Category Archives: Images in the News

NY Times | N Bengiveno

Willy Machan said his landlord offered him $25,000 to move out so he could bring in homeless tenants. The landlord, Alan Lapes, was clearing out these tenants to accommodate a group of people not often regarded as desirable: New York’s homeless. The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays many times the amount the rooms would usually rent for — spending over $3,000 a month for each threadbare room without a bathroom or kitchen — because of an acute shortage in shelters for homeless men and women. Indeed, the amount the city pays . . . . has encouraged Mr. Lapes to switch business models and become a major private operator of homeless shelters. He is by most measures the city’s largest and owns or leases about 20 of the 231 shelters citywide. Why is the city colluding with this profiteer?

The model being used by Mr. Lapes, clearing out lower paying tenants, was also pursued by Mr. Podolsky and family members. In the late 1980s, Mr. Podolsky, his father and his brother, pleaded guilty to charges by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that they used threats and violence to drive tenants out of three Upper West Side buildings so they could rent them to new tenants at far higher rents or sell them as condominiums or cooperatives.