De Blasio could invoke eminent domain in housing plan

Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened Tuesday to use eminent domain to seize private apartments housing homeless people if owners don’t voluntarily sell to nonprofits to make way for below-market-rate units.

Being targeted are about 800 “cluster” apartments in about two dozen buildings scattered across the city in which privately-owned dwellings, often in deteriorating rentals, are leased by the city to house people with nowhere else to go. Under the law, the city must house the homeless, unlike in many states.

At a news conference Tuesday in the Bronx, de Blasio’s housing commissioner, Maria Torres-Springer, said attempts to negotiate with landlords to purchase the apartments have already begun. She declined to say how the negotiations were progressing. The units would be priced below market rate permanently.

Although use of the sites under de Blasio has increased to keep pace with rising homelessness, the mayor announced the plan to invoke eminent domain, which would dovetail with his promise to stop using cluster sites by 2021. He said he believes his plan will succeed in court on the grounds that the planned use “is a definition of public good.”

“We come in peace,” de Blasio said regarding the plan. “We are looking for a good faith solution. And we are very hopeful we can get to a good faith solution.”

His social services commissioner, Steve Banks, added: “the ability to take property for a public purpose is permissible, but it’s not taking without compensation, and so the compensation is established through the court proceeding if the parties don’t come to an agreement outside of court.”

The current occupants of the apartments would qualify to stay in the units, and de Blasio said some could pay no rent to do so. He declined to publicly identify the buildings being targeted.

Banks ruled out citing the buildings’ blight — a common basis for greenlighting eminent domain seizures in New York State courts — and said city lawyers would instead focus on the public-policy good from converting the buildings into below-market-rate units.

But Robert McNamara, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit that opposes eminent domain, said while courts in the state have mostly approved blight-led eminent domain seizures, it’s unclear whether citing a public-policy good would legally suffice.

De Blasio said the aim is to complete the acquisitions or seizures by 2018.“What was the Theodore Roosevelt quote?” de Blasio said. “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

But McNamara said doing so by eminent domain typically takes far longer.

“Government officials are always tempted to use their power to take private property from one owner and give it to another one based on promises about what will be done with it in the future,” he said. “But experience teaches us that those promises are all too likely to be empty.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.