CREEPS  ixx

Eviction from ones’ home

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Being evicted from one’s home is a traumatic experience. Millions of people have had to suffer from this traumatic experience. The majority of them are evicted because they are in arears of their rent or mortgage payments. Other reasons are because the tenants  are noisy. Tenants can also legitimately be evicted if they are selling illicit drugs from their residences. These are valid reasons for evictions.

However, there are improper reasons for evictions. Here are some examples.

Joseph Betesh, the owner of the Dr. Jay’s clothing store chain, acquired the two five-story buildings at 83 and 85 Bowery, half a block north of the Manhattan Bridge, along with nine other Bowery buildings for $62 million in 2013. 

The two redbrick buildings were constructed in 1910. Owned by the same family between the 1930s and 2013, they were lodging houses renting out cheap cubicles until 1980–81, when they were converted into apartments, with twelve units in 83 and sixteen in 85. The current tenants are mostly restaurant and garment-factory workers. Some have lived there for twenty to thirty years, and they generally pay $1,000 to $1,200 a month in rent.

According to court documents filed by tenants, Betesh then refused to renew their leases. In March 2016, after trying to evict one resident on the grounds that the building was not rent-stabilized and so tenants had no guaranteed right to a lease renewal, he filed a request in the State Supreme Court to evict them all.

The tenants agued that the landlord was concocting a string of excuses to empty the two buildings so he can renovate them for luxury housing or have the building torn down for the construction of a new building.

“We realized that he wanted to evict everybody,” tenant leader Shu Qing Wang, who’s lived in 83 Bowery for five years, told the Voice through an interpreter at a rally in front of the buildings on July 19^th 2019. Approximately 150 people in front of the building chanted, “Fan bi qian, bao jia yuan” — Mandarin for “No displacement, save our homes.”

Betesh tried to evict Wang first, in early 2015, Cao. the tenant’s representative  said, “The other tenants in the buildings chipped in to hire a lawyer and architect. They knew that the issue was not just about one apartment.”

Earlier in 2015, both the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the tenants filed “HP actions,” Housing Court cases intended to force Betesh to make such repairs as fixing the stairs and getting rid of rats. In February 2016, the court ordered the landlord to complete the repairs by the end of that April. He never made those deadlines, according to  lawyer Seth Miller, who began representing the tenants in the fall of 2016.

Because the old leases had not been renewed, Betesh tried to claim that the buildings’ residents were “month-to-month” tenants and in January 2016 he sent the residents of 27 apartments notices that those tenancies would be terminated in 30 days.      

In March, the landlord filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court demanding that all of the tenants be evicted on the grounds that the building had to be vacated in order to make critical repairs, that it was not rent stabilized, and that they had no right to stay because he’d terminated their rights as month-to-month tenants.

He further requested that the Housing Court case against Wang be included, that the tenants’ HP actions be stayed, and that the court issue a preliminary injunction prohibiting the tenants from using the building as their residences until the case was resolved. That would be equivalent of evicting them.

Mr. Miller Acting for the landlord, claimed that evictions were needed for required structural repairs. Obviously that  was a faster path than going the route  tenant by tenant and having to deal with the rent-stabilization issue first.”

In a May 2016 court settlement agreement that Public Advocate Letitia James helped broker with Betesh was that the landlord offered to give the tenants 99-year leases if they’d agree to be temporarily relocated during repairs. They rejected that deal, arguing that the repairs could be done while the building was still occupied, and fearing that rent increases, which the proposed settlement didn’t stipulate, would be far more than they could afford.  renovation, all the rent will go up. Mr. Cao, speaking for the tenants said. “They didn’t want to tell us how much. Once we moved out, we knew we could never come back.”

        

Mr. Miller, the lawyer representing the tenants said, “Their plan is to spend $2.5 million to make the building gentrified. The last thing they want is to have these tenants stay. As major-capital improvements in smaller buildings are prorated over eight years, a $2.5 million renovation could yield permanent rent increases of more than $900 a month.”

 

The landlord’s lawsuit made two main claims. First, it argued that the buildings should not be rent stabilized because they were lodging houses, not apartments, when the state rent-stabilization law was enacted in 1974  and were converted to apartments just before single-room-occupancy rentals were put under rent stabilization in June 1981. It also claimed that the conversion was a substantial enough renovation to qualify the structure as a new building.

The tenants responded by stating that the buildings should be rent stabilized, because they were built before 1974 and have more than five apartments, and a 1982 appeals-court decision held that the rent-stabilization law covered lodging houses retroactively. They also deny that the 1980–81 renovations were substantial enough to deregulate the building. Their architect presented evidence that the conversion did not meet the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s standard of replacing 75 percent of building-wide systems such as plumbing, heating, and gas supply.

There was  another major claim that the buildings have too many structural defects to be repaired while the tenants are there. HPD cites the sagging stairway and halls among the eleven open Class C (“immediately hazardous”) violations at 85 Bowery. An engineer hired by the landlord claimed in January 2016 that 85 Bowery had to be vacated because of badly cracked joists on the stairwell and for asbestos abatement, and that 83 “is probably in bad shape.”

The staircase at 85 Bowery is a major problem, Miller said at the July 19 rally, but the tenants’ architect estimated it could be fixed for about $110,000. Christine Hobson, who is a senior structural engineer at Rand Engineering hired by the tenants, wrote in a court affidavit in April 2016 that the bad staircase joists could be replaced while the tenants remained in their apartments if protective barriers were installed in the hallways. Regarding 83 Bowery, she added, “a building should not be vacated based on the supposition that it is ‘probably in as bad shape’ as another building,” and “a quick inspection of one apartment and building stairs is a slim suggestion upon which to recommend that the that the tenants beforced to vacate the building.”

In a September 2016 court stipulation, Betesh agreed to let tenants stay temporarily in exchange for them agreeing to put the HP action on hold  and extend the deadline for repairs.

Later that sane month, he filed another motion demanding their immediate eviction, claiming that surveillance cameras he’d installed showed that most of the apartments were overcrowded, and alleging that tenants were illegally renting out rooms.

The tenant’s’ lawyer Miller said.  “The landlord wants people to think that they aren’t real tenants that they aren’t the same people who are on the leases.  They lied,” Miller said at last week’s rally. “We’re going to show the courts and the city the truth. This is stabilized housing and it can be repaired.”

In May, the State Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Freed referred to the disrepair and rent-stabilization questions to the DHCR. A court conference on the case was scheduled for November 30^th .

The battle on the Bowery is just part of a larger war currently playing out in a Chinatown being pressed on all sides by gentrification. The owner of 231 Henry Street, several blocks southeast, is also trying to evict remaining long-time tenants by claiming that the twelve-apartment building is not rent stabilized, said Bao Gai Huang, a 62-year-old garment worker who’s lived there since the mid-Nineties. The landlord stopped accepting his rent in 2016, telling him, “You’re not my tenant anymore,” he said. The case is now in court, with the owner ordered to accept rent and let the tenants stay temporarily  but it is already, vacated and the apartments are renting for $3,000 a month.

Betesh’s attempted mass eviction of his tenants “really shows how severe the issue of displacement is in our community,” Renquan Yang of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association said at a rally.

While harassment intended to drive out rent-stabilized tenants has become a common business model over the last decade or so, mass evictions are relatively rare, because they need a plausible legal pretext. However, they are more common in Chinatown, because of the housing stock’s age and sometimes dubious legal status. In 2011, the new owner of a five-story building at 11 Allen Street moved to evict all the building’s tenants because the previous landlord had never bothered to obtain a certificate of occupancy. He succeeded, and apartments there  increased the rent up to $4,400 a month. That is $62. 900 a year.

The Chinese Staff and Workers Association contended that much of this displacement would not be happening if the city had included Chinatown in its 2008 rezoning of the East Village that set height, density, and affordability standards. A plan proposed in 2012 by the Chinatown Working Group would have put restrictions on new construction in Chinatown including a requirement that 40 to 55 percent of apartments built be affordable to people making less than $40,000 a year. The Department of City Planning rejected the plan in 2015 was what  a spokesperson  called it “too vast an undertaking.”

“Failing to extend the zoning restrictions much south of Delancey Street channeled development into Chinatown and the southern Lower East Side.” said Zishun Ning of CSWA. “Displacement has become “very rampant” in the past two or three years  because of the profits, the landlords want to drive out rent-stabilized tenants.”

Just up the block from 83-85 Bowery is the teal-blue glass Wyndham Garden Hotel. Across the street is a new eight-story glass building. A scaffold platform over the sidewalk signifies the renovation of the seven-story building next door. Around the corner on Hester Street is a partially excavated vacant lot, the former site of a building that thirty people had to leave after it was irreparably damaged during the hotel’s construction in 2009.

Six blocks north, in another of the eleven buildings from the 2013 deal, Milestone Equities is offering a 3,500-square-foot loft for $13,500 a month. And if 83 Bowery is in serious danger of collapsing, that has not stopped Milestone from offering its commercial space through the RKF retail real estate broker, touting the more than 6,700 square feet available on the first floor, second floor, and basement.

The tilting staircase at 85 Bowery leads up to narrow hallways, the doors festooned with red-and-gold good-luck decorations. In a second-floor apartment with neat dark-red linoleum on the floor, four children with ages ranging from toddler to preteen play on the couch. Speaking in Mandarin through an interpreter, Shui Feng Zheng, who’s lived in the building for nineteen years, points out the tacked-up wood rectangles used to patch holes in the ceiling, and the new — actually working — gas stove installed after the tenants filed their lawsuit demanding repairs.

“I want to tell the landlord not to evict us because there are a lot of older folks here and a lot of young kids, including babies,” says Zheng, 46, a mother of three from China’s Fujian province. “Where would we go? The kids go to school here. This is our home.”

All of what I wrote in this article took pace in 2017. I don’t know what occurred after that that year. I wrote this article anyway because it gives you some idea of what some landlords will do to make an extra buck even if it means evicting their long-time  tenants.