SRO Housing: For Tourists or New Yorkers?
By Frank BrodheadSingle-room occupancy housing is perhaps the most vulnerable sector of affordable, privately owned housing in New York. It was once home to more than 100,000 New Yorkers; most of the remaining 40,000 live in Manhattan, where they are being battered by the powerful tides of a strong real-estate market.
SRO residents typically pay about $100 a week for a 9' x 12' room, sharing a bathroom and/or communal kitchen with others on their floor. It’s not for everyone, but SROs fill an important niche for many seniors, beginning workers, or just low-income people.
A large portion of Manhattan’s SRO housing is in residential hotels, especially on the West Side. It is here that the tourist boom has had it greatest effect, tempting even fourth- and fifth-string hotels to dress themselves up as tourist hotels offering rooms at $75 and $100 per night. To cash in on this bonanza, hotel operators must not only advertise widely and make cosmetic improvements, but force out permanent residents to make room for the tourists. Many hotel owners also try to upgrade their buildings, combining small rooms into bigger ones, or installing private baths. Some owners do this one room at a time; others attempt to redo their entire building at once.
Different landlord strategies produce different kinds of problems for long-term residents. But all tenants are affected by the city’s failure to enforce legal protections now on the books. One such protection is the requirement on an owner to obtain a “certificate of no harassment” prior to adding bathrooms or changing the “room count” of their buildings. Obtaining a certificate, issued by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, is usually automatic: HPD only denied three of the 649 applications made between 1993 and 1998.
New life was breathed into this process last week when HPD denied a certificate of no harassment to Property Markets Group (PMG). for the Allerton Hotel on East 57th Street. PMG is currently the most aggressive of Manhattan’s hotel “converters,” having recently purchased four SRO hotels. It is a strident violator of tenants’ rights; the 90 permanent residents of the West Side’s Broadway-American now live in the midst of a construction zone, and tenants at the Commander Hotel have filed dozens of harassment and other grievances since PMG took over a year ago.
The tenant victory at the Allerton, whose case was presented at HPD by the East Side SRO Law Project, is important. It may have some effect on PMG’s ongoing harassment of tenants at the Commander and their other East Side hotel, the Martha Washington. And it may send a signal to other hotel converters that they can’t get an automatic “pass” on tenant harassment. But will it automatically stop the conversion of the Allerton? Legally, yes. PMG can’t get necessary work permits without their certificate. But in practice many hotel owners have converted much or all of their buildings without a certificate, and sometimes without any permits whatsoever.
Responsibility for stopping “illegal conversions” rests with the Department of Buildings, which has the power to issue “stop work” orders and enforce them against owners who continue work. Yet in practice it rarely does this. To try to change this Councilmember Ronnie Eldridge (D-Manhattan) has introduced two bills that attempt to require, rather than simply allow, the DOB to issue stop-work orders and take other steps to stem illegal conversions. The department predictably this bill, and the Mayor’s office has refused to allow it to even meet with the bill’s advocates to discuss some compromise. Thus the bill lies dead in the water, and the city’s protections for its SRO residents remain mostly theoretical.
SRO Tenants United meets at the Goddard-Riverside Community Center on the first Tuesday of each month. To learn more, call (212) 799-9638.