Vets getting the shaft from HPD

From the NY Post:

The city is fighting a secret war against veterans — not only ignoring laws that give them preference for affordable housing but also pushing legally to erase the rules.

Air Force vet Aaron Glover, 50, is suing the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for failing to favor retired service members applying for Mitchell-Lama developments.

Glover, who works for Manhattan’s VA medical center, applied for a $600-a-month studio apartment at Manhattan’s Henry Phipps Plaza East last summer after seeing a newspaper ad.

But HPD staff never sifted through the nearly 30,000 applications to pick out veterans, said Glover’s attorney, Pete Kempner.

By law, ex-military are to be put at the top of the waiting list, ahead of other applicants who are placed on the list through a random lottery. Instead, HPD has been applying the veteran’s preference only after a lottery is conducted.

Last month, HPD proposed new rules that would weaken the veteran’s preference — applying it only if vets are lucky enough to be picked out of a lottery of thousands of applicants.

Since 2007, state law has required Mitchell-Lama developments — middle-income rental and cooperative housing built through government incentives — to give preference to disabled vets. Three years later, the law was expanded to include all veterans.

Still, a 2012 state audit found few veterans benefited from the rule. Across 18 HPD-supervised buildings, only 14 of 332 vacancies were filled by former servicemen or women. Two developments illegally skipped over vets on their waiting lists.