Hope Community is courting tenants and is in talks with the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development for help purchasing all or part of the 47-building portfolio, which entered foreclosure proceedings last year.
Dawnay, Day bought the portfolio in 2007 for $235 million--an astronomical sum, considering the modest rents most tenants pay. The goal was to bring in wealthier tenants. When that didn't happen and the firm was unable to keep up with mortgage payments, the owners withdrew services, failed to make necessary repairs and in short order defaulted--leaving tenants with collapsed ceilings, rats, leaks and broken elevators. Now Hope wants to step in.
“These buildings are in the neighborhood where our buildings are, sometimes right next door. Our interest is to preserve affordable housing, to keep this resource for the community,” says Walter Roberts, Hope Community's executive director.
The Hope LDC has a long history in El Barrio. It owns 74 buildings with 1,300 apartments for low-income tenants and employs 500 people. Founded in 1968 to reclaim abandoned and deteriorating housing, Hope also provides below-market commercial space to local businesses and has partnered with private developers to build mixed-income housing, including a series of townhouses on East 120th Street with $1 million sale prices.
Owning and managing buildings for people who aren't poor is a departure for the city's nonprofit housing industry. But Roberts says providing for a diversity of people who want to live in East Harlem is important. He says safe, decent affordable housing remains the groups' core mission. If Hope acquired the Dawnay, Day portfolio it would keep the buildings in rent stabilization and rent to low-income tenants, Roberts says.
Buyer meets skepticism
But Juan Haro, an organizer with the Movement for Justice in El Barrio, which has been organizing Dawnay, Day tenants since 2004, isn't so sure.
Movement for Justice (MFJ) members say Hope Community runs buildings rife with safety violations and that a steady schedule of gut renovations has displaced vulnerable tenants and raised rents in a neighborhood hard-pressed by gentrification.
“We don't want Hope Community because we know that they are a bad landlord,” says Maria Mercado, 49, who lives in one of the Dawnay, Day buildings and has been active with MFJ for the past year and a half. “There are a number of Hope tenants who’ve come to our meetings and who've marched with us,” she says.
One of those is Jan Morales, 60, who says she lived in a building on East 109th Street when Hope took it over in 1995. The next year Hope moved her to another property so they could do a major renovation. But Morales claims she was never permitted back into her original apartment and that rent was far higher in the new one. When Morales lost a rental assistance benefit tied to her daughter last year, and her $697 a month in supplemental social security income wasn't enough to cover the rent and groceries, Hope evicted her. Morales, who has been living in a homeless shelter on 125th Street since April, claims Hope never offered her assistance in finding a job, applying for an alternative subsidy or getting a less expensive apartment.
Roberts says he can't comment on things that happened before he became executive director in January. “We do everything we can to make sure tenants aren't inconvenienced during rehabilitation. But have their been mistakes? Of course. What program runs without some mistakes?” he says.
