"It's a terrible wait to live, waiting for what's going to fall next," said Marie Purnell, the president of the Starrett Tenants Association and a 31-year resident of the complex. Purnell said tenants are in the dark about the next step in the Starrett dealmaking, now that HUD had slapped down Clipper again. "Right now, nothing. We don't know" what's next, Purnell said last week.
In the next chapter, DHCR wants to take what Van Amerongen calls "a proactive approach." The turmoil of the past six months can be avoided in the second round if Starrett City Associates first talks with her office, Van Amerongen said.
In fact, the DHCR commissioner said all Mitchell-Lama owners should talk with her office before issuing a contract of sale or before giving tenants notice of their intention to buy out of, or leave, the Mitchell-Lama program.
“They do have the option to buy out,” Van Amerongen said of Mitchell-Lama owners. She added, “We won’t be able to stop every buyout. That’s the nature of the market.”
And the open market will have the final say, should Deane's group or a future owner remove Starrett from Mitchell-Lama. Because Starrett was first occupied in 1974, it doesn't fall under rent stabilization after exiting the Mitchell-Lama program, and it won't be protected by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's recent change to state housing policy (tightening the "unique and peculiar" provision), which only affects pre-1974 Mitchell-Lama complexes.
Instead, the owners would be able to set market-rate rents for the apartments. Probably, most tenants would keep their current rents. Nearly 90 percent of households at Starrett City get federal assistance of one kind or another; those households probably would be eligible for so-called enhanced vouchers, according to Amy Chan, a Mitchell-Lama organizer with Tenants & Neighbors. But, Chan pointed out, when those tenants leave Starrett City, they take with them their enhanced vouchers – and their affordable rents.
