Good Old Lower East Side

Warehousing at Baruch Houses

May 15, 2001

More than 150 tenants of Baruch Houses packed the meeting room at 605 FDR Drive on Wednesday, April 25th to discuss the large number of empty apartments in their complex. Residents talked about long waits for transfers, in cramped conditions, while larger apartments have remained vacant for as long as 13 years, sometimes right across the hall.

Councilmember Margarita Lopez presented the group with the results of her office's own investigation into the issue. There are currently 75 vacant apartments in Baruch Houses. 68 of them have been empty for more than a year and more than half are two-bedrooms apartments.

According to NYCHA, the apartments are to be converted into homes for the disabled, a process that is too expensive to do only a few apartments at a time. Instead, the city spends up to $329-a-night for each homeless person housed in a midtown hotel.

On Monday, April 30th, PHROLES members, Baruch tenants, representatives from the Legal Aid Society and several residents from Barrier-Free Living, a shelter for disabled adults on the Lower East Side, accompanied Councilmember Lopez at a press conference on the steps of City Hall. She demanded that NYCHA either begin the process of renovating the apartments or else make them available to doubled-up or homeless families immediately.