Judge tells NYC housing agency to rethink removing residents
By SAMUEL MAULL
Associated Press Writer
January 12, 2006, 6:25 PM EST
NEW YORK -- A Manhattan judge has ordered a city housing agency to reconsider findings that would evict 31 tenants, most of them Jewish, from apartments in a Brooklyn development to make room for nonwhite families, primarily Hispanics.
State Supreme Court Justice Walter B. Tolub granted the request of several Jewish residents of Roberto Clemente Plaza, in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section, who asked the court to reverse the city's finding that they had no right to the apartments.
The judge said the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), through Clemente's operator, Kent Village Housing Co. Inc., ignored its own rules by improperly approving the 31 leases. He said HPD, after discovering its own errors, was now playing "catch-up ball" for legal and political reasons.
HPD ordered the evictions, beginning in July 1998, after hearings at which "Kent failed to submit any evidence contradicting" the petitioners, the judge said. He also said the hearing officer ignored proof that the Clemente residents might have been entitled to stay.
"Such conduct cannot be condoned," the judge wrote in a harshly worded 13-page decision. "Violating one minority group's due process rights is not the way for a government agency to meet its commitment to another minority group."
David Berger, lawyer for the petitioners, praised the judge's ruling, calling it "a great decision."
Berger and tenant activist Isaac Abraham said some Jewish families who were targeted for eviction moved out rather than stay and fight. Abraham said he and other activists are asking those former tenants to return and demand their apartments.
A lawyer for HPD and Kent, Debra Hochman, said she was "disappointed" with the ruling. She said the apartment occupants were denied successor tenancies in the city-aided housing development because "they did not meet the legal requirements to be entitled to live there."
"HPD's determinations were completely proper and lawful and should have been upheld," Hochman said Thursday, adding that the agency was considering its legal options.
The head of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a Hispanic civil rights group, said he thought the judge had made "a bad decision."
"I think it's tortured logic," the fund's Cesar Perales said. "It seems to me this judge was trying real hard to come up with a reason not to have HPD evict these people."
But the judge said HPD's actions were not rational since it was trying to kick the tenants out after approving the tenancies through Kent, which acted as HPD's agent even while it was breaking HPD's rules with the agency's "tacit acquiescence."
The petitioners' complaints and the judge's ruling early this week arose from HPD's attempt to comply with a 1990 agreement that reserved 16 apartments for Hispanics in the 532-unit housing development, which is named after the Puerto Rican baseball Hall of Famer.
Hispanic tenant activists contended for years that Jewish tenants illegally passed leases on to distant family members to keep Hispanics from getting the apartments.
The judge said HPD admitted that apartments for the Hispanic families in Clemente Plaza were to be found by passing over 16 white families on the development's waiting list.
In 1998, Kent was still having trouble finding apartments to comply with the 1990 agreement, so HPD did an "application and recertification audit," the judge said.
All the petitioners had received their apartments by succeeding tenants with whom they had lived and by signing leases with Kent between 1990 and 1997.
Upon receiving lease applications, Kent had two choices _ deny them in writing or send them to HPD for approval. But the judge said Kent devised a third way, not provided for by law: issue leases without HPD approval.
In June 1998, HPD told Kent that the recertification audit showed the company had "permitted inappropriate succession practices" for years.
HPD questioned the succession rights of 26 tenants, all Jewish, and then Kent questioned the succession rights of 10 other tenants, some Jewish, the judge said.
Thirty-one of the targeted tenants sued. The case was dismissed, and the dismissal was upheld on appeal in June 2003.
HPD then held administrative hearings, and the tenants lost.
The judge said that when he got the case the tenants alleged that "HPD totally discarded its own regulatory scheme and devised a new, unfair and unauthorized scheme."
The judge agreed.
The tenants, "who relied on leases issued to them by Kent, are now in the position of being ousted from homes they have settled in, at the height of New York's rental market, simply because Kent failed to comply with the regulations it was obligated to follow, and HPD allowed it to do so," the judge wrote.
The judge sent the case back to HPD, telling the agency to reconsider its findings and to follow its own rules in deciding whether any of the petitioners is eligible to remain in the disputed apartments.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--housingfight0112jan12,0,2330795,print.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
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