sister took the detector apart. Inside: a tiny camera, apparently installed by the family’s landlord. “The next day the landlord came with a picture of my sister’s face and said if the camera was damaged we’d have to pay to replace it,” he said. Mejia and her two kids live on W. 109 St. in a five-story CONTINUED ON PAGE 6
SOUTHBRIDGE TOWERS GOES PRIVATE NEWS The Mitchell Lama complex voted to convert subsidized apartments to market rate BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
question of whether to privatize or not goes back to at least 2005 when residents voted to conduct a feasibility study to determine whether privatizing would even be possible. According to Stuart Saft, an attorney with Holland and Knight who heads their real estate division and was charged with compiling the 900-page privatization offering plan, 1,082 Southbridge residents voted to privatize while 373 voted against the plan. Pro-privatization residents squeaked by with 10 votes over the two-thirds threshold needed to privatize. There were three abstentions, and some residents chose not to vote or were ineligible due to being behind in their maintenance, the Mitchell Lama equivalent of rent.
TWO BRIDGES Two-thirds of residents at Southbridge Towers voted for the complex to exit the Mitchell Lama affordable housing program and take their apartments private last week. The move will allow them to convert their subsidized apartments into market rate apartments and realize a windfall of equity on units they bought decades ago for $10,000 or less. Southbridge Towers is a 1,651-unit apartment complex at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
apartment building between Broadway and Amsterdam. She’s lived in the building since 1968 and pays $664 for her three bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment. The building is owned by the Orbach Group, and is part of a portfolio of 23 buildings on the street that were acquired by the company in 2009 for $45 million. The properties are part of a larger portfolio of more than 70 buildings that Orbach has amassed in the past five years, all of which are located between West End Avenue and Central Park West from 101st Street to 115th Street. Orbach markets apartments in these buildings through a website called CoSo Apartments, targeted at students at nearby Columbia University. (CoSo stands for Columbia South.) Many of the existing tenants in the CoSo buildings are in rent-stabilized apart-
In Brief N.Y.P.D. OFFICER STOPS SUBWAY-STATION SUICIDE EFFORT Police say an officer has stopped a suicidal man from leaping into the path of an oncoming downtown subway train. Officer Carlos Guzman was on patrol in the L line station at First Avenue in downtown Manhattan Friday morning when he saw a man sitting on the edge of the platform and starting to push himself off. Guzman says he grabbed the man’s shirt, and the man struggled with him, but he was able to hang on and keep the man safe. Guzman says the man told him he wanted to kill himself. He says the man ultimately thanked him for saving his life. The man has been taken to a hospital for evaluation. The 27-year-old Guzman has been an officer for over four years.
HIGH LINE APPOINTS INTERIM EXEC DIRECTOR Following the resignation of Jenny Gersten as the exective director of Friends of the High Line, the organization announced that co-founder Robert Hammond will return to serve as interim director until a permanent replacement can be found. Hammond will take over the post on October 20, following the completion of his Visiting Fellowship in resident at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Hammond co-founded Friends of the High Line with current president Joshua David after they met at a commmunity board meeting in 1999. The departure of Gersten came as a surprise, coming on the heels of the opening of a new leg of the enormously popular elevated park, which now runs from the Meatpacking District to the under-construction Hudson Yards project on the West Side.