The Manhattan Times

From slum to cooperative, tenants to owners

Ten years ago the building at 504 W. 171^st Street was falling apart – literally.

Tenants in the 20-unit building could see each other through holes in bathroom walls, and the floor of an apartment on the first floor fell into the basement. At one point drug dealers controlled at least three apartments. And there were 400 open violations at the building, which ballooned to over 600 after landlord Jack Ferranti was jailed for setting a fire to his Queens business, killing one firefighter and leaving four families homeless.

When a new landlord, a relative of Ferranti, took over things didn’t improve. Tenants conducted a legal rent strike and, in 2000, the courts directed the landlord to clean up all the violations.

Some work was done, and the drug dealers were kicked out, but not all of the violations were cleared and in 2001 a second rent strike began. The landlord abandoned the building, and the city took it over due to taxes owed.

On Sept. 17, tenants – the majority of whom stuck through the rocky times – will cut the ribbon on the newly renovated building. It has gone from slum to cooperative, and its occupants from abused tenants to low- and moderate- income homeowners.

Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation Community Development Director Jennifer Welles said her organization was approached by the tenants of the building in 1999 when the first rent strike began, and has helped guide them through the years of red tape, leading them on the path to home ownership.

When the city takes a building, Welles said, it first gives the landlord another chance to pay the back taxes, and then gives the tenants and opportunity to become the owners through a process called Third Party Transfers. Enough of the tenants signed a petition to take over the building and NIMIC became the project sponsor.

The tenants took out a $2 million loan through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the National Cooperative Bank and work got started.

“The whole construction phase was pretty brutal,” Welles said.

Tenants suffered through the noise and inconvenience of the reconstruction, which happened one “line” at a time. A few of the tenants left, freeing up space to “checker board” others around while work on their apartments were done. The vacant apartments were taken by families that had previously doubled up with relatives in the small building.

The work done in each of the apartments at 504 W. 171^st Street was reasonable, if not luxury. Each has new bamboo flooring, new walls and new plumbing and electrical wiring.

There is a new boiler and windows and appliances in each apartment were replaced by NIMIC with a $200,000 weatherization grant, making the building 30-percent more energy efficient than it was before.

With the help of NIMIC, 16 tenants in the building saved up $2,500 to become shareholders in the limited cooperative and established a three-member co-op board to oversee the building and pay the management company that oversees the building. The remaining three tenants opted out and will remain renters in the building. The last apartment was sold to a man in the neighborhood who purchased the two-bedroom unit for $54,000.

The reconstruction of the building was completed in 2007 and since then NIMIC has been working with the building tenants to help them obtain Section 8 vouchers to help cover the rent, which has gone from between $300 and $500 to between $600 and $900. Those funds now go to pay for the loan that paid for the reconstruction of the building.

With all the pieces finally in place, NIMIC becomes a monitoring agent to help the board with anything they might need and to ensure the building keeps up with its agreements with the city.

The new apartment owners have restrictions against when they can turn around and sell the space and how much they can sell it for so no one “flips” the apartments for a big profit and so the building stays affordable.

Welles said 504 W. 171^st Street is only the second building in the city whose tenants have made it entirely through the Third Party Transfer program.

But NIMIC has two more building in the process, one at 21 Fort Washington Avenue, and another pair of buildings at 652-656 W. 160^th Street. But for now, NIMIC and the tenants will celebrate the positive end to a long process.

“This is probably their only opportunity to own homes,” said Welles. “It’s been a lot of work to get this little tiny building through.”

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.