The city is fighting a secret war against veterans — not only ignoring laws that give them preference for affordable housing but also pushing legally to erase the rules.
Air Force vet Aaron Glover, 50, is suing the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for failing to favor retired service members applying for Mitchell-Lama developments.
Glover, who works for Manhattan’s VA medical center, applied for a $ 600-a-month studio apartment at Manhattan’s Henry Phipps Plaza East last summer after seeing a newspaper ad.
But HPD staff never sifted through the nearly 30,000 applications to pick out veterans, said Glover’s attorney, Pete Kempner.
By law, ex-military are to be put at the top of the waiting list, ahead of other applicants who are placed on the list through a random lottery. Instead, HPD has been applying the veteran’s preference only after a lottery is conducted.
“They’re trying to lessen their workload at the expense of veterans — it’s a bad deal,” said Glover, who served in the Air Force for seven years and rose to the rank of senior airman. He lives with his sister in Harlem and is struggling to find an apartment on his $ 50,000 salary.
“It’s much easier to put 20,000 applications in a hopper . . . than to check if they belong to veterans,” said Kempner, who heads the Veterans Justice Project at Legal Services NYC.
Last month, HPD proposed new rules that would weaken the veteran’s preference — applying it only if vets are lucky enough to be picked out of a lottery of thousands of applicants.
“They’re looking for shortcuts, but . . . the least our veterans deserve is some time and effort,” Kempner said.
Since 2007, state law has required Mitchell-Lama developments — middle-income rental and cooperative housing built through government incentives — to give preference to disabled vets. Three years later, the law was expanded to include all veterans.
Still, a 2012 state audit found few veterans benefited from the rule. Across 18 HPD-supervised buildings, only 14 of 332 vacancies were filled by former servicemen or women. Two developments illegally skipped over vets on their waiting lists.
More than 200,000 veterans live in New York City. HPD randomly selected 2,000 applications for Henry Phipps Plaza East and 20 belonged to veterans, Kempner said.
HPD is also proposing that only veterans who are the “head of household” can be given preference — cutting out many disabled veterans who are in the care of their family.
Last year, Brooklyn veteran Martin Bumagin filed a suit against HPD for denying his veteran’s preference because his mother was the “head of household.” The case was settled after Bumagin, a Marine who served in Iraq, argued there was no such rule.
An HPD spokesman said the agency processes all applications for the head of household whether they are veterans or not. The proposed rule change is a clarification of the city policy.
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
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