Council Member Dinowitz questions Clayton Apartments on insurance costs per unit

Yeah, Mr.

Schallenberger, you mentioned insurance costs.

That was, I guess over the years, HPD has shared different reasons why rent has increased.

Insurance costs are one of them.

They're going up everywhere.

Do you know how much you pay per unit?

For insurance?

If anybody's good at math, you can divide 697,000 by 162, and that'll give it to you.

I can't do this.

Janice is going to do it.

Can I take this opportunity to actually...

$4,300.

I just want to...

Oh, please.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

$4,300 per unit for insurance.

At Tracy Towers, it is also similar.

It's $4,600 per unit for insurance.

$4,600 per unit, roughly, for insurance.

A&HD says that for affordable units, throughout the city, it's roughly $1,770 per unit for affordable housing.

And the Rent Guidelines Board's documents that for rent-stabilized units, it's less than $2,000 a unit for insurance.

Insurance costs are going up.

But there is a real, seems like a real critical discrepancy between the two.

costs Michilama residents are paying for insurance and what other types of affordable housing developments and apartments are paying for insurance.

And this is one of the areas I believe HPD needs to use their, I guess, negotiating power representing 46,000 units to get better rates because they are not in line with other types of affordable housing.

And you all have to pay the price for those inflated insurance costs.

Thank you.

I appreciate you addressing that.

Could I have 10 seconds?

Two other quick things?

Okay.

So the one other thing that I wanted to get to was the management companies, which people have talked about a little bit.

There's a list of about 30 that are approved.

Most of them are terrible.

I'm just here to tell you.

We've looked into all of them.

We've talked to boards from different co-ops.

They're very bad.

I feel like it would be a huge benefit, and we've talked to some private companies who are willing to go through all the hoops to get approved by HPD, but opening that up is going to be helpful because...

I'll be honest with you.

Like we're trying.

We've had management steal from us.

We've had one of our managers is literally indicted by a DA.

I don't know if she's in prison now, but like that happened.

And like we've had shareholders that have had their their monthly maintenance checks literally stolen multiple times.

And these are the companies we're forced to work with by HPD because they only approve a certain amount.

Not being critical of you all for that.

I'm just saying that's the that's, you know, where it stands.

And the other thing, I promise I'll wrap it up, is.

Oh, the ability to raise funds, right?

So some of the Mitchell Llamas, the Upper West Side, they have commercial spaces underneath.

They can charge rent for that.

We have none of that.

We have no, you know, we don't have a big parking lot that we can sell.

We don't have these like other creative opportunities.

And there's, so there's some differences between the Mitchell Lama co-ops.

You know, that essentially allow other ones to raise funds.

And, you know, we don't want to ask for handouts.

We would love to be able to handle this internally ourselves, but the reality is we don't have the tools to do that.

That's it.

There's something that I do notice that when buildings do leave the program,

If they don't have commercial space, they rebuild it.

They go in and they make adjustments so in the future they're going to bring themselves more money.

I think as far as also looking at ways to save money, we need to look at ways that we can actually put...

Commercial space in some of these buildings on the lower levels.

Is there a way to upgrade it?

My mother's building left the program, and they redid, they took part of the lobby, the sidewalk, and they put big three, the whole avenue now is commercial space.

We need to be able to look and do different things like that.

And like the gentleman mentioned earlier, when y'all do your roundtable, you need to have some of us sitting there too.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.