During this past summer, she further alleged, it was even relieved of that low amount when the rent was waived. She was critical of what she saw as the privileged status of a nursery school in one of the buildings: it takes up 14 rooms, she said, and is charged less than $200 per month. Jacobowitz also cited past increases from 1992 to January 2006, which she called the “ancillaries”. After running through a list of increases in the past 15 or so years, she speculated that it might be indicative of an operational takeover by CPC as the entire mortgagee and the privatization of Big Six. Kaminsky called HPD a rubber stamp that ignores its own regulations, noting also that in 1988 it relinquished its first mortgagee status to the Community Preservation Corporation and became a secondary one. Those who did keep their remarks within the scope of economics included Dorothy Kaminsky and Maxine Jacobowitz, who have been residents 40 years or more. When she said she has seen sub-letting going on and would like an investigation of it, Slomin told her to confine her remarks to economic matters.
She said she is applying elsewhere for housing, fearing that in four or five years her Big Six home would be unaffordable. She told the audience that her residential expenses have increased to where she now pays in excess of 30 percent of her income each month to stay where she is. Doreen O’Leary, a city worker, became a resident in 2001. (SCRIE allows eligible senior citizens exemption from rent or maintenance increases, and correspondingly allows landlords eligibility for equivalent credits on their property taxes.)Ī resident who might have been unborn when Big Six was opened spoke for those who moved in relatively recently. Slomin’s reply of sorts was to remind his audience of the Senior Citizens’ Rent Increase Exemption, or SCRIE, mention of which drew a few groans and hoots, perhaps because it, like the federal subsidies he also mentioned, was “too complicated to explain here”. He declared that residents “shouldn’t be penalized for keeping New York City alive”. Paolo, who said he found his new surroundings at Big Six “a joy” when he moved into his cooperative unit in 1963, lamented what he characterized as the decline since then of the Mitchell-Lama ideal: to keep a middle class tax base in the city. Nass said that instead of funding rising expenses, property management should be reducing deficits that have been incurred over the years. The first two speakers, Nathan Nass and Arthur Paolo, said they were Big Six residents since the beginning, or nearly so. At the beginning of the new fiscal year, July 1, 2008, the Big Six debt service will be increased by $491,000, he said, and money must be made available to meet it- hence the move by management to increase maintenance costs. He then described the main problem at hand, an operational deficit in the 2007-08 budget of 4 percent. In his preliminary remarks, Slomin said that he was conducting a public hearing, which would not be a give-and-take session but would allow statements from those who put their names in to make them. of what it takes to run a Mitchell-Lama operation.”īuilding management set up about 50 chairs, but before the meeting could commence, folding chairs by the dozen were brought out for people continuing to show up their number would finally come to about 100. Gary Slomin, an assistant HPD commissioner who conducted it, said that ultimately HPD’s housing supervision division would make an assessment based on what he called “a complete analysis, using our own methodology. The hearing provided no immediate answers, nor was it supposed to. The residents who were present at the hearing, most of whom were near retirement age, at the point of it or well into it, had questions of their own about the seemingly unstoppable march of rising costs. The feasibility of the housing that each was meant to afford the working and middle classes of New York City has come into question in recent years. A maintenance hearing on premises last week at Big Six Towers, the high-rise cooperative complex (actually seven towers in all) at Queens Boulevard between 59th and 61st Streets conducted by the Division of Housing Supervision of the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development provided another look at the evolution of Mitchell-Lama housing.īig Six has been in existence nearly 45 years and the Mitchell-Lama law a little more than a half-century.
0 kommentar(er)
