City Tries To Yank Harlem Tenants From Affordable Housing Program

HARLEM, NY — The city is trying to boot a group of Harlem tenants out of a program that would let them become owners of their building, citing misleading claims about missing documents, according to the tenants' lawyers.

The dispute centers on 206 West 120th St., a six-story building near Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard. Starting around 2002, the residents decided to enter the long-running Tenant Interim Lease program, a city initiative that lets tenants in city-owned buildings form co-ops in order to buy their own apartments.

But since 2018, the city has been trying to remove the building from TIL, claiming tenants have not submitted required financial documents.

After settling the case in 2020, the city redoubled its efforts in recent months, sending another termination letter in January and filing an Aug. 1 motion saying that tenants again failed to submit the documents, as the Daily News first reported.

But attorneys for the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit representing the tenants, counter that many of the documents being requested by the city's Housing Preservation and Development Department (HPD) either do not exist, are redundant, or are unavailable for other reasons.

"Poor communication within HPD, unclear and shifting standards, and frequent changes in HPD personnel resulted in significant delays in the submission of financial reports," the tenants' attorneys wrote in a court filing. "[T]hese delays were created by HPD, who now irrationally tries to blame the tenants."

Meanwhile, the tenants themselves have long since been displaced from the 120th Street building, which was supposed to have been renovated through the TIL program. Since 2008, the tenants have been living in temporary apartments around Harlem, after the city said it would renovate the 120th Street building in as little as two years.

"HPD never commenced renovation or any kind of construction at 206 West 120th Street, which remains vacant and boarded up to this day," the tenants' attorneys wrote. "Fourteen years after they were first relocated, petitioners are still not back home."

Gabriel Valentin, one of the tenants, wrote in an affidavit that HPD had once called the 120th Street group "a model tenant association," only to later accuse the residents of mismanagement.

"We self-managed for years and years, without compensation, relying on the promise that this building would be ours one day," Valentin said.

Two tenants who had lived at 206 West 120th St. for decades died recently while waiting for the co-op conversion to start, Valentin said.

In a statement sent after this article was published, an HPD spokesperson said the agency had been working with the tenants for "many years" to help them take ownership of the building.

"Although considerable staff effort and financial support went toward meeting this objective, this building regrettably could not convert to homeownership," the spokesperson said. "Instead, the tenants will be able to keep their homes as affordable rental apartments in a newly renovated building."

Reasons for terminating the building from TIL included low rates of rent collection and 20 months' worth of missing financial reports, according to the city.

The tenants' effort to stay in the TIL program has won support from some in the neighborhood, including Community Board 10, which drafted a letter during its meeting last month calling on HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrión, Jr. to drop the proceedings.

"Removing this property from the TIL program would be damaging to low-income and working-class communities that need protection and support," the board's letter reads. "It is these very tenants that have been a stabilizing force in our community and have made Harlem the place that it is today."