Rent Stabilization Fight May Loom for IPN

By Ronald Drenger


The tenants of Independence Plaza North on Greenwich Street spent four years battling, as they saw it, to save their homes. They raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, hired lawyers and lobbyists, buttonholed government officials, demonstrated at City Hall, negotiated with their landlord, and even drafted a City Council bill.

		The campaign culminated last year in a deal with IPN's owner, Laurence Gluck, that allowed him to pull IPN out of the state Mitchell-Lama housing subsidy program and rent vacant apartments at market rates, while avoiding steep rent increases for existing tenants. But recently the tenants have discovered information that, had they had known it earlier, may have avoided much of the costly and grueling effort, while giving them an even better deal to protect their low rents. "When I heard this news I was stunned," said Diane Lapson, president of IPN's tenants association. The tenants now believe that according to city law, when IPN left the Mitchell-Lama program it should have been placed under rent stabilization regulations, which cap rent increases at rates determined annually by the
city's Rent Guidelines Board. They may be on the brink of another battle with their landlord to establish whether all IPN apartments are, in fact, rent stabilized. Ed Rosner, a member of the tenant association's executive board, found out that in 1998, IPN's previous owner received a tax abatement for renovation work. Under city regulations, buildings that receive this tax break, known as a J-51 abatement for the section of city code that covers it, are placed under rent stabilization. Rosner said he easily found the information on a city government website after tenants at another former Mitchell-Lama development, West Village Houses, discovered that their landlord had received a J-51 abatement. But Gluck's attorney, Stephen Meister, wrote in a July 29 letter to the tenants association that the rent-stabilization requirement "has absolutely no bearing on buildings which obtain J-51 abatements while regulated under the Mitchell-Lama program." Meister declined to comment to the Trib. The tenants and the lawyer they chose to pursue their case say that Gluck is misrepresenting the law. The laws "don't have any of the exceptions that Mr. Meister tried to make up in his letter to tenants," the attorney, Seth Miller, of Collins, Dobkin & Miller, told tenants at a meeting last month in the P.S./I.S. 89 auditorium. A spokeswoman for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), which administers the J-51 program, confirmed that IPN is receiving the tax abatement- $81,540 over 12 years-but did not respond to written questions about IPN's rent-stabilization status. Lapson, IPN's tenant leader, said that the tenants association would probably decide early this month on its next step, which may well involve taking the issue to court. "We believe that we're right, we believe this is the law, and we have every intention of doing what's appropriate to establish rent stabilization at IPN," she said. "It's very disappointing that HPD, other city agencies, some of our politicians, who all know what a J- 51 is, nobody told us anything before." Tenants at the Aug. 2 meeting echoed Lapson's frustration. "To fight for so long," said Anthony Russo, "and now to find out that we could have gotten rent stabilization from the beginning- it's crazy."