Layla Law-Gisiko, Nov 2, 2025

At Chelsea Addition, the NYCHA senior building in Chelsea, a tenant said she wanted to stay. Her belongings were packed anyway. In the corridor, fourteen cardboard boxes filled with her possessions waited to be transported elsewhere, somewhere where Ms. Cheung (name changed to protect tenant’s privacy) said she did not want to go.

When housing advocates asked how the boxes had come to be packed, a relocation consultant from Housing Opportunities Unlimited (HOU) called the police. Officers from the 10th Precinct arrived and, without producing a deed or a judge’s order, announced that the building had been sold and that tenants would be well advised to comply.

The young HOU staffer said that the tenant had agreed to move. And that her move-out day was coming up. The staffer insisted she even signed a new lease. But Ms. Cheung denied it. A neighbor came by to lend support. While all remained civil, the commotion was great, exchanges were tense and unnecessarily intimidating, with cops speaking of risk of protest and HOU speaking of outside agitators. What they ignored was Ms. Cheung who persistently said she did not want to leave.

HOU pressed Ms. Cheung to “view” a relocation unit. Ms. Cheung looked scared but eventually she agreed. She entered the elevator escorted by the police officers. When her neighbor and I stepped in with them, we were ordered to step out. When we arrived downstairs, there was no sign of Ms. Cheung. A grim conjecture flickered: had the viewing become a move? The neighbor and friend was worried.

Two hours later, Ms. Cheung reemerged, surrounded by HOU staff, police officers and family members, from the adjacent building. The visit of the relocation unit had concluded. Ms. Cheung looked exhausted and sad. Through the translator, she told us that the building smelled of urine; the elevator door was manual and heavy, push, then pull, beyond her capacity. She was allowed to go back to her apartment. She did not need permission from anyone but the pressure lingered.

Once she was back home, we asked her if she wanted us to put the boxes back in her apartment. She said yes. We started putting the boxes from the corridor in. The apartment, already tight, could not absorb fourteen cartons of a life. We promised to come back the next day.

But when we arrived the following day, the corridor had been cleared. The boxes were gone. Ms. Cheung was in her apartment. She greeted us with a giant smile. “No move, no move” she told us proudly. The boxes sounded unimportant to her because she was relieved to be in her home. 

Soon after, Caitlin Coleman, of HOU, arrived and objected to the presence of housing advocates. She repeated that Ms. Cheung wanted to move; she asked why anyone else, advocates and translators, was there at all. “Why are you interfering?” she kept saying. When asked where the boxes had gone, she did not say. I suggested that Ms. Cheung call 911 to report missing property. The suggestion did not land well with Caitlin who erupted. “You are telling an elderly person to call 911, that would cause her so much stress. How dare you?!” Which sounded like a strange statement given that just the day before, HOU staffers had called 911 to handle the very same elderly person. A HOU-hired translator was summoned. Family was phoned. Pressure migrated from corridor to speakerphone. When none of it budged the central fact that Ms. Cheung did not want to move, Ms. Coleman offered a truce of logistics: “we’ll come back tomorrow” she said.

Later that day, in a neighbor’s living room, with a translator, Ms. Cheung added context. She told us that weeks earlier, a relative had taken her to the HOU office. She explained that a Chinese-speaking HOU staffer alluded to a family-related form already signed and was told said she must sign too.  She thought it was standard renewal paperwork. She did not recall receiving a copy of what she signed. She said she felt misled. Ms Cheung’s sadness and despair was palpable.

When we finally left the building, we noticed that the intercom directory had been erased. The little digital screen now reads Directory is empty.  As if vacating a building full of seniors is as easy as hitting the DELETE button on some App. Now when visitors, home care attendants or even emergency personnel need to access the building, they cannot be given entry. It is a critical safety issue. 

What happened over these two days has a familiar choreography. Belongings are removed before rights are adjudicated; the presence of officers lends the sheen of authority to what remains, in the end, a housing dispute. The law is not baroque: without a court order and a marshal, there is no eviction. To the knowledge of those on the floor, there was no order, no marshal, and not even the necessary federal approval of demolition. 

These behaviors may amount to constructive eviction. It covers the acts that make a home unlivable without ever turning a key: the packed boxes, the vanished directory, the door too heavy to use, the suggestion that resistance is not only futile but impolite.

It is also a way of ignoring the sentence that Ms. Cheung repeated, quietly and without ceremony, on both days. Her command of English is limited but this one sentence she has nailed: No move, no move. 

At Chelsea Addition, we are witnessing a subtraction of rights.

Source: Layla Law-Gisiko