Work-Bites, Steve Wishnia, Mar 28, 2026

A five-judge panel of the state Appellate Division has extended a temporary restraining order stopping the New York City Housing Authority from proceeding with its plan to demolish and privatize two Chelsea public-housing developments for at least seven weeks.

The ruling, issued March 26, bars NYCHA from “taking any action in furtherance of its plan to convert, dispose of, demolish, and redevelop the Chelsea Developments public housing” until a hearing scheduled for May 19.

“The wrecking ball is stalled,” City Council candidate Layla Law-Gisiko told a rally of about 25 people behind the Chelsea Addition senior-housing building at 436 West 27th Drive, one of the first two buildings slated to be demolished under the NYCHA plan.

The ruling came in Duane v. NYCHA, a lawsuit filed by former state Senator Thomas Duane and a group of residents of the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses and the surrounding neighborhood. It’s one of two pending suits seeking to stop the plan to turn the buildings over to the Related Companies, which would then gradually demolish more than 2,000 apartments and replace them with a mix of luxury housing, “affordable” housing, and Section 8 apartments for the developments’ current residents.

The legal machinations are complicated, explains Visnja Vujica, one of the lawyers representing the Elliott-Chelsea Houses Resident Association and Fulton-Elliott-Chelsea Tenants Against Demolition in a separate suit.

In both cases, State Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen refused to grant a preliminary injunction halting the NYCHA plan. In the Duane suit, he held that the plaintiffs were not likely to win on the merits because they had filed too late, on Dec. 22. “Article 78” lawsuits challenging a state or local government’s action must be filed within four months of that action, and NYCHA’s lawyers said it had approved the plan on July 28. They called the suit a “last-minute Hail Mary not grounded in sound advocacy or genuine urgency but rather in gamesmanship.”

But the lawyers in the Duane suit obtained minutes of a NYCHA board meeting from Sept. 18, in which it approved plans to privatize Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea, along with Campos Plaza on the Lower East Side, Bay View in Canarsie, and the Wilson Houses in East Harlem. That would mean the Duane suit had been filed before the four-month deadline.

The Appellate Division ruling continues the temporary restraining order until May 19, when it will hold hearings on whether to grant a preliminary injunction halting the conversion, in both Duane’s and the resident groups’ lawsuits. If granted, that would extend the ban on NYCHA proceeding with the conversion until Judge Cohen rules on the actual merits of the tenants’ challenge.

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