A civil rights bill that would require co-op boards to lift their veil of secrecy and provide a reason when they reject a buyer is stalled in the New York City Council despite the support of the vast majority of council members and other key backing. Opposition to the bill in its present form as, the Fair and Prompt Co-op Disclosure Act, Intro 119, comes from white, generally liberal council members from Manhattan, most of whom previously expressed support for the idea. The city’s real estate industry strenuously opposes the measure.
In a city with 300,000 co-ops, the sale of an apartment is packed with stress for buyers and sellers. What may seem like a great deal for both sides can be overruled by the building’s volunteer co-op board, which must approve any sale – and any buyer. While the board may not violate human-rights laws in rejecting someone, it can turn a person down for any other reason.
In most cases, potential buyers are rejected because the board has concerns about their financial situation – whether, for example, the prospective co-op member can actually afford the mortgage and monthly maintenance fee. But it is impossible to know that for a fact because the boards operate in secrecy and do not have to provide any reason for rejection.
If a board is sued for alleged illegal discrimination, it must then explain its reason and that rationale can be examined in court. In other words, if the board says it rejected a family because their finances did not measure up, a trial could explore whether the board has been consistent in such rejections and is not really trying to keep the people out because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or other trait covered by anti-discrimination laws.
While most co-op boards attract little attention, some rejections involving celebrities have made headlines. In the mid 1980s, the San Remo on Central Park West nixed Madonna, apparently because they found her too vulgar. Former President Richard Nixon could not get into the East Side’s River House, even though it was home to his former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. And that same famously snooty co-op turned down Gloria Vanderbilt. She sued for discrimination, alleging that the River House rejected her because the board believed she was going to marry her good friend singer Bobby Short and bring a gay black man into the building. Unlike Nixon and Madonna, Vanderbilt was given a reason for her rejection: The board said that with only about $7 million she really was not rich enough. But she only received that explanation after she sued.
A coalition of 40 civil rights groups is supporting the disclosure bill. “If the boards are able to keep their shroud of secrecy, people who feel they were discriminated against are much less likely to pursue their rights or even apply in the first place in some buildings,” said Craig Gurian, a civil rights attorney with the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, one of the chief proponents of the bill. In the rare cases where someone does sue, Gurian says, “the reason for the rejection that you get is the one that a defense lawyer thinks is most convenient.” The bill, he argued, would lock the board into the reason that they had at the time of rejection and could not be changed.
“The bill is about fighting discrimination,” said Gurian. “It has the good side effect of promoting decency and transparency.”
The NAACP in New York has endorsed the measure. Hazel Dukes, executive director of the NAACP in New York. “Discrimination is alive and well, especially in housing. It continues to raise its ugly head,” said Hazel Dukes, the groups’ executive director.
But some representatives of co-op boards fear the bill will create problems for them, opening them to liability. “Anytime you try to give a reason, you’re going to get sued. You say the guy was obnoxious at the meeting, he comes in and says, â€I’m going to sue you,’” Marc Luxemburg, president of the Co-Op and Condominium Council, told the New York Times.
Interestingly co-op owners who do not serve on boards back disclosure. A survey conducted by Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvales, Inc. found that 63 percent of these co-op owners supported the idea.
The bill, though, has attracted significant opposition and so seems unlikely to pass. Perhaps most importantly, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who endorsed the bill when running for re-election from her Chelsea district in 2005, is now against it. According to her spokesperson Sandy Mullin, Quinn does not think “this bill is the right answer to the problem and we’re to keep looking at other solutions.”
Quinn is not alone. Councilmember Gale Brewer, who represents Manhattan’s West Side, has been against the disclosure bill from the get-go. She said that “progressive” friends on co-op boards told her such a disclosure law “would make it harder to recruit people” to volunteers for the co-op board. Brewer said that her office gets lots of complaints about the way co-op boards are run but not about discrimination by the boards.
Councilmember Jessica Lappin of the East Side endorsed the bill in 2005. In a response to a questionnaire from Citizens Union, Lappin said then, “If required to disclose the reasons for rejecting an applicant, co-op boards would be subjected to a proper level of public scrutiny and might be less inclined to arbitrarily deny applications based on discriminatory reasons.” Now she has reversed herself, saying that she has heard from “hundreds of constituents opposed to it.” (Citizens Union is the sister organization of Citizens Union Foundation, which published Gotham Gazette.)
“I support the concept and the goal,” she said, but acknowledged that she was not making any proposals on the bill could be improved.
Another council member from the East Side, Dan Garodnick, also, also came out for the bill in 2005, saying, “As a lawyer with a background in civil rights, I support initiatives that protect New Yorkers from invidious discrimination in all its forms.” He too now opposes it, saying he does not think “that this law would accomplish these goals.”
Faced with such opposition, no hearing has been scheduled on the bill, whose chief sponsor is Councilmember Hiram Monserrate of Queens. “There should be a hearing,” Monserrate said. The General Welfare Committee did hold a hearing on the measure in September 2005 – before Quinn became speaker.
Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union which questioned the candidates in 2005, also is concerned that the bill is not being allowed a hearing now, despite its sponsorship by a two-thirds majority of the council.
Monserrate said he is “in discussions with attorneys for the council that they think would make it a better bill.” But he said he “cannot understand why someone would not support this call for disclosure--it insures transparency.”
At the 2005 hearing, Deputy City Human Rights Commissioner Cliff Mulqueen testified that the “commission supports the idea of requiring co-op boards to provide reasons for the rejection of purchase applications.” He did raise concerns about some procedural aspects of the proposal, however.
Andy Humm, a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights, has been in charge of the civil rights topic page since its inception in 2001. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (34 on Time-Warner; 107 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM. Â
New York has the oldest anti-discrimination law in the country – dating back to 1945 – but when it comes to implementing its policies, the state lags behind. The New York State Division of Human Rights is saddled with a backlog of thousands of complaints filed by people who claim that they have been discriminated against. Under the current review process, it can take three years or more for a case to be resolved.
Kumiki Gibson, Governor Eliot Spitzer’s new commissioner of human rights, promises to change the agency, and she recently invited me to her main offices at One Fordham Plaza in the Bronx to explain what she wants to do. Gibson admits she faces challenges. By her own account, Gibson says that when she arrived at the division she found it “filled with people at the top who were not committed to civil rights and good management.”
A native of Buffalo, Kumiki Gibson is a former counsel to Vice President Al Gore and, most recently, counsel to the president of the National Urban League. The daughter of an immigrant mother from Japan and an African-American father, Gibson says that her parents “saw to it that I got a good education and taught me that I could achieve the American Dream.” Gibson believes that most of her personal experience with discrimination stems from her work as a litigator and “being a woman in a man’s world.”
Inspired by Spitzer’s “One New York” theme set out at his inauguration, in which he acknowledged “the civil rights movement still has chapters to be written,” Gibson hopes to overhaul the New York State Division of Human Rights.
“We need to give all New Yorkers the opportunity to have full and productive lives,” she said. “This was a chance to create an institution that will survive over time.”
More than 85 percent of the complaints to the Division of Human Rights involve employment discrimination, the majority from people of color, followed by bias based on sex, disability, age, national origin, creed, conviction record, and sexual orientation.
Gibson’s first priority is dealing with the backlog of cases dating back three or more years – and her goal is to resolve each case in 465 days or less.
“That’s the statutory target, but the division never adopted targets,” she said. “Legislators put targets there for a reason. I want to get all cases in and out.”
Gibson said that she will seek changes in the law that will make it “easier for complainants to file with us or go into court.”
The agency is also actively inviting civil and human rights groups around the state to come to its offices to see what it is doing to improve things.
Gibson sees outreach and public education as a “powerful tool to enforce the law,” and that the agency would be sending out undercover testers “where we suspect systemic discrimination.”
Although Commissioner Gibson is looking at ways that the law may need to be changed, she has not settled on a legislative agenda yet.
Asked about the bill to add “gender identity and expression” to state law, as New York City did in 2002, Gibson said that she believes state law already protects transgender people and the division welcomes their complaints of discrimination. The governor does support the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act and Gibson said, “I’m just trying to figure out if changes are needed.”
Joe Tarver, a spokesperson for the Empire State Pride Agenda, which is championing the transgender rights bill, said, “No matter what case law there is or what opinions by government officials there are, there is no substitute for explicit protections in the law against discrimination.”
Craig Gurian, a civil rights attorney at the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, who has played a major role in strengthening the city’s human rights law, welcomes Gibson’s appointment.
“During the Pataki years and for that matter before that, in a lot of ways the State Division was entirely non-functional,” said Gurian. “It bore no relation to a prosecuting and investigating agency,” a criticism he makes of many such human rights commissions around the country.
While he said that he did not know Gibson previously, he believes that she thinks of her job as a civil rights enforcement job, not an administrative or bureaucratic position and that she has hired civil rights lawyers for the staff.
That said, Gurian believes “there aren’t enough people at the division and there are a lot of people not doing the jobs that they’re supposed to.” But he also thinks that Gibson “understands that you can’t just rely on individual complainants coming forward. You have to be proactive. I’m sure we’ll see more division-initiated investigations.”
While he is glad that Gibson has a greater sense of urgency about resolving complaints of discrimination, he said, “It is always sobering to realize how time-consuming good investigations are.”
In the coming years, Gibson believes that her record will speak for itself.
“They should say, `the proof is in the pudding,’ but no one should question my commitment to civil rights,” said Gibson. “I want people to get justice.”
“We have to gain more credibility and enhance our reputation in the community,” she added. “We have work to do to make people believe in us again. If we can’t, we need to rethink our purpose.”
Andy Humm, a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights, has been in charge of the civil rights topic page since its inception in 2001. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (34 on Time-Warner; 107 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM. Â
Shaun Donovan, commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, has responded to this article. For his response, see below.
Immigrant tenants and advocates for them have long complained that language barriers and inadequate outreach keep the city’s housing inspection agency from reaching thousands of immigrant families living in deplorable housing conditions. A new report by City University of New York and housing advocates offers lends credence to these complaints.
The report, entitled “Living in Isolation: Issues of Access to City Housing Services Among Immigrant New Yorkers,” shows that while immigrant households and New Yorkers with limited English proficiency are significantly more likely to have housing maintenance problems than other New Yorkers, they are less likely to report problems and to try to get services from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Residents of neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants, such as Chinatown and the Lower East Side, file far fewer housing complaints than those in other parts of the city. This is despite the fact that, according to the report, households in those communities are more vulnerable to landlord harassment and more likely to be living in poor housing conditions than people in other communities. The bottom line, say tenant advocates, is that the New Yorkers who are most in need of city housing assistance have been the least able to get it.
The report, issued by the City University of New York’s Center for Urban Research and Communities for Housing Equity (a coalition of housing groups to which my organization, the New York Immigration Coalition, belongs), looks demographic data from the 2000 census and the 2005 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey and overlays that information with city data on housing complaints.
The report points out that New Yorkers with limited English benefit far less from the Bloomberg administration’s improved complaint procedures processes than other New Yorkers. Following the launch of the city’s 311 non-emergency hotline in 2003, the number of housing complaints filed with the city soared, almost doubling between 2001 and 2005.
But immigrants, who account for one in four New Yorkers, are less likely to take advantage of 311 or other avenues for complaint. A 2006 report by Communities for Housing Equity, found that only 18 percent of the immigrants and New Yorkers with limited English that it surveyed who had housing problems, reported those conditions to the housing department. For example, one women told the African Services Committee of an array of problems in her building: an insecure front door that allowed robberies; broken elevators; garbage strewn hallways, leaks and a collapsed ceiling. She had not gone to the city with her difficulties, though, because she did now know which agency to contact and, even if she did, was not sure she would be able to communicate with the people there.
She is not alone. The report, “Hear This! The Need for Multilingual Housing Services in New York” found that 62 percent of immigrants are not even aware of the existence of the housing department. And so, many such tenants prefer to contact already overburdened community-based organizations for guidance.
“I lived in horrible conditions for 20 years before I finally realized that there was a government agency that could help me,” said Zhi Qin Zheng. Now she is a leader for the Chinatown Tenant Union.
Even tenants who know about the housing department may find it difficult to get the services they need. Language remains a barrier. “It is so difficult to communicate with inspectors if they do not speak Spanish,” explained Rosalia Cruz, a tenant in Brooklyn and a tenant leader at Neighbors Helping Neighbors. “I can’t explain to the inspectors the problems that I’m having, and they say things to each other that I can’t understand.”
For its part, the housing department points out that of its over 400 housing inspectors, 254 are bilingual, speaking a total of 30 languages. The agency has created a language card for housing inspectors to use when tenants do not speak English and allows inspectors to telephone an interpreter. Inspectors also have access to a translation service, offering 150 different languages, according to a housing department spokesperson. The agency has established a language access taskforce to look at the communication problems. And, to increase awareness about the services that it provides, the administration has launched its Taking It to the Streets campaign, which sends staff to different neighborhoods to talk about the services the housing department provides.
But some of this looks better on paper than in reality, some tenant advocates say. Currently inspectors are dispatched without regard for the language needs of the tenants, some charge. “Of the dozens of times I have called 311, only once has an inspector come who has spoken Spanish,” Cruz said.
Tenant advocates are working to enact city legislation, sponsored by City Councilmember Rosie Mendez, that would require the housing department to improve outreach, hire more bilingual and multilingual inspectors and assign inspectors with consideration for the language needs of the tenants and increase the translation of HPD documents.
Ericka Stallings is a housing advocate with The New York Immigration Coalition.
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By Shaun Donovan
Preserving our existing housing stock and ensuring that tenants live in safe and well-maintained apartments is a vital part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $7.5 billion New Housing Marketplace Plan to build and preserve 165,000 apartments and homes for 500,000 New Yorkers over 10 years. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development is committed to helping all New Yorkers access our services, and we are implementing a language access initiative across the agency. The initiative will increase meaningful access to quality housing information for city residents who are non-English speaking or have limited proficiency in English.
We encourage tenants to call 311, the city’s non-emergency hotline, which serves as its customer service center, to complain if their landlord is not making repairs. Tenants do not have to know the name of the city agency they wish to contact, and they can be certain that the call center representative will be able to take their complaint: 311 offers simultaneous translation services in over 170 languages. Requests for information on affordable housing and complaints about poor housing conditions are two of the most common inquiries the housing department receives through 311.
The department recently expanded the affordable housing hotline to make it available in Mandarin, Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Korean and Russian. The multilingual hotline will help more New York City residents gather the information they need to apply for affordable units created by the New Housing Marketplace Plan, the largest municipal affordable housing plan in the nation’s history. The hotline provides listings of affordable homes and apartments available through the city’s housing lottery system. Interested applicants can find out about open lotteries by calling 311 and asking for the Affordable Housing Hotline in any of the languages available.
HPD also recently released an online 311 tool, available in Spanish as well as English, which allows users to check on the progress of their complaint on the housing department’s website. This is an important step forward in our efforts to enable tenants to better use the city’s code enforcement services.
The housing department is continuously improving the multilingual capabilities of its housing inspectors. More than 200 out of its 400 housing inspectors are bilingual, speaking a total of 30 languages. All housing inspectors use a language card that allows them to identify which language tenant with no or limited English speaks and to request appropriate free interpretation services by phone. A 24-hour a day, 7-day a week language translation service is available to housing inspectors and office staff. It offers translation into 150 languages. Additionally, the inspectors carry brochures in five most widely spoken languages in New York City, other than English.
Exciting and diverse New York City neighborhoods are the product of the hard work of immigrants who have come to our city for generations to share our success. With the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Language Access Initiative more tenants across the city will share in the city’s economic success through new affordable housing opportunities and improved housing conditions.
Shaun Donovan is the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development
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