Squatters’ Fight to Stay in New York City-Owned Buildings Goes to Court

On a battered street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, construction workers are hard at work renovating five vacant buildings. They are surrounded by high metal fences, guarded by police all day, and brightly lit by spotlights through the night.

Police barricades also are stacked along the sidewalk--a constant reminder of a siege that began more than a year ago between the city, which owns the buildings, and 100 squatters who lived in the abandoned apartments and helped restore the buildings for a decade.

Several hundred police officers, wearing riot gear and backed by an armored vehicle, evicted the squatters in 1994 after a series of violent standoffs. Dozens of squatters were arrested and some were injured during the confrontations.

But now the battle is shifting from the streets to the courts and stirring new debate about the rights of squatters here and in other cities. The widely watched case, which will be heard soon by a state judge, has illuminated a strange subculture that thrives in the shadows of the city’s apartment towers and tenements.

“It has been very difficult in the last 10 years for the squatters to have the standing to challenge the government,” said Stanley Cohen, an attorney for the group. “For the first time, we are getting our day in court.”

To defend the squatters, Cohen is invoking an obscure legal principle known as “adverse possession.” It is a common-law theory that says a person who has continuous use of someone else’s property for 10 years without a formal objection or notice to vacate has the right to use it.

Cohen contends that the squatters here have a legal right to stay in the buildings because city officials not only knew they were living there but encouraged them to stay because they maintained the property.

But Leonard Koerner, counsel for the city, said adverse possession does not apply in this case. Among other reasons, he said, the theory can be used only when property owners give some kind of approval.

“If I go into your apartment, I need to have your permission,” he said. “I can’t just walk in and stay for 10 years and have right of adverse possession.”

Koerner said housing officials long have tried to keep squatters out of the buildings by sending eviction notices and even sealing the doors with cement. If these trespassers win the court battle, he said, “it would set a precedent for squatters’ rights.”

Squatters have been a problem here for many years. The largest community lives in about 16 buildings on the Lower East Side, a tenement-filled haven for the poor and working class sandwiched between the East River and the Bowery.

Many of the narrow buildings were designed to accommodate the great wave of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island at the turn of the century. Dozens of families lived in each building, shared toilets with neighbors and bathed in the kitchens.

When stricter building codes were enacted in the 1930s, however, many landlords could not afford to comply and sealed their tenements. Commercial businesses stayed away and rents remained low. In the 1960s, a second wave of immigrants settled here, along with a thriving bohemian community.

The Lower East Side became an affordable area for artists and musicians. And in recent years, it has blossomed into an avant-garde arts center. Slowly, it is becoming gentrified.

Avenue A, one of the main arteries of the nearby East Village, is now a nightly hot spot. Trendy bars and restaurants are opening, and inexpensive apartments in the area are getting hard to find.

The squatters say they have a solution to the lack of affordable housing in the neighborhood: Moving into vacant, city-owned apartments and renovating them.

They are a diverse group, men and women of many racial and ethnic backgrounds. Some are very poor and one step from living on the street. But many are artists, musicians and carpenters, articulate and educated. And they all rally behind the notion that poor people should have a right to housing.

“Squatting basically provides a chance for people who don’t have enough money to improve their situation by fixing up buildings and moving into them,” said Seth Tobocman, who is drafting a graphic novel about the Lower East Side. “The city has hundreds of buildings that they don’t know what to do with.”

According to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city owns 1,325 vacant buildings but, like the five buildings on East 13th Street that are at the heart of the dispute, they are all slated for renovation to low-income housing.

“Do we remove every single squatter from every property? No, we don’t. We tend to only do it when we have plans for the building or if there is a safety issue,” said Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, the city housing commissioner.

During the 1994 eviction, city officials argued that the buildings, lacking heat and water, were structurally unsafe, unsanitary and a fire hazard. But a state judge ruled that the buildings were structurally sound and allowed squatters to remain. In May, an appellate court allowed the city to seize two buildings.

A few days later, hundreds of police officers stormed the buildings. Squatters had dragged piles of old appliances and furniture in front of them and overturned a car to deter police. A few dozen squatters welded themselves inside one building. Several hours later, the police pried them out and reclaimed the property. Two other clashes erupted in following weeks.

Now the buildings are being renovated into 41 apartments, mainly for families earning less than $30,000 a year. The rent is $488 a month for a family of four. Twelve units will be reserved for homeless families.

“We don’t gentrify neighborhoods,” said Deborah Boatright, a city spokeswoman. “Our business is to develop low-cost housing.”

There may be more trouble ahead. Housing officials say they are planning to seize an arts center that has been a magnet for squatters and turn its building over to a low-income housing developer. But the squatters are vowing once more to resist.

“We will not go quietly,” said William Duran, a squatter who lives in an apartment in that building.

The squatters contend that all the housing being developed is too expensive. They also insist that without the construction they have completed, the buildings would have deteriorated to the point the city would not be able to use them.

The squatting movement is getting some favorable attention. Recently, some of their apartments were showcased in the New York Times for their ingenuity. The Tony award-winning play “Rent” was modeled partly after the squatter community, and that has led even to a bohemian-style clothing line.

But critics say that glorifying their lives is wrong. “They are stealing from the people of New York,” said Antonio Pagan, a community leader. “. . . They are nothing but yuppie gentrifiers disguising themselves in revolutionary garb to get free rent.”