Alan Lapes: Homeless Housing Profiteer

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According to the New York Times, Alan Lapes, whose vacant condo building at 165 West 9th Street in Gowanus is the target of advocacy organization Coalition for Carroll Gardens, buys out his single-room occupancy tenants and flips the rooms to the city's Department of Homeless Services for more than $3,000 a month.

Profiteers like Lapes were drawn to the homeless shelter business by the premium rates DHS is offering due to the homeless housing shortage.

Lapes owns or leases about 20 of the city's 231 shelters.  Most city shelters and residences are run by the city or nonprofit agencies, but Lapes' operation, plagued by complaints of prostitution, violence, drug use, vermin, broken elevators, heat and hot water outages and fire and building code violations, is for-profit.

Lapes' business model -- clearing out SRO tenants and renting their rooms to DHS at premium rates -- is the same one used by the Podolsky family, from whom Lapes rents buildings.  In the 1980s, two of the Pololskys entered guilty pleas to harassing tenants out of their Upper West Side buildings so they could condo or rent the apartments to upscale tenants.

Last week, more than 200 outraged local residents and elected officials packed a community meeting on Lapes' plans to turn two of his buildings on West 95th Street in Manhattan into homeless shelters, without public oversight.

Landlords like Lapes, according to the Times, were spawned by court settlements in 1979 and 2008 forcing the city to house the homeless or face big fines. Now, with the tide of homelessness at a 30-year high, the city has resorted to single-room-occupancy buildings, supposed to house low-income adults.

Homeless advocates blame Mayor Michael Bloomberg for creating the homeless crisis in New York City by failing to move families out of shelters into permanent housing, and by paying millions to sleazy private landlords like Lapes and the Podolskys.

A related post on this blog.