Owner-occupancy threatens to oust tenants

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

Chelsea Now photo by Miriam Fogelson
José Rivera, Miguel Munoz and Patrick Merrill stand outside their apartment building at 221 W. 16th St., where they are facing an owner-occupancy eviction attempt by their landlord.

By Barry Paddock

When cab driver and amateur jazz musician Miguel Munoz says, “My apartment is an extension of myself,” he really means it. Munoz, 45, has lived in his Chelsea apartment since he was 5 years old, and has lived on his block even longer than that. Stocky, with a shaved head, goatee and irrepressible smile, he drives a yellow cab seven nights a week and sleeps during the day, waking to play piano in his cramped living room lined with framed photographs of Marilyn Monroe. “I plan to retire in this apartment,” Munoz vows. “My heart is embedded in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps that is why for the last two years, Munoz has been fighting tenaciously, along with eight of his fellow tenants in four of his building’s other apartments, to save his home from an owner-occupancy eviction.

Munoz’ landlord at 221 West 16th Street is seeking to evict these tenants by claiming that he will convert the building’s top two floors into a home (which Munoz refers to as “the superplex”) for himself and his wife. New York City’s rent-stabilization laws allow landlords to not renew leases in order to make apartments the landlord’s own primary living space. “The tenants have enforced their rights to live there rent-stabilized for many, many years,” the landlord, Gary Brown, told Chelsea Now. “And now we are enforcing our rights to live there.”

Over the years, Miguel Munoz has squabbled with neighbors annoyed by his music, but the tenants facing eviction have now banded together to fight back. As they fight their evictions in city housing court, they are suing both Brown and the State of New York in State Supreme Court.

Digging in

Munoz first arrived in Chelsea from his native Dominican Republic just a few days shy of his second birthday. His mother had left behind work as a housemaid to seek better opportunities in New York. They settled in the building adjacent to Munoz’s current home. “Blue-collar, union families,” is how Munoz remembers the population of the block, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, in the mid-1960s. “Irish Catholics, Hispanics, a little Italian here and there. We shopped at the Spanish grocery down the block. We bought candles at that store during the blackout of ‘65. We knew who the rowdy kids on the block were and who their parents were. Kids would open the pump and play in the fire hydrant and the cops would be called to close it.”

After a gut renovation in 1966, Munoz’ current building entered a HUD-sponsored Section 8 program for low-income tenants. Munoz’s mother eagerly signed on, passing her belongings out her window and straight into the window of their new home next door. She found work as a machine operator in a downtown Manhattan handbag factory, a job she worked for decades. She scrimped and saved to send her son to St. Francis Xavier Catholic School on West 17th Street. In 1985, she bought a home in Queens Village, leaving Munoz to take over the Chelsea apartment. In 1987, the longtime landlord opted out of the HUD program and sold the building.

A series of landlords came and went over the next few years. They did not raise rents, nor did they provide leases. In 1995, Munoz led tenants in pressuring the then-current landlord into issuing rent-stabilized leases and registering their rents with the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), the state agency that regulates housing. Two years later, Brown took over the building and filed with DHCR for building-wide rent increases, arguing that proper rents were not established at the close of the HUD program and that landlords had made further errors in registering rents since then. His request for increases was reviewed and turned down by DHCR in July 1998; the agency ruled that possible improprieties by past landlords were too old to challenge.

Soon thereafter, Brown brought an eviction proceeding against Miguel Munoz, claiming he made major alterations of his living space without landlord approval. Munoz acknowledges having made various upgrades to the apartment over the decades, including installing new cabinets, painting and plastering, and laying down linoleum, but says the alterations were done years before Brown took over the building, when the building was neglected by the landlords. The eviction proceeding against Munoz lasted five years in housing court. Judge Jean T. Schneider ruled in Munoz’ favor in 2003. “Gary Brown kept me in court knowing he couldn’t win, to try to wear me out,” said Munoz. Furious, he unsuccessfully pursued a harassment claim against Brown with DHCR and a malicious prosecution claim in State Supreme Court.

In May 2005, Brown notified Munoz and the other tenants on the top two floors of the nondescript six-story building that he would not be renewing leases so that he could make those two floors his home. “I got the bomb dropped on me,” says Munoz’ neighbor David Robards, describing how he felt after receiving his notice of non-renewal from Brown. Robards has lived in the building for 24 years, is blind in his right eye, and works seven days a week as a telephone bank clerk for a city agency. He is also an aspiring college hockey sports writer given to describing everything in convoluted sports metaphors. “I feel like a goaltender in a never-ending Game 7 overtime elimination game,” he says of life since the eviction proceedings began, “in a constant man-down situation. It’s a lot of pressure, anxiety, fear and anger. I take it a day at a time.”

Another tenant facing eviction, restaurant manager Patrick Merrill, says that in a phone conversation with Brown early on in the eviction proceedings, the landlord promised substantial buyouts if everyone on the top two floors agreed to leave without a fight, but he told Merrill that if he alone agreed to leave, he would only get $1,000 as a buyout. Merrill felt Brown was trying to manipulate him into helping pressure or persuade his neighbors to leave. Merrill says Brown over the phone later offered him $75,000 to leave, and that he refused the offer. Tenants were reluctant to disclose what they currently pay in rent but called the rates “extremely affordable” and “well below market rate.”

“I’m not going at any price,” says Munoz, adding that Brown has never made him an offer. “Money is not an incentive for us to move.” Also facing eviction is a former City employee living on a pension and a married couple with a son attending a local high school and daughter attending a City College.

Questionable motives: See you in court

Brown has been a player in New York real estate since the early 1980s and is now head of Furnished Quarters, which describes itself as “the largest corporate housing provider in New York City.” The company, founded by Brown and his brother Steven in 1998, leases on a temporary basis more than 600 apartments in more than 30 Manhattan buildings to tourists and business travelers as an alternative to hotels. According to Department of Buildings records, the structure at 221 W. 16th St. is an Old-law tenement zoned “Class A multiple dwelling” for permanent residential purposes.

“There shouldn’t be any short-term rentals in this building. It is supposed to be residential space for New Yorkers,” said John Raskin, director of organizing at Housing Conservation Coordinators, an anti-poverty agency on the Upper West Side that also focuses on tenant advocacy. Use of such buildings for transient purposes is a practice that has been confirmed by tenant activists like Raskin, as well as local elected officials across the city, as a tactic to empty buildings of rent-regulated tenants. (For more on the issue, see the front-page story on illegal hotels in the Feb. 16 issue of Chelsea Now.)

Eight temporary dwelling units are at 221 West 16th Street, but only one is within the top two floors that Brown is trying to clear out for claimed personal use. Tenants on the top two floors say the Furnished Quarters units below them sometimes sit empty for weeks, and that if Brown’s sole motive was finding himself a new home, it would be far easier and quicker to simply stop renting them out and make use of these unregulated units. All three apartments on the building’s first floor are Furnished Quarters units; one of them has been combined with space in the basement to create a duplex. When asked if he chose the top two floors for a living space purely because it was the most attractive physical space or if additional factors, such as a desire to deregulate more units, were taken into consideration, Brown told Chelsea Now, “It’s best left for the litigation to show what we’re doing and why.”

The tenants, represented by longtime housing lawyer Robert A. Katz, are suing Brown for monetary damages in the State Supreme Court. According to Katz, the suit argues that “the evictions are a cooked-up scheme to get back at Munoz for daring to fight the earlier rent hike.” When asked if it was accurate to say that he had many past wranglings with Munoz, Brown told Chelsea Now, “No, I don’t think we’ve had an unusual amount of litigation with him in the past.”

In his original motion to take over tenants’ apartments, Brown says that he and his wife live on the Upper West Side and have become crowded in their home there. During the course of litigation, it was established that Brown also lives in Easton, Conn. The tenants and their lawyer describe his Connecticut home as a mansion, believe Brown lives there most of the time and assert that he will not leave Connecticut behind to make Chelsea his primary home. Brown, reached at Furnished Quarter’s Connecticut corporate headquarters, described his Manhattan home to Chelsea Now as a 600-foot, one-bedroom co-op and acknowledged living in Connecticut as well. When asked which location was currently his primary residence, he said, “As much as I’d like to, I can’t answer the question because it’s part of the court case and is under litigation.”

For his part, Katz believes the government should investigate how the transient apartments came out of rent-stabilization to begin with. “Given the building’s history with HUD as low-income housing, these units should never have been allowed to go anywhere near luxury housing.” When asked by Chelsea Now how the units were deregulated, Brown said, “I can’t give you direct information on that. There’s numerous ways to do that.” He added that each unit was deregulated through a unique set of circumstance and insisted that “we followed the law to the letter on that.”

Meanwhile, Brown’s tenants are also suing the State of New York, challenging the constitutionality of the statute that could allow Brown to take their homes. Katz said he is charging the tenants a greatly reduced rate for his services because of his personal conviction that the owner-occupancy law is overdue for examination by state courts. “My basic objective,” he says, “is to show that this law is defective. If I knock out this statute, nobody in rent-stabilized apartments can be evicted this way.”

Katz recently argued in the State Supreme Court that the owner-occupancy statute is in violation of New York State’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. He recites a laundry list of greater protections tenants in the rent-regulated suburban counties of Westchester and Nassau have over tenants in New York City. Outside the city, landlords can claim no more than two rent-stabilized units for themselves, making evictions like Brown’s impossible there. Furthermore, Katz told Chelsea Now, “outside the city, landlords must show that they need a tenant’s apartment, that they have nowhere else to live; in New York City they need only show a desire and intention to live in tenants’ homes.” Outside New York, Katz says, landlords must go through DHCR to be granted an owner-occupancy eviction. In New York City, landlords take tenants straight to housing court with no DHCR oversight. The appeal process is also different, favoring suburban renters, Katz contends. These disparities explain why only six owner-occupancy cases have ever been brought against rent-regulated tenants in counties outside the city.

A Supreme Court Justice recently dismissed Katz’s argument, ruling that it was more difficult for suburban renters to relocate and that they were thus entitled to greater protections, a rationale Katz calls “absurd.” Nonetheless, he is preparing to reargue the case, focusing specifically on the disparities in judicial oversight faced by suburban and New York City renters fighting owner-occupancy evictions. Katz will also argue that the language of the law allowing landlords to seize “one or more” apartments for personal use is defective because it is overly broad. “Suppose instead of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village being bought by a corporation, as they recently were,” Katz says to illustrate his point, “they had been bought by Donald Trump, who now wanted to make them into the largest mansion in the universe, a complex for his own use?” There is nothing in the language of the rent laws to prevent this, he argues.

Tenant advocates also believe the law is flawed. “The majority of tenants in New York City housing court don’t have attorneys,” says Louise Seeley, executive director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court. “The majority of landlords do. Owner-occupancy cases are incredibly difficult cases to defend. The important information is all in the hands of the landlord—who’s really moving in, what the landlord really intends.”

“We’ve seen an increase in owner-occupancy cases all over the city,” reports Natasha Winegar, an organizer of rent-regulated renters for Tenants and Neighbors, the State’s largest tenant advocacy group. “It adds to the feeling tenants have of being under siege. With the steady weakening of the rent laws under Pataki, we’re now hemorrhaging affordable housing at a rate the city will never be able to replace.”

Brown believes there is nothing especially noteworthy about his eviction proceedings at 221 W. 16th St. He told Chelsea Now, “These evictions go on all day long in New York City. We are following the laws to a tee.”