By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM — The tenants of a crumbling city-owned building on Fifth Avenue are fighting plans to sell it to a non-profit developer, saying they were unfairly prevented from buying it themselves.
Many tenants now fear that if the sale goes as planned, they will lose their homes for good.
The city says that isn’t true. But the residents have enlisted the help of Community Board 11, which is trying to persuade the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to keep the building out of a developer’s hands.
"This building is family, generations, a home," tenant association president Audrey Quantano said. "Our memories are here. We’ve worked hard, and watched our children grow up and go to college and come back home. We won’t get to have that anymore."
The battle over 2049 Fifth Ave. reflects in many ways the ambivalence about the rapid real-estate changes underway across Harlem.
In an effort to increase the amount of affordable housing, the city has been partnering with developers on a wide array of projects, from new construction to gut renovations, and setting aside some of the apartments for low-income residents. At the same time, many investment firms turned private buildings into market-rate housing.
That has fed concerns among longtime Harlem residents that the neighborhood is no longer a place for struggling and working-class African-Americans.
From the city’s perspective, however, the goal is to preserve and expand the housing stock in neighborhoods decimated by the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, when homeowners abandoned New York. At one point, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development owned 60 percent of Harlem’s residential property through tax foreclosures.
One of the many ways the city unloads its tax-foreclosed housing inventory is the Tenant Interim Lease program, which allows renters to form co-ops and take ownership of their buildings. The building at 2049 Fifth Avenue was accepted into that program in 1997. But it never made it past the planning phase. Last year, HPD removed the building from the program, citing several financial and organizational failures.
"We didn’t see...that they actually wanted to participate in the process," HPD spokesman Eric Bederman said.
HPD arranged to sell the building to West Harlem Group Assistance, a non-profit that plans a complete renovation. In a meeting with Community Board 11, the tenants complained. Officials asked HPD to put the building back into TIL, or another homeownership program.
Alvin Johnson, chairman of the board’s housing committee, said the city failed to help the tenants prepare for homeownership. He and the tenants have come up what with they say is proof that HPD’s claims were invalid. He called the city’s latest actions "a building grab."
Bederman stressed that the West Harlem Group Assistance will allow all existing tenants to return to the building, and that their rents will be capped at 30 percent of their income.
Quantano, a 53-year-old chef and entrepreneur, doesn’t trust those promises. While she spoke, building inspectors came to her apartment to make notes on a rat infestation and broken floor tiles, part of a myriad of problems that she says have gone unaddressed by management for years.
"We want ownership," she said.
