Immigrant tenants an easy mark at the Hotel Breslin

The opulent lobby of the Hotel Breslin

By Chris Lombardi

Last summer, as members of the soon-to-be Broadway Breslin Tenants Association first came together to share what they knew about management tactics at their building, they asked some of their fellow tenants whose English was limited to present written testimony of their experience in their own language.

One family wrote: “Landlord’s employees knocked on my door repeatedly for three times.... They asked for my ID card and documents, phone number and started a very long speech. Both of us couldn’t understand English at all.... My cousin’s brother [acted as] my interpreter. They forced him to sign a piece of paper saying that we have to agree to move out at [date]. Both of us don’t know how to take care of this situation.”

The Tenants Association collected many such stories while preparing a harassment case against their landlord, Edward Haddad, and his associates at GFI Capital Management, who were looking to empty the 103-year-old Hotel Breslin of current tenants in order to convert it into a luxury transient hotel. That preparation culminated in a June 5–7 hearing before Judge Faye Lewis of the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH), at which the association sought to prevent management from obtaining a Certificate of No Harassment, which would clear the way for conversion. But Lewis found insufficient proof that harassment had occurred and ruled in favor of the management. Tenants Association members claim that much of the evidence supporting their case never made it to the judge.

Similarly, many of the stories of the hotel’s Asian immigrant tenants, many of whom were illegal subletters, also were never presented at the hearing. Two Asian tenants scheduled to testify dropped out at the last minute, as reported two weeks ago in Chelsea Now: One, who had already told her fellow tenants she felt scared by managers’ persistent pressure, gave in, took a “buyout” from the management and returned to Korea. The other pulled off the witness list for unknown reasons. The two Asians who did testify were ones whose English was excellent and who felt more capable of fighting back.

Interviews with housing and immigrant advocates point to the same conclusion: Though these immigrant stories may not have been directly relevant to the outcome of this case, the treatment they describe is nevertheless a key part of the larger Breslin story, fraught with complexities that defy easy categorization while also emblematic of a persistent pattern citywide.

National, state, city problem

Housing discrimination is still a serious issue nationwide in both sales and rental markets, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The department’s most recent study, in 2006, found 422,000 instances of housing discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nationwide.

Discrimination can include refusals to rent, overcharging and lending bias. HUD’s guidelines also state that it is illegal to “threaten, coerce or intimidate individuals because they exercise their fair housing rights,” language repeated almost verbatim in the “fair housing” codes of both the New York City Human Rights Commission and the New York State Division of Human Rights (DHR).

Housing cases made up 8 percent of DHR’s workload last year, according to spokesman Thomas Shanahan, who added that the agency doesn’t classify the cases by “protected group.” meaning along racial, ethnic, religious lines, or according to sexual orientation or gender identity.

The city’s Human Rights Commission also gets “tons of complaints about housing discrimination, 18 percent of our total,” Commissioner Spokesperson Betsy Herzog told Chelsea Now. She added that most charge landlords with refusing to rent, or trying to steer them to other neighborhood. “Some are harassment,” she said, “but that, when it comes right down to it, is very difficult to prove.”

The difficulty of proving harassment or discrimination is one of the reasons some Chinese tenants represented by Helena Wong, of Chinatown Justice Center, refused to pursue such a complaint last year. Wong, a former Community Fellow at the Open Society Institute, organized a multi-building tenants union in 2004 “in response to the neighborhood’s rapidly increasing gentrification”; in April, the union won a major agreement with two Delancey Street landlords. The tenants, who could have pursued a human rights violations claim with DHR (which contacted Wong’s group during this process), chose not to go through the long process of filing the report. According to Wong, they were far more interested in the immediate results they won, including cash payments to some tenants and restoration of services.

Asked by Chelsea Now about the challenges of organizing Asian tenants, Wong said that the most important hurdle is linguistic. “I think the problem is major language barriers, so that often tenants are afraid to ask questions.”

Cultural gaps created opportunity

At the Breslin, linguistic and cultural gaps played a strong role from the beginning in the dynamic between management and immigrant tenants, along with the willingness of some in the Asian communities to broker deals with the Breslin management that left their compatriots vulnerable.

Many Korean tenants, in particular, appear to have been drawn into the Breslin by Web listings on sites like HeyKorean.com to subleases of dubious legality. During the June court hearings, GFI Capital Management Associate Adam Cassidy spoke eloquently of the “illegal sublets” being created by these sites, though other tenants told Chelsea Now that the building had encouraged such rentals for a number of years. It is unclear who placed the listings in the first place, although one Breslin tenant, who asked not to be named, told of seeing a Korean real estate agent scold a building manager, saying: “You promised me those apartments!”

Breslin Tenants Association President Stephen Colvin said on Wednesday that he does not believe the Breslin management orchestrated a master plan in taking in Asian tenants, adding carefully: “But it is also possible that management began to benefit from these tenants.

“More likely than not, someone from the Korean real estate community made a proposal to management, perhaps not realizing it was a rent-stabilized building,” said Colvin.

“They got money, probably more than the legal rent, from these subleases. And when the time came to empty the rooms, it was not as hard as it might have been” for the Breslin management.

The whole scenario sounded familiar to Javier Valdes, housing advocate with the New York Immigration Coalition. “Landlords are very creative,” he told Chelsea Now on Monday. “They find a way to make the most they can.”

Valdes said that in his work with Asian tenants, he hears more and more about an increased reliance on subleases. “No leases; everything’s in cash. Sometimes they’ll have a middleman—someone who speaks the language and can apply the pressure.” He added that the idea of advertising in newspapers and Websites in immigrants’ languages is also not unusual: “One case in Staten Island, we see the Mexican pop is being targeted; the ads are placed in Spanish.” There, too, everything has to be in cash, no receipts: “It’s in the landlord’s interest to do that, so he can control what they know.”

The Korean-language tenants at the Breslin who were illegal subletters were some of the first to be evicted after April 2006, when Haddad joined forces with GFI Capital Management to begin converting the Hotel Breslin. (“We needed to create vacancies,” one building manager testified in June.) By summer 2007, fewer than 150 of the original 377 hotel units still had tenants. Many of these had been occupied by Asian subletters.

Why are you still here?

The next stage of the “transition” was persuading the legal Breslin tenants to leave via buyout, which often entailed some form of intense pressure to get them to agree. In the case of immigrants, there were more points of possible pressure.

Legal Asian tenants at the Breslin reported seeing their complaints about repairs ignored unless they agreed to “talk to the management.” Such an order may be heard differently by Asian immigrants, said Chinatown Justice Center’s Wong. “Many come from countries whose governments are authoritarian, and they think what people tell you is what you’re supposed to do.”

Some reported being told that the zoning laws were changing, they would have to move out, and that “many other [Koreans/Chinese] are signing this paper” agreeing to move out. Others were told that if they convinced groups of other Korean/Chinese/Japanese tenants to move, they would get a bonus. Still others said that they were repeatedly asked for ID and the status of their visas, were told that the FBI was looking into their situation, or were asked, “Why are you still here?”

“I felt that they were targeting me much more because I was a foreigner,” said Niriti Nagpal, a 33-year-old Indian immigrant who has lived in the Hotel Breslin for several years and is now active in the tenants association.

Although aspects of the Breslin immigrants’ story are new, like the HeyKorean.com Website that lured many young people, much of it is familiar to local advocates like Rosa Maria de la Torre, director of the Chelsea Housing Group at the Hudson Guild. These are fierce times, said Torre, who has worked on behalf of immigrant tenants since her early days in the Chinatown office of Legal Services of New York, an experience she calls “my law school.”

Even then, in the 1990s, she saw the same dynamic: landlords trying to get the most they could out of immigrant tenants, most of them working double time, who had neither the language skills to master New York’s arcane rent laws nor the time to acquire them. But she is impressed, she said, at the way the Breslin tenants organized and rallied around everyone’s experiences, including those silenced Asians who were on their way out.

Neither the Breslin tenants nor their counsel plan a long-shot human rights claim on behalf of the immigrant tenants; they are pursuing a different strategy, assembling evidence to prove that management’s behavior fits the definition of “harassment” set by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

But if Haddad and GFI ultimately win, said Nagpal, she will be “really disappointed in America.”

“If this were my country, and they did this to the tenants, I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Nagpal. “But I was told when I got here, ‘You have more rights here in this country.’”