No Fun to Stay at the YMCA: Chelsea Y Moves to Oust Tenants
By Colby Lenz

As the McBurney YMCA’s management continues to lead potential buyers through its buildings on West 23rd Street, tenants, advocates, and elected officials continue to fight for the tenants to stay. Relieved that the rumored Sept. 1 move-out date was lifted, the building’s 34 residents still live in limbo, fearing that they will wake up to find an eviction notice on their door any day.

In early July the McBurney YMCA surprised its tenants with the news that they would soon be forced to leave their homes. In line with the city-wide move away from affordable housing, the YMCA plans to sell the 95-year-old building at 215 West 23rd St. to build a new health club without residences. This move is particularly serious, because in a time when SRO housing is disappearing rapidly, the Y provides one of the last sources of affordable housing for non-special-needs tenants.

Attempting to defend the YMCA against bad press reports and pressure from tenants, elected officials and tenant advocates, Paula Gavin, president of the YMCA of Greater New York, claimed that “it is not [the YMCA’s] intent to evict any long-term residents… it is our intention to assist them in locating alternative suitable housing.” But in July, when the YMCA introduced a few of the tenants to Lutheran Social Services (the organization hired to relocate tenants), one tenant asked about the organization’s success rate in finding housing. The social workers, whom the YMCA had presented as experts, replied that this was the first time they had undertaken such a mass relocation.

The YMCA also refuses to acknowledge that while most of the 34 tenants are not covered by the city’s rent-regulation laws (because of the YMCA’s nonprofit status), the ones who moved in before 1971 are covered and cannot be forced to leave. YMCA officials, who tell potential buyers that the buildings will be delivered vacant, persist in evading the fact that some of these rent-controlled tenants plan to stay.

In mid-July, a majority of the McBurney’s tenants started the McBurney Y Tenants’ Association to organize against the YMCA’s attempts to force them out. Supported by the Chelsea Housing Group, the Chelsea Coalition on Housing, the West Side SRO Law Project, Councilmember Christine Quinn, State Senator Tom Duane, and Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, these tenants are busy writing letters of protest, speaking out at community meetings and planning their next steps for preserving their homes.

After two months of tedious nonprofit-gone-corporate rhetoric and meetings between YMCA officials and tenants and their supporters, it seems as though little has changed. Despite repeated public commitments by Paul Kooster, vice-president of operations at the Greater New York YMCA, to “seriously consider alternatives to relocating tenants,” the YMCA now sends out festive weekly faxes describing the “progress” of the relocation process. The YMCA has offered no alternatives, and recently shot down every issue the tenants’ association brought to an agenda-setting meeting for an upcoming forum called by the YMCA to “address tenant concerns.”

Concurrently, the coalition of support for the tenants continues to grow. Some members of the McBurney YMCA’s health club are now pressuring the YMCA to reconsider evicting its tenants. And SRO tenants from around the city are joining in the struggle—a struggle with unsettling and potentially harsh ramifications for both the McBurney’s 34 tenants and the future of affordable housing on the whole.

To show support for the McBurney tenants, please write or call Paula Gavin at 337 7th Ave., New York, NY 10001; (212) 630-9600.

Colby Lenz is a tenant organizer with the West Side SRO Law Project.