NEW YORK—In the shadow of the Metro North line, a street-level parking lot at the corner of Park Ave. and E.108th St in Harlem awaits its destiny.
Residents learned through their community board, that the City, which owns the lot, is planning to sell it for the low price of $1 to what locals call a “slumlord”—Tahl-Propp Equities.
Kathleen McClafferty, who has lived in a Tahl-Propp-owned building for seven years, said the treatment she and her neighbors got from the building managers was “terrible.”
“It took four years to get my flooring fixed,” McClafferty said. “The bugs came through from underneath it, I was tripping over it, and my 80-year-old mother was tripping over it.”
Tahl-Propp’s public record on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) website show 4,136 violations for 2,437 units in Harlem.
For McClafferty, just getting the managers to speak to her was an ordeal, and when she was able to reach them, they threatened her with eviction. She and other tenants also continue to receive unclear rent statements with unspecified charges though courts have ordered the charges be dismissed.
Now McClafferty is on the steering committee of Harlem Tenants Against Tahl-Propp (HTATP). The HTATP is trying to persuade the City not to grant Tahl-Propp the property. “Just for being a poor landlord, they don’t deserve such a deal,” McClafferty said.
A phone operator at Tahl-Propp’s corporate headquarters indicated that the company does not have press secretaries or public relations personnel. No comment could be obtained from them.
Tahl-Propp has been steadily buying properties in Harlem and redeveloping them as condominiums. They currently own 50 apartment buildings in Harlem. They plan to build a 200-unit building on the Park Ave. lot.
Generally, when the City sells for such a low price to a developer, the developer commits to providing affordable housing in a portion of units in the new building. However, of 200 units, 100 will be market rate, 60 will be at 120 percent of the area median income, and 40 will be within 60 percent of the area median income.
But even those 40 units that are meant to be affordable to current residents might not be affordable at all, depending on whether the City includes more affluent neighborhoods in calculating the areas median income, according to Mary Kolar, an organizer with Tenants & Neighbors, which provides rent education to tenants in New York State.
Residents fear that the proposed purchase of the Park Ave. lot could be another sign of planned gentrification in Harlem. They point to the example of 305 E.150th St, an 84-unit rent-stabilized project that Tahl-Propp has vacated to convert into a 42-unit condominium building.
In 2005, the New York Sun interviewed Rodney Propp, Tahl-Propp’s chairman. Buying low and selling high in Harlem had been a long-standing strategy for the company. “We didn’t like the valuations in other parts of Manhattan,” Propp said. “Harlem was virtually the last Manhattan neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified. ...We analyzed the market and asked ourselves, ‘Where can we dominate?’ The answer was that we'd need to go into neighborhoods that were out of favor. We found that we had the Harlem market pretty much all to ourselves. ... So we went out and bought as many buildings in Harlem as we could.”
Residents learned through their community board, that the City, which owns the lot, is planning to sell it for the low price of $1 to what locals call a “slumlord”—Tahl-Propp Equities.
Kathleen McClafferty, who has lived in a Tahl-Propp-owned building for seven years, said the treatment she and her neighbors got from the building managers was “terrible.”
“It took four years to get my flooring fixed,” McClafferty said. “The bugs came through from underneath it, I was tripping over it, and my 80-year-old mother was tripping over it.”
Tahl-Propp’s public record on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) website show 4,136 violations for 2,437 units in Harlem.
For McClafferty, just getting the managers to speak to her was an ordeal, and when she was able to reach them, they threatened her with eviction. She and other tenants also continue to receive unclear rent statements with unspecified charges though courts have ordered the charges be dismissed.
Now McClafferty is on the steering committee of Harlem Tenants Against Tahl-Propp (HTATP). The HTATP is trying to persuade the City not to grant Tahl-Propp the property. “Just for being a poor landlord, they don’t deserve such a deal,” McClafferty said.
A phone operator at Tahl-Propp’s corporate headquarters indicated that the company does not have press secretaries or public relations personnel. No comment could be obtained from them.
Tahl-Propp has been steadily buying properties in Harlem and redeveloping them as condominiums. They currently own 50 apartment buildings in Harlem. They plan to build a 200-unit building on the Park Ave. lot.
Generally, when the City sells for such a low price to a developer, the developer commits to providing affordable housing in a portion of units in the new building. However, of 200 units, 100 will be market rate, 60 will be at 120 percent of the area median income, and 40 will be within 60 percent of the area median income.
But even those 40 units that are meant to be affordable to current residents might not be affordable at all, depending on whether the City includes more affluent neighborhoods in calculating the areas median income, according to Mary Kolar, an organizer with Tenants & Neighbors, which provides rent education to tenants in New York State.
Residents fear that the proposed purchase of the Park Ave. lot could be another sign of planned gentrification in Harlem. They point to the example of 305 E.150th St, an 84-unit rent-stabilized project that Tahl-Propp has vacated to convert into a 42-unit condominium building.
In 2005, the New York Sun interviewed Rodney Propp, Tahl-Propp’s chairman. Buying low and selling high in Harlem had been a long-standing strategy for the company. “We didn’t like the valuations in other parts of Manhattan,” Propp said. “Harlem was virtually the last Manhattan neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified. ...We analyzed the market and asked ourselves, ‘Where can we dominate?’ The answer was that we'd need to go into neighborhoods that were out of favor. We found that we had the Harlem market pretty much all to ourselves. ... So we went out and bought as many buildings in Harlem as we could.”
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