GOTHAMIST, David Brand, Published Mar 28, 2023

A Lower East Side landlord who received more than $200,000 from the city in exchange for renting apartments to formerly homeless New Yorkers has filed to evict them, court documents show.

During a pandemic-induced slump in the rental market in 2021, the owners of a 20-unit building at 67 Pitt St. leased apartments to 11 tenants who were living in homeless shelters at the time. Those tenants qualified for a Special One-Time Assistance, or SOTA, grant that covered their rent for one year, with the payment from the city going directly to the building’s landlord.

But after their leases expired, the landlord did not give the tenants the option to renew their agreements and rents went up by about $700, residents said. The landlord, 67 Pitt Realty LLC, filed to evict all 11 residents in January after residents stopped paying rent. The residents now say they are at risk of returning to shelters, pointing to gaps in the city’s safety net programs and tenant protections.

“I’ll probably try to stay with a couple friends here and there or go back to the stupid shelter system,” said first-floor resident James Eley, 41. “I just want somewhere to live, where I can be comfortable and go to work.”

Under current law, landlords are not required to issue a new lease unless an apartment is rent-stabilized, even for tenants with the government subsidy that guarantees their monthly payments. The 67 Pitt St. apartments were taken out of rent stabilization in 1999, based on renovations made 15 years earlier, according to state records.

According to Kevin Duffy-Greaves, a supervising attorney with Mobilization for Justice who is representing Eley, the situation reflects a number of problems facing the city’s low-income renters. These include a possible return to shelter for once-homeless tenants; a denial of a new lease; a nearly 50% rent increase; limits in the city’s right-to-counsel law (seven of the 11 tenants do not have an attorney); and the flaw in a housing subsidy meant to keep people in apartments.

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