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Winning Battles, Losing the War

New York Lawyer
July 20, 2007

Legal Staff Works to Retain Dwindling Number of Single-Room Occupancy Hotels By Thomas Adcock
New York Law Journal

A big fat cockroach, the kind with wings, lay dead on the linoleum floor of attorney Molly Doherty's cramped office on Monday morning this week.

Unflustered, Ms. Doherty, director of the West Side SRO Legal Project, advised a visitor to her quarters on upper Columbus Avenue, "I'll just take care of that." Whereupon, she grabbed a convenient broom and dustpan and consigned the stiffened corpse of one less Periplaneta americana to a wastepaper basket.

If only her courtroom adversaries were so easily dispatched.

Ms. Doherty and her small staff of attorneys and community organizers are in a Sisyphean struggle against owners of New York City's dwindling number of single-room occupancy hotels, havens of cheap shelter for the poor and lonesome, most old from struggle, and sometimes daft.

The most difficult client, said Ms. Doherty, is "someone who has a hard time talking about day-to-day reality" but who nevertheless suffers actual abuse. The case, for instance, of an elderly woman living in a rent-stablized room in a Harlem SRO undergoing heavy renovations for new life as a budget hotel for tourists.

"She's delusional, in a way. She says the landlord is sneaking people into her room and sticking her with needles," said Ms. Doherty. "But there she is, the only tenant in the building, and it's a fact that construction debris is piled in front of her door - every day.

"After a hospital visit one time, she returned home to find that the landlord had changed locks," Ms. Doherty added. "The landlord said he was getting an order of protection against her because she was a threat to him."

Ms. Doherty succeeded in restoring the woman's rights to tenancy. And so it goes, on and on.

"While we've won many battles, we're sort of losing the war," said Stephen Russo, executive director of the Goddard Riverside Community Center, of which the SRO project is part.

Mr. Russo measures loss by numbers that do not bode well for the project's clientele, ripe for eviction by landlords anxious to empty their downscale properties of unglamorous sorts and tidy up the premises to re-rent at substantially higher rates.

According to the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, there were approximately 165,000 SRO units available in 1971. Last year's count was 42,000.

"It doesn't take a financial genius to figure out that if you have a stabilized tenant paying $245 a month and suddenly you can rent the room for $100 a day that it makes sense to change things," said Mr. Russo.

Catharine A. Grad of Grad & Weinraub frequently assists the project at half her usual hourly rate. She said of Ms. Doherty and her staff of four attorneys and seven community organizers, "They serve people who don't have families to help them, who could be at the mercy of landlords in a very heated market. These vulnerable people are living in SROs, which are under siege. They're being converted into tourist hotels."

A lifelong social activist, Ms. Doherty does not limit herself to the courtroom in advocating for her clients adrift in the "tides of change," as she calls the New York real estate scene. She attends street rallies mounted by SRO tenants and lobbies government agencies.

Ms. Doherty's favorite extra-legal tool of persuasion is deploying client tenants to auction sites where their own SROs are on the block. The tenants button-hole prospective bidders with a deal-souring salutation: "Hi, I'm a rent-stabilized tenant in that building."

Social Movement Background

Such tactics come naturally to Ms. Doherty, 33, whose parents were involved in the social movements of the 1960s. Among her earliest memories as a toddler in the 1970s, the Boston-born Ms. Doherty distributed leaflets outside a supermarket in Fall River, Mass., in advocating a boycott of California grapes and lettuce in support of the late Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union.

Ms. Doherty's father, who died while she was a student at the City University of New York School of Law, persuaded her to become a lawyer rather than a social worker - for the simple reason that a J.D. might mean an extra $10,000 or so in annual salary.

Not that Ms. Doherty is engaged in practice for material gain. Annual pay at the project ranges from $43,000 to $65,000, as negotiated by Local 2325 of the United Auto Workers, the union that also represents attorneys at the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services of New York City. The project operates on a yearly budget of about $750,000, derived mostly from city contracts.

Attorneys drawn to the project include Deepa Varma, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University School of Law now at work as a staff attorney, and Antonella Pomara, 25, a third-year at the University of Chicago Law School assigned to litigation research at the project by Debevoise & Plimpton, where she is a summer associate.

Ms. Pomara returns to work at Debevoise on Monday, to be replaced by the final of three summers the firm commits to the project. Last year, Ms. Pomara interned at Legal Services, where she became interested in housing law.

"I've always been involved in community service," said Ms. Pomara, who established a soup kitchen as a high school student in Westchester County and tutored children during her undergraduate years at Columbia University, continuing through law school in Chicago.

Undecided about a career choice between public interest law and the private bar, Ms. Pomara said, "Irrespective of which direction I'll take, public interest work will always be something I'll dedicate myself to."

Ms. Varma never doubted her own career direction. At the project, she particularly relishes the often nose-to-nose combat of Housing Court.

"That's what makes it exciting," said Ms. Varma, whose own activist bona fides include internships with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women and election project work in her ancestral India.

Ms. Doherty agreed.

"It feels good when you're getting screamed at by a landlord's attorney," she said, "and you're able to remain calm - and win."

Of the more genteel life at a large private firm, Ms. Varma said, "I never wanted that kind of job. I have a roommate who does it. It sounds pretty grim."

Large-Firm Involvement

Nonetheless, big-firm lawyers indeed have roles in the project's work. Case in point was the recent matter of the project's being sued as third party to an SRO sale that fell through. Enter Karl E. Seib, Jr., a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler recruited by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest to represent the project.

The prospective buyer in the failed deal had sought information from tenants on housing code violations undisclosed by the landlord, Mr. Seib explained.

"We didn't want to disclose the names of tenants; we didn't want them to be bothered," said Mr. Seib. Besides which, as he stated in response to buyer's counsel, the tenants could not possibly be of help.

"It was something they didn't quite know how to deal with," Mr. Seib said of the project's lawyers. Along with litigation associate Julie Jun, he said, "We brought a measure of potency to the response."

He added, "Molly Doherty is a very hard-working person. I was happy to handle this because she spends a fair amount of her time in court."

Ms. Doherty also spends much time collaborating with the community organizers on her staff to make each remaining SRO as cohesive and neighborly as possible under often difficult circumstances.

"I admire the way these people take care of each other. To me, it's inspiring," Ms. Doherty said of the tenants. "It's a real important way to live in a city that can be segregating and lonely."