Landlord Tapped by City to Save Affordable Units Also Leads in Evictions
(DNAINFO) Carolina Pichardo and Amy Zimmer | January 24, 2017 — A&E, which got tax breaks to preserve affordable housing, is a top landlord for filing eviction cases.
Much of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan hinges on the preservation of existing affordable units.
But advocates worry that some landlords who get city subsidies to preserve affordable housing are the very same landlords who have the highest rates attempting to evict tenants from rent stabilized homes — and are therefore contributing to the loss of affordable housing.
One of the prime examples, they say, is A&E Real Estate Holdings.
A&E, which is believed to be the fifth biggest landlord in the city, inked a $201 million deal in 2015 to buy Harlem’s Riverton complex and pledged to keep its nearly 1,000 units affordable over the next 30-plus years in exchange for $100 million worth of tax breaks and incentives from the city, according to reports.
James Patchett, the incoming head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation who previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, the mayor’s point person for affordable housing, recently highlighted that deal, which he brokered, as a source of pride in reaching the administration’s housing goals.
“I really felt like I was representing [the tenants] as their agent, the person who was standing on the public side with the strength and the tools to ensure that they were protected,” Patchett told the Real Deal last week.
But A&E was also responsible for filing more than 2,230 evictions cases between January 2013 and June 2015, according to an analysis by Rentlogic, a rental listings platform that aims to empower tenants by using open source data to grade landlords on things like vermin infestations, mold problems and construction violations.
Rentlogic’s Yale Fox questioned whether the city should be so quick to praise such a deal.