SRO Tenants: Affordable Housing Under Siege
By Frank Brodhead

Single-room occupancy (SRO) housing forms a small but strategically important part of the fight to keep affordable housing in Manhattan. A tidal wave of real-estate speculation, fueled by New York City’s tourist boom and by the weakening of rent regulations, threatens to engulf much of the remaining SRO housing in Manhattan, now home to some 25,000 people. At the same time, SRO tenants have organized and fought back. SRO Tenants United, based on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, now has several hundred members and has played an active role in city-wide coalitions and on behalf of SRO tenants.

Who lives in SRO housing?

SRO housing provides residents with a single room. They usually share a bathroom and sometimes a common kitchen area. In the West Side of Manhattan, most SRO units are located in residential hotels. In other boroughs, and in other parts of Manhattan, most notably in Harlem, SRO housing usually means a 12 to 24-unit brownstone, often converted long ago from a single-family residence to a rooming house.

Most people who live in SRO housing have incomes of under $10,000 per year, and 50% pay more than half of their income as rent. About two out of five are employed, and most of the others are disabled or retired. About 20% of SRO residents receive the public-assistance shelter allowance of $215 per month. Typical rents range from $90 to $125 per week.

Roots of Conflict

In Manhattan the conflict between SRO landlords and tenants is focused on the conversion of SRO housing to other uses: tourists, students, or conversion to apartments. A large number of SRO hotels have recently changed hands, purchased with the intention of clearing out the long-term tenants and renovating the rooms to make them attractive to tourists.

One dramatic example of hotel conversion is the work of Property Markets Group (PMG), which has largely emptied the Broadway American on West 77th Street. The remaining tenants there live in the middle of a noisy and hazardous construction site. A few blocks south, at the Commander Hotel, tenants say PMG employs private investigators to pry into their lives, attempting to learn who might be vulnerable to eviction on the grounds that it’s not their primary residence or is an illegal sublet.

Tenants at the Commander also accuse PMG of deliberately reducing services as a form of harassment intended to make them move out: more than 100 tenants recently filed a massive complaint with the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. And on Manhattan’s East Side, PMG has just bought the Martha Washington and the Allerton hotels, historic women’s residences which it vows to convert to tourist use. Their first step was to bring in men in an attempt to intimidate and harass the long-term women residents.

The good news is that tenants from the several PMG buildings have made contact through SRO Tenants United. They see united action—legal, political, and through direct action—as critical to their chances to maintain their homes.

The Fight for Intro 108

SRO tenants are supposedly protected by a city ordinance that requires owners who want to convert SRO housing to other uses to first obtain a “Certificate of No Harassment.” The purpose of this law is to protect SRO tenants from harassment intended to force them out of their homes, a common landlord practice to facilitate construction and conversion. (Conversion usually involves combining two small rooms into a “suite,” with a bathroom and kitchenette.) In recent years the number of applications for certificates has more than doubled, with about 1,500 units per year slated for legal conversion.

Many SRO landlords don’t or can’t (because of a history of harassment) seek certificates before attempting to convert their building. Instead, they falsify their work-permit application, or obtain a lower-level work permit that doesn’t require a certificate, and then proceed to work beyond the scope of the permit. In these situations, SRO tenants and their advocates find that the city Department of Buildings seldom issues stop-work orders, rarely enforces them, and never rescinds a work permit when fraud or illegal work is discovered. In fact, entire hotels, such as Midtown’s Amsterdam Court or the West Side’s Simmons House, have been converted from residential to tourist hotels without proper permits at all, and in the face of numerous stop-work orders.

In an attempt to plug these loopholes in law and enforcement, Councilmember Ronnie Eldridge (D-Manhattan) is sponsoring Intro 108. The general thrust of this bill is to require (rather than just to allow) the Department of Buildings to issue stop-work orders and to rescind work permits when landlords obtain them by fraud or do work beyond the scope of their permit. It also requires the department to monitor work in SRO buildings through regular inspections and requires it to issue a stop-work order at the request of the city housing commissioner, something that now rarely happens. Intro 108 also defines “illegal work,” or work without a Certificate of No Harassment, as a form of landlord harassment. (Needless to say, the Department of Buildings opposes the bill.)

A similar bill was introduced in the City Council late last year and died in the Housing and Buildings Committee. This year, after several months of fruitless effort to get the committee to hold a hearing on Intro 108, one was finally scheduled and invitations to testify were sent out—only to be suddenly withdrawn when the hearing was “deferred.” A spokesperson for committee chair Archie Spigner (D-Queens) said that the hearing had been canceled because of a scheduling conflict. Insiders say that calls from the Department of Buildings and the Rent Stabilization Association were the reasons for the cancellation.

To resurrect Intro 108, SRO tenants need the support of the broader tenants’ movement. There is little incentive for Council- members and politicians outside of Manhattan’s West Side and Harlem to support SRO tenants, so they need to be persuaded that SRO housing is an affordable-housing issue that affects all New Yorkers.

SRO tenants need calls and letters to Councilmembers asking for support for Intro 108, and calls to Council Speaker Peter Vallone demanding that the Housing and Buildings Committee hold hearings on Intro 108. Vallone’s district office phone is (718) 274-4500; his campaign office is (718) 433-1998.

Frank Brodhead is an organizer with the West Side SRO Law Project