“It’s hard to survive”

Lawsuit filed against city to block Inwood rezoning

Story and photos by Gregg McQueen

It was different in 1996.

“A lot of drugs, a lot of rats, a lot of empty stores,” said Maribel Núñez.

The co-owner of Albert’s Mofongo House on the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway said much has changed in Inwood from the business’s first days over two decades ago when it was one of the few restaurants in the neighborhood.

Despite the difficulties, she and her husband Alberto have kept the 24-hour Dominican eatery going.

“We’re part of that community that’s cleaned up [the area],” remarked Maribel, who said she was concerned about displacement that could result from the planned Inwood rezoning. “We stuck it out, and now they want to give people the boot.”

When they renewed the restaurant’s lease last year, the rent jumped from $24,000 to $34,000 per month, Maribel said, speaking just a few feet from the intersection where protestors who rallied in August against the rezoning were arrested in acts of civil disobedience.

“It’s because of what’s going on in the neighborhood,” she said. “Every year, rent goes up about $1,000. It’s good for us that we have a new lease, but eventually, we might not be able to stay.”

Maribel and Alberto have joined on as plaintiffs in a new lawsuit as part of the first legal challenge to the city’s planned rezoning of Inwood.

Community stakeholders announced on Monday that they are suing the city over the rezoning, which was approved by the City Council on August 8.

The Article 78 lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, argues that there were flaws and omissions in the impact studies conducted by the city, and asks the court to determine that the decision for rezoning was “arbitrary and capricious.”

The suit’s 15 plaintiffs include Maribel and Alberto Núñez, together with uptown advocacy group Northern Manhattan is Not For Sale (NMN4S), and other residents and business owners from Inwood. It was filed by attorney Michael Sussman on behalf of Inwood Legal Action (ILA), a constituent group of NMN4S. Advocates formed ILA last year to explore legal options to fight the rezoning.

Inwood attorney Philip Simpson, who assisted Sussman in putting together the suit and is also one of the plaintiffs, said the city failed to study the impact on preferential rents, minority and women-owned business enterprises, traffic congestion, and how people of color would be disproportionately affected.

“These issues have been raised by our neighbors time and time again, and none of these things have been studied,” Simpson said, calling the failure to examine these impacts a “miscarriage of justice,” and a “perversion” of the land use review process.

“The city’s top-down approach to rezoning has failed to take into account the perspectives of the very members of the communities who would be affected by the major changes that this rezoning would cause,” Simpson stated.

The rezoning plan would increase area density and the levels of residential and commercial development within a 60-block section of the neighborhood.

At a press conference on Monday outside of State Supreme Court, activists were joined by Congressman Adriano Espaillat and State Senator-elect Robert Jackson.

“This is the beginning of pushback against rezoning in Inwood,” remarked Espaillat, who said the rezoning would cause “massive displacement” of working class people in Northern Manhattan.

“It will further contribute to segregating this city among income lines,” he said.

Espaillat said the 12,000 preferential rent leases in the four zip codes of Washington Heights and Inwood were especially vulnerable.

“We feel that the small number of so-called affordable apartments that are going to be produced are just a drop in the bucket, and what we’re really going to see is a major push for market-rate housing,” he said, noting that there would be additional lawsuits to come, as advocates attempt to battle the rezoning efforts.

Simpson said that during the Universal Land Use Review Process (ULURP), advocates called on the city to study the rezoning’s impact on preferential rents.

“The city said there was no public data,” he said. “Yet, when the city put out its Point of Agreement on the rezoning, one of their promises was to put out more tenant advocates and tenant lawyers in Inwood and they were going to target those people on buildings with preferential rents.”

“So, they have the data. They just refused to take a look at it,” he remarked.

Jackson pointed out that around 20,000 people moved out of Community Board 12’s jurisdiction between 2000 and 2010.

“You may ask, where did they go, and why did they leave? It was mainly because the rents were too high for them to afford,” he said. “This is a working class community and we want to try to maintain the type of community that we need, and that’s what this fight is all about.”

Jon Yeung, owner of U-Like Chinese Restaurant and one of the plaintiffs on the lawsuit, said he is concerned that he will be unable to renew his lease when it expires, as landlords will be substantially increasing rents or creating new buildings based on the rezoning.

“There’s concern that they’re going to tear down the buildings and make new ones,” he said. “For businesses, there are no real protections there.”

Ted Freed, a 30-year resident of Inwood, said the city’s ULURP process, which is part of all rezoning initiatives, rings hollow in its attempts at community engagement.

“You have the ULURP process to make the people think they have a voice,” he remarked. “But in the end, the city isn’t really listening. And City Councilmembers fall in line with what the local representative wants.”

City Councilmember Ydanis Rodríguez, who represents the district and backed the rezoning, defended the plan as a way to spur economic growth and bring a large number of affordable units to the neighborhood.

“I supported a responsible and contextual rezoning because I believe it will catapult economic development in the technology, health, science industries while creating a Latino food destination and good paying jobs for the working and middle classes of Inwood,” he said in a statement. “When it comes to the housing crisis, this is the first time we’ll see thousands of affordable apartments built for low-income, working class individuals where Inwood residents will receive guaranteed preference to rent the new affordable units.”

The Mayor’s Office and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), which spearheaded the rezoning, referred requests for comment to the city’s Law Department.

“The city stands by the approvals it made authorizing this important initiative. We will review and respond accordingly to the claims after we are served with the lawsuit,” said Law Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci.

Freed said that affordable housing promised by the city isn’t necessarily affordable to current Inwood income levels.

“You have a lot of deceptive promises being made,” he stated. “It creates an illusion that something positive is going on. They talk about affordable housing, but it’s not going to be affordable to the people who are here now.”

“Affordability is the primary obstacle to housing people, and if the plans that are on the table are not affordable, they are not real solutions,” said housing advocate Aiyisha Oglivie. “They are only there to enrich the rich.”

Espaillat stressed that the rezoning fight should be a concern not just for Inwood residents, as neighborhood changes would also impact the surrounding communities.

“This is going to have a domino effect in Northern Manhattan. This is not about Inwood only. This is about Washington Heights, this is about Hamilton Heights, this is about Marble Hill, Kingsbridge,” said Espaillat, who noted that other neighborhood rezonings such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn resulted in heavy displacement of low-income tenants.

“Rezoning has not worked for working class people across the city of New York,” he said. “We’re going to fight back. We’re going to say, ‘You can’t do this to our neighborhood.’”

In July, a State Supreme Court judge ruled against a similar legal challenge brought by East Harlem community stakeholders in an attempt to halt that neighborhood’s rezoning, which was unanimously approved by the City Council in late 2017.

In that lawsuit, advocates alleged that the city prepared an inadequate environmental impact statement, which estimated that fewer than 30 East Harlem residents were at risk of displacement as a result of the rezoning.

Simpson said the Inwood lawsuit is structured differently and is intended to show that the city failed to examine certain impacts altogether.

“This specific lawsuit is not saying to the city, well, you lowballed and your estimate was off,” he explained. “We’re saying you didn’t study what you were supposed to study, at all. It’s not a matter of asking a judge to second-guess decision making or estimates — it’s a matter of saying, you should have studied this, you didn’t, and that was wrong.”

David Eisenbach, a Columbia University professor who is running for Public Advocate, said the fact that the city is facing lawsuits related to its rezonings shows the ULURP process is “irretrievably broken.”

He said the City Council acts negligently when voting on rezoning projects.

“All it takes is for one Councilmember, the one in the district, to go along with the big real estate plan, and they all follow suit. That’s why you have these votes of 51 to nothing for a rezoning,” he said.

Eisenbach said he’d prefer to see a system where individual Community Boards have veto power on rezonings.

“If a Community Board votes against a project, like we saw with Inwood and East Harlem, it should end there.”

For Maribel and Alberto Núñez, the effects of the rezoning speculation have been reverberating ominously for months now. She worries that the recent rent increase is only the beginning.

“You have to try to survive. Landlords know they’re not risking anything, because if you leave, they’ll find somebody else to come in and pay more,” she said.

The restaurant’s employees, mostly Dominicans from the neighborhood, frequently complain that their rent is too high, added Alberto.

“Now, it’s hard to survive,” he remarked. “We love this neighborhood, the diversity, but [if the rezoning goes through], I feel like that’s going to change.”