New York, NY —
Along the elegant side streets of the upper west side, the few remaining Single Room Occupancy Hotels for poor New Yorkers are under pressure to change. SRO owners are finding their prime locations can be marketed as youth hostels for young foreign travelers. And poor tenants who need a place to stay say they are being harassed into leaving. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez reports:
REPORTER: To take a tour of one tenant’s home for the last 16 years all you have to do is stand at the door and look straight ahead.
JR: It’s 12x8 that’s how big it is... as you see the fridge I had a bed down here but I built a loft and it makes it more spacious.
REPORTER: That’s JR. He prefers to not to use his last name because he fears his landlord. The possessions he’s gathered over the years hang neatly from the walls. Shelves hold a microwave, a toaster oven and several medications for his mental illness and diabetes. Four cooking pans hang in a neat row underneath a small air conditioner mounted in the only window. A t.v. is mounted in one corner and crème colored silk fabric framed in black hangs above a table. He switches on a small light and the delicate shape of woman stitched into it appears:
JR: That took time, that took time in other words you gotta stuff it with cotton and then shape it up.
REPORTER: In the late 80’s JR was homeless and a drug addict. He says before he knew he was mentally ill he used to medicate himself with cocaine and sleep on the streets. Thanks to the kindness of a parks department worker who gave him the key to a lock, most nights were spent inside the bathroom of a neighborhood playground. That’s until he was offered his current room at the Riverside Inn. He describes what the place felt like back then:
JR: A safe place to be. It’s just like any home…it’s what you make out of it
REPORTER: But JR says that’s changed over the years and now the only people treated with respect are the foreign students who rent rooms there:
JR: When it comes to people that live there permanently, they change their demeanor totally. They are not willing to help.
REPORTER: Several permanent tenants at the Riverside Inn say they are harassed by building workers who yell at them, threaten them, and call the police on them for no reason. JR says he’s been arrested twice in the last two years:
JR: And physically it takes a lot out of me ….it means I’m without my medications for a couple of days.
REPORTER: He’s been working with the Legal Aid Society to file a false arrest complaint. Investigators there corroborate his story.
Rosalba Rodriguez – an aide to City Councilwoman Gale Brewer – also works with tenants at the Riverside Inn. Although it’s illegal to house children in a SRO she says she and her brother grew up in one and still live in one. They both rent their own rooms in the same building: RODRIGUEZ: I live in not such a bad condition at all and I said I don’t live like this why should they live like this.
REPORTER: Rodriguez says the owners of the Riverside Inn are breaking the law by trying to force out low income residents who have the same rights as tenants who live in regular apartments, and by doing construction without permits.
The Department of Buildings and two other city agencies conducted a top to bottom inspection of the Riverside Inn last month. Tom Conners is Inspection Manager for the borough of Manhattan. He says five violations were written, two were for obstructed fire exits. But Conners says converting the building into a youth hostel is legal:
CONNERS: There is generally nothing wrong with that as long as they ....maintain their safety features.
REPORTER: While renting to foreign tourists is not illegal, forcing out long term tenants to make room for them is. The city cracks down on tenant harassment by requiring owners who are changing the use of their building to apply for a “Certificate of no Harassment”. In order to receive it, investigators must first interview tenants to make sure no one’s been forced out. Over the last two years out of the 450 applications received, there were 29 findings of harassment. One involved an owner who removed bathtubs and toilets rendering bathrooms shared by tenants useless. The Riverside Inn isn’t subject to this type of scrutiny because it doesn’t have to change its certificate of occupancy to rent space to students.
On the outside the SRO fits into the neighborhood of pre-war buildings and brownstones. On the inside, each floor of the six-story building consists of several locked corridors. The low income tenants say they are separated from the more well to do room renters. They complain their floor tiles are loose, and their walls are patched and unpainted while other guests have carpeting and wallpaper. But some foreign travelers who rented rooms are equally disgusted with the conditions of the building. Suzanne Gellert from Germany is interning for an American law firm. She paid 650 dollars to rent a room for a month and says an ad on the internet is false:
GELLERT:Completely, newly renovated. We rent out to students, interns and people for language courses. This is not what it is
REPORTER: A suitcase with wet clothes sits in the hallway in front of her room along with some wet books.
GELLERT: The ceiling is open it’s broken. When I walked in here there was water coming out like in a shower, like at full load, like a waterfall and the thing is I told them and no one’s coming up here to help me.
REPORTER: Gellert says she will not stay in her room another night because it is infested with bed bugs. She points to her arm covered with red welts as she speaks:
GELLERT: I have two hundred bites on my body and the pharmacist sent me to the emergency room last night…
REPORTER: The bed bugs have infiltrated several corridors of the hotel. JR says he’s been waiting two months for an exterminator. Other tenants sprinkle their doorways and floors with boric acid powder to try to keep the pests out. While Gellert has another place to go, low income tenants have few alternatives and want to preserve their affordable housing. JR says he receives a 600 dollar a month disability check and cannot afford more than the 249 dollars a month he pays in rent:
JR: What I would love and this will help anybody that they wouldn’t treat people like…as a piece of dirt. All you want for your little spot in other words, is to live as normal as possible.
REPORTER: City housing officials agree SROs provide much needed housing for some of the poorest New Yorkers and they want to preserve the units.
On a city website, Irene Shreyberg is listed as the head officer of the Riverside Inn. She refused to answer questions about the property.
But one attorney who represents owners says the free market is forcing the turnover. Traditional SROs rarely break even and there are many more lucrative options. Now foreign students are willing to pay almost three times the going rate.
For WNYC, I’m Cindy Rodriguez.