de Blasio is setting up a new deal for the city to buy cluster buildings from another slumlord

 NY Daily News

Ashley Taliercio and her two children have been in their Harlem apartment for three months, but it feels like years.

Each day they’re forced to walk a gauntlet of squalor: caved-in ceilings, used condoms, cigarette butts lining the stairways and constant cold inside their claustrophobic studio.

All of it has begun to numb the 30-year-old mother.

“There’s roaches, there’s fighting. There’s people doing drugs in the hallway,” she told the Daily News, her son crying in her arms, her daughter sitting stone-faced on the bed they share. “It’s not safe. But it is what it is.”

Taliercio lives at 148 W. 124 St., one of 14 buildings in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx the city is planning to buy from Mark Irgang, a landlord who already earns money from the city by housing homeless people in emergency “cluster-site” housing.

The land deal, which the city has treated as a closely guarded secret since announcing it in November, is the second part of its plan to phase out cluster housing by buying it and converting it into permanent affordable apartments.

The practice of housing people in cluster, or scatter-site, apartments has come under fire because the units cost the city a fortune to rent, and are often in a terrible state of disrepair.

Buying the Irgang’s 14 apartment buildings outright will also cost the city, however. Property records show the buildings are worth at least $41 million.

And it won’t just cost in terms of taxpayer money. Buying property from shady landlords does not happen without at least some political fallout. The purchase price in phase one of Mayor de Blasio’s cluster site conversion plan was a major headache for him both before and after the deal’s completion.

He came under fire earlier this year when The News revealed the city would be buying 17 buildings from notorious landlords, Jay and Stuart Podolsky. That was phase one of the plan. The brothers ultimately ended up making $173 million on the deal — despite one city appraisal that valued the properties at just $49 million. The city comptroller launched a probe into the appraisal process, which is ongoing.

Further complicating matters in phase two is that the controversial Acacia Network manages some of the Irgang properties.

Cluster apartments cannot be rented by homeless

From Crains:

As the city phases out a controversial program that placed homeless people in often subpar private housing, a crucial question found its way to state Supreme Court in Brooklyn: Once the de Blasio administration stops paying rent for an apartment, are its residents entitled to lease it themselves?

Wednesday a state judge said no.

The jurist found that participants in the cluster-site program were not tenants in the apartments they occupied and thus have no right to a rent-regulated lease.

Unless the decision is overturned by a higher court, the ruling is likely to discourage future lawsuits by homeless people and to bolster the position of landlords, who did not want to be forced into an agreement with tenants who might have trouble paying rent.

DeBlasio cronies rake in dough for homeless housing

From the Daily News:

Twin brothers with identical eye-popping salaries have been double-dipping off their nonprofit that provides housing to the city’s homeless — even as their clients suffered poor service and have been blindsided by eviction notices.

Mark and Solomon Lazar, the sons of Joseph Lazar, a former political ally of Mayor de Blasio, each make $240,000 a year as the top executives of the Brooklyn-based nonprofit LCG Community Services. But their big checks don’t end there.

The city has paid millions of dollars to LCG Community Services to place homeless families in temporary housing since 2012. The city also awarded LGC a four-year, $10.9 million contract in 2015 to run a Brooklyn shelter.

Mark and Solomon Lazar, in turn, use LCG to pay millions of dollars to a for-profit firm, Razzal Hospitality and Management — which they own.

Razzal manages many of the properties where LCG places homeless families.

In 2016, LCG paid Razzal $2.7 million to manage part of its cluster-site housing — a controversial city program that places homeless families in private apartment buildings, according to the nonprofit’s most recent federal tax filing.

LCG also paid $1.94 million to the Lazar brothers’ private firm in 2015 and $1.4 million in 2014, records show.

Meanwhile, LCG clients who live in cluster housing sites in the Bronx have complained in a lawsuit about bad conditions in their units, including roach infestations, leaky toilets and broken appliances.

De Blasio thinks this is "creative & bold"

From the NY Times:

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city’s reliance on the cluster sites has grown along with the rise in homelessness, which has arguably been the biggest failure of his tenure.

Now the mayor is taking a large step toward ending that reliance: On Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio is expected to announce a plan to essentially convert many of the homeless apartments into affordable housing, hoping to solve a problem that has worsened over his first term.

Under the plan, the city would use public financing to help nonprofits buy roughly a third of the apartments currently used for the homeless, and then convert the apartments into affordable units, helping the mayor fulfill two goals: lowering homelessness and adding to the city’s affordable housing stock.

If landlords do not cooperate, the city intends to use eminent domain to take the property, officials said.

The planned acquisition involves 800 apartments spread throughout 25 to 30 buildings, mostly in the Bronx, which has the overwhelming majority of cluster apartments in the city. The city targeted buildings where more than 50 percent of the units were occupied by homeless people — a threshold that would guide future acquisitions, the city said.

The planned acquisition could place about 3,000 people into permanent housing; in some cases, homeless families living in the apartments would simply stay put, but would no longer be considered homeless. It was not immediately known how much the program would cost the city.

In other words, we're condemning buildings that already house homeless families in order to turn them over to someone else and then reclassifying the people living in them as "not homeless". This sounds like a plan. A bad one.

Why Queens is being inundated with shelters

Hey all, this info came to me late last night. As you can see from the City's own chart above, Acacia Network, the "social service" organization that is responsible for the poorly run Verve Hotel in LIC and which is planning to open a shelter at the Holiday Inn Express in Maspeth, has so many problems and violations at its other shelters that the city is closing them down. "C" means closed and "P" means pending closure. So where to put all the homeless that Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx are responsible for? Why QUEENS, of course! That's the fair thing to do after all. Burden overtaxed working and middle class homeowners so that a charity with a long history of coming up short for both the city and its clients can continue to enrich themselves.

There is no huge increase in numbers of homeless, just fewer sites to place them. You'll notice the line highlighted in green is about an adult couples shelter that has 39 rooms. The city is claiming that if the Maspeth community can come up with an alternate site containing 35 rooms, then the Holiday Inn site will be tabled. Is this why? They need to replace a closed Manhattan shelter for adult couples?

An industrious fellow on the Maspeth 11378 Facebook page also did some digging and came up with a lot of information about this so called "charity" known as Acacia Network.

I suppose the Queens papers could have uncovered this, if they weren't so busy defending Liz Crowley and Marge Markey.

And the response from City Hall?

DeBlasio doing great job enriching homeless shelter owners

From the Daily News:

The homeless population has risen to an all-time high, forcing the de Blasio administration to house desperate families in decrepit tenements red-flagged by the city’s own inspectors as hazardous.

Since he arrived at City Hall pledging to turn things around, Mayor de Blasio has struggled to confront a long-intractable problem that has only gotten worse.

By mid-December, the homeless census reached a record 59,068 — nearly the population of Utica, city records show. The Coalition for the Homeless says it peaked even higher at 60,352.

The homeless count, according to the city and the coalition, includes 25,000 children. And it represents a 10% jump from the 53,615 in shelters on de Blasio’s Inauguration Day.

To reduce these distressing numbers, the city has tried to move families into scarce permanent housing, but has been forced to continue using much-criticized apartments known as “cluster sites.”

As a candidate, de Blasio vowed to end the use of clusters, which were often cited for outrageous code violations such as collapsed ceilings, lead paint, vermin and busted boilers.

Despite the mayor’s wishes, the city actually increased the number of cluster units in 2014 by nearly 8% — from 2,918 to 3,143. The 225-unit jump was far less than the 1,150 cluster units Bloomberg added in his last two years, but critics were hoping for a total turnaround.

The problems with these units persist.

A computer analysis by the Daily News and Columbia Journalism School’s New York World found that as of Dec. 31, at least 27 current cluster sites had at least two serious housing-code violations per apartment.

That included 10 buildings with at least three serious violations per apartment, and one building, a 20-unit, red-brick tenement on President St. in Crown Heights, with nearly five open violations per unit as of Dec. 31.

Since then, some of these buildings have cleared some violations while others have racked up even more, records show.

These violations plague the aging tenement buildings where about a dozen nonprofit groups hired by the city choose to locate tenants.

Buildings leased by the biggest providers — including the Bushwick Economic Development Corp., Acacia Network and Camba Inc. — have accumulated hundreds of open-code violations, records show. None of the groups returned calls seeking comment.

All of these nonprofits rake in millions of dollars from the city, state and feds each year. Meanwhile, many regularly place families in units with bugs, peeling paint, collapsed plaster and spotty heat, records show.

All told, The News/Columbia analysis identified 6,767 serious code violations in 224 city-funded cluster sites across the five boroughs as of Dec. 31.