IPN Tenants Organizing Against Buyout

The president of the Independence Plaza tenants association told a crowd of about 350 residents on Oct. 16 that they would have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and round up substantial political support to fight off what the association believes is a threat to their homes.

The tenant leader, Neil Fabricant, said the association was launching a voter registration drive among the complex’s roughly 3,500 residents and asked tenants to pledge at least several hundred dollars to a defense fund.

"We’re not going to let ‘em kick us out of our homes," Fabricant said, eliciting loud applause. "We have one agenda and one agenda only: we want to protect our homes, that’s it." The meeting, at a theater of the Tribeca Performing Arts Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College, was organized to address the probable sale of Independence Plaza (IPN) to a buyer who plans to withdraw from the Mitchell-Lama government housing program. The program keeps IPN rents below market value, and tenants fear that the withdrawal, which will probably take at least one to two years, will cause their rents to skyrocket to unaffordable levels. The crowd, probably the largest to attend an IPN tenants meeting since the complex’s three 39-story towers were built in the mid-1970’s, expressed strong support for the tenant association’s leadership.

"We’re in for a bumpy ride if we try to separate," said Ronald Cappozzoli, who has lived at 40 Harrison Street since 1979. Recently, there had been talk around the complex of oppostion to the tenant leadership, but those attending the meeting appeared to be unified behind Fabricant and the executive board.

With board members sitting at a long table onstage behind him, Fabricant said the association would have to increase its membership and remain united in order to raise support from local elected officials to come up with a plan to protect affordable rents.

"This isn’t about Larry Gluck and it’s not about Harold Cohn," Fabricant said, referring to IPN’s prospective buyer and its current principal owner. "This is about holding politicians accountable. There are four thousand people in this complex. If we hold them accountable, that’s a mighty number. Four thousand people can put an assemblyman, or state senator, or city council member, out of office." Fabricant said Albany legislators have claimed they were fighting for Mitchell-Lama tenants but had not actually pushed for affordable housing. "When the time comes, we’re going to tell you which politicians are helping us for real, and which politicians are getting in the way," he said. The tenant association hopes to devise an alternative to the Cohn-Gluck deal, which must be approved by the city’s Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) and which Fabricant referred to as a "landlord-take-all scenario." He said a real estate finance-consulting firm hired by the tenants association was creating a model for a limited-equity co-op, in which tenants could buy their apartments for below-market prices, and those who declined to buy their apartments would be protected from steep rent increases. "It’ll be something no other Mitchell-Lama in the city has put on the table," Fabricant said. In other residential complexes where landlords withdrew from Mitchell-Lama, even when the tenants fought in court, "the tenants ultimately had to settle for a bad deal," he added. "We need to get to the table with HPD, Gluck, Cohn, and everyone else, and have a bargaining point so we don’t get jerked around." But Fabricant warned that the battle would be expensive.