The Drama Heightens for IPN Tenants:
Landlord and Tenants Face Off Over IPN's Future
by Ronald Drenger   Reprinted with permission from The Tribeca Trib, November 2003

Two weeks before the City Council held its hearing on the Mitchell-Lama buyout bill, Independence Plaza North tenants finally met Laurence Gluck, whose name has stirred fear among them for more than a year.

On Oct. 16, tenants of the three-tower Tribeca complex packed the P.S../I.S. 89 auditorium to fire questions at their new landlord and tell him their worries over his plan to withdraw the complex from the Mitchell-Lama housing program. While some tenants said that Gluck came across as a nice guy, the encounter seemed to do little to quell their fears.

Cordial and low-key as he faced his tenants from the stage, Gluck pledged that he will be “the most modest, gracious landlord who could own the property.”

He asserted that about two-thirds of IPN tenants will be protected by “sticky” vouchers, a program in which the federal government pays the difference between market rents and the amounts that tenants have been paying under Mitchell-Lama. IPN’s tenant association has questioned how much protection the program really provides, and whether that many tenants will be eligible.

But much of the discussion focused on the tenants who will not qualify for the vouchers and whose rents Gluck says will go up. Gluck said it would be a couple of months before he could offer a proposal for those tenants, but promised “gradual, equitable increases.”

“I will not throw those tenants into the harsh waters of fair-market value too quickly for them to adjust,” he said.

People in the audience repeatedly pressed him to divulge the size of the rent increases and how quickly they will be implemented.

“I’m feeling very vulnerable,” Renee De Santis, the mother of two small children, told Gluck. “I have no idea what to do. Do I try to find a new home for my family? Do I tell my kids they have to leave the only neighborhood they’ve ever known?” She added, “I need to know if I will be able to live here or not. And I need to know now.”

Tenant association president Neil Fabricant charged that Gluck had not lived up to a promise to have a proposal on the table by September, and had instead offered promises that he would be “gracious.”

“We can’t live with ‘graciousness.’ We can’t live with ‘reasonableness,’” Fabricant said. “We need a number. What’s the number?”

After repeated prodding, Gluck explained that he was waiting to negotiate with government officials over how much money he will get for each subsidized tenant. That amount, he said, would determine the rent he needs from non-subsidized tenants.

“The more money the federal government gives me under that program, the more generous we can be to the tenants not protected by sticky vouchers,” he said.

Later in the month, Fabricant seized on Gluck’s statement, saying that the Bloomberg administration had promised that tenants would negotiate together with government officials and the owner over IPN’s post-buyout future. “Now there are negotiations and we’re not at the table,” he said. “We feel betrayed.”

Fabricant said that tenants must be involved in the discussion over the subsidized rents because it is a chance to press for long-term protections for all tenants.

A couple of points made by Gluck conflicted with information from government agencies.

He said he was participating in the sticky voucher program voluntarily, and had the right to evict all tenants if he chose to. But according to Adam Glantz, a spokesman for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the voucher program, if a complex is bought out of Mitchell-Lama and tenants are eligible for the program, the owner must accept the vouchers and cannot evict those tenants.

And two tenants questioned Gluck about Park West Village, a rent-stabilized complex on the Upper West Side that he and a partner, Joseph Chetrit, purchased in 2000. Tenants there have filed at least 26 rent-overcharge complaints with the state, in most cases claiming that the owners exaggerated renovation costs for vacant apartments so they could remove the units from rent stabilization.

Gluck noted that he is only a minority partner in Park West Village and said he has “no control over what goes on there.” He acknowledged that there have been “several overcharge complaints, one or two won by management, one or two won by the tenants.”

As of last spring, the State Department of Housing Preservation and Renewal said that it had ruled for the tenants in 17 of 18 cases, with eight cases still pending.

After almost an hour of questions and impassioned statements from residents, Fabricant, who was moderating the dialogue, loudly and aggressively demanded that Gluck respond, yes or no, to a series of proposed commitments to protect tenants.

Regarding tenants eligible for subsidies, Fabricant asked, practically shouting, “Will you promise that they will receive sticky vouchers or their equivalent for the duration of their tenancies at IPN?” He asked Gluck to commit to the estimate that two-thirds, or even 50 percent of tenants will be able to continue paying Mitchell-Lama-equivalent rents after the buyout. Gluck declined to make the commitments.

After Gluck left the meeting, Fabricant made clear that he was unimpressed by the owner’s appearance.

“He’s on his best behavior now,” Fabricant told the audience. “Wait till he really gets a hold on this place.”