The decision Friday marks the first time a New York court has ruled that minimum-income policies for people with full-rent subsidies violate city and state laws, said Housing Works senior attorney Armen Merjian, who represented the family trying to get into the Parkchester housing complex.
A 12,000-unit Bronx housing complex could soon open to homeless applicants with city-issued rental vouchers after a state judge on Friday ordered the owner to accept a family it had locked out by “irrational” and discriminatory income eligibility rules.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Latin sided with a 34-year-old mother of two who sued the owners of Parkchester in the eastern Bronx after she was denied an apartment because she did not earn at least $62,000 a year, even though the CityFHEPS voucher she received from the Department of Social Services (DSS) would cover the full rent. The woman, who has been sleeping on the floor of a friend’s one-bedroom Parkchester apartment with her 1- and 5-year-old children, said an income that high would have made her ineligible for a voucher in the first place.
It is a violation of the city’s human rights law for landlords to deny apartments to applicants because they use government subsidies to pay their rent. The practice, known as Source of Income (SOI) discrimination, is one of the most common forms of housing discrimination in the city, though rarely enforced. The decision Friday marks the first time a New York court has ruled that minimum-income policies for people with full-rent subsidies violate city and state laws, said Housing Works senior attorney Armen Merjian, who represented the family trying to get into Parkchester.
“This decision echoes what every other court and human rights commission to examine this issue has said, which is that it is illegal to impose a minimum income requirement upon those with a full voucher and thus no rent share,” Merjian said.
On Friday, Latin ordered Parkchester to process the woman’s application and either give her an apartment or place her on a waitlist if a unit was not available. “This is exactly the type of case that injunctive relief is meant for,” he wrote. “The brutality of homelessness is too great a risk.”
Latin’s decision came after a Thursday hearing in which he twice slammed Parkchester’s minimum income rule as a “Catch-22” for poor applicants with rent subsidies.
“If the plaintiff was making $62,000, she wouldn’t be eligible to get a voucher that will pay the entire rent,” Latin said. In court papers and at the hearing, Parkchester’s attorney contended that the development’s management company uses the same requirement regardless of an applicant’s source of income.
“There’s a huge homelessness problem in New York City. How can you cut these people out completely?” Latin said in response at Thursday’s hearing. “How could we ever fix that problem using your uniform method for everybody?”
The judge questioned why the company would force an applicant with a full housing voucher to earn a multiplier of the annual rent if the city covers the entire cost, and suggested that Parkchester uses more onerous rules for voucher holders than for applicants without subsidies. Parkchester’s “refusal to accept her housing subsidy…is the cause of her homelessness,” he wrote.
Parkchester Preservation Management, which manages about half of the rentals in the 12,000-unit complex, did not return an email or phone calls seeking comment on the decision Friday. This story will be updated if they respond.
Parkchester first opened in 1940 as a whites-only community but has evolved under new owners into a diverse, mixed income neighborhood with 6,300 rental units located blocks from the 6 Train. The planned community…
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