Ariel Hirsch (UHAB) on Duckler portfolio victory and need for COPA
Hirsch announces the successful removal of a negligent landlord from 88 homes in Crown Heights after nearly a decade of tenant organizing, HPD enforcement, and legal services. She argues COPA and Safer Homes could have intervened years earlier, before total abandonment occurred.
All right, please begin.
True Sanchez, thank you for the opportunity to testify.
My name is Ariel Hirsch, and I'm the Director of Policy at UHAB.
For 50 years, we've empowered low- and moderate-income tenants to take control of their housing and become homeowners in the buildings where they already live.
We're excited about this housing plan and found the emphasis particularly on tenant protection, preservation, and homeownership to be really meaningful.
It is now the time to really deliver and excited to see sort of how these things play out.
I want to highlight a story, and we'll submit written testimony that have more things in it, but that we recently have been working with the Duckler portfolio, tenants in 88 homes in Crown Heights, where tenants organized for nearly a decade.
They've been through decades of disinvestment, fraud, overcharges, disinvestment, leaks, roaches, mice, rats, collapsed ceilings, everything you can imagine, and finally abandonment by their owners.
It took dedicated organizing from those tenants, support from organizers at HOPE, legal services help, and the full suite of HPD code enforcement programs, AEP, HPD litigation, to get this negligent landlord
out of these buildings, which I am really excited to announce that we did on Wednesday.
They have a new owner and they are headed towards a full renovation and preservation for their homes and conversion to cooperative homeownership, their ultimate goal that they've been fighting.
And it highlights, I think, so many of our needs for tenant protection and preservation programs that we're discussing.
Fix the City could have used these HPD resources together instead of sort of a scattered shot, sort of things as they come approach.
COPA and or Safer Homes really could have intervened to begin the preservation process the last time these buildings were sold in 2018
or any number of these really intense events over the last 10 years before we reached total abandonment.
HPD programs like Our Home, we hope will still fund the rehab now that we're here, but we could have used these things many years ago.
And by this point, the only thing that gets to the root cause of these issues is ownership transfer and comprehensive preservation, where we can address the root cause of these conditions issues.
We'll submit written testimony with the rest, but thank you so much.