Westchester County Business Journal: Housing segregation claimed in Yonkers

Called a realization of the American dream when it opened last year, a $25 million housing development in Yonkers now is the focus of a federal lawsuit by residents claiming they’ve endured a nightmare of shoddy construction and buried backyard debris as well as racial segregation in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

The class-action lawsuit was filed this month in U.S. Southern District Court in White Plains by attorneys for 37 residents of the Father Pat Carroll Green housing complex at the corner of Nepperhan and Ashburton avenues. Its charges of segregation, especially volatile in a city with a contentious and costly history of federally ordered housing desegregation, could cast a legal shadow over other nearby residential redevelopment projects in the Ashburton Avenue corridor.

There the city and two private developers are replacing blighted public housing at the former Mulford Gardens with Grant Park at Croton Heights, a $45.5 million, 100-unit apartment community due to open in 2011. Another part of the Croton Heights affordable-housing project, the $23 million, 60-unit Park Vista apartment building, opened in 2008 at the corner of Ashburton and Vineyard avenues. Also under construction on Ashburton for a 2011 opening is Park Terrace, a $19.1 million, 49-unit apartment building for residents 62 and older. All are part of the city’s $180 million plan to rebuild and revitalize the Ashburton neighborhood and business corridor.

Development part of transformation

The Father Pat Carroll Green development, with 62 owner-occupied units and attached rental apartments, is another element in that transformation. The two-family homes sold at a net price of $263,000, said Rose Noonan, executive director of the Housing Action Council Inc. in Tarrytown, the project’s nonprofit marketing agent. County and federal grants subsidized about $5.6 million of the project.

At an opening ceremony in 2009, Yonkers Mayor Philip Amicone said officials were “cutting a ribbon on the American dream for dozens of Yonkers families” owning their first homes.

Yet the federal lawsuit claims its predominantly black and Hispanic residents were “steered” to the development by Noonan and other Housing Action Council staff, thus perpetuating minority segregation in Yonkers. It claims applicants were “pressured” to sign purchase contracts with warnings that the waiting list was long and they might lose any chance at an affordable home if they did not act quickly.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Randolph M. McLaughlin, a professor at Pace Law School in White Plains, is affiliated with the Manhattan law firm of Harwood Feffer LLP. McLaughlin said area residents applying for home ownership were not informed of other housing opportunities or were told they did not qualify for developments in historically white neighborhoods and communities. Similarly, white applicants were not informed of the Father Pat Carroll Green project in the minority neighborhood, the lawsuit claims.

“How come the only people that are in this development look exactly like the people who live next door or across the street?” said McLaughlin. “That’s not an accident.”

Construction flaws not corrected

The lawsuit also claims the housing developer, Long Island-based Jobco Inc. and its affiliate, Yonkers Green Realty, have failed to correct numerous building design and construction defects since residents moved in last year. The long-vacant site also had been a dumping ground for garbage, auto tires and batteries, metal pipes, toilet seats and other debris that residents found buried in their yards.

Mounds of weed-sprouting dirt dumped at the site this year by the city for use as yard fill by the contractor were taken from the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center construction site in Yonkers, said David Simpson, the city’s mayoral spokesman. McLaughlin said the mounds, which a city official described as “topsoil,” have compounded residents’ complaints of unsightly and unsafe debris.

Simpson said the city has “worked very aggressively” to address construction, debris, landscaping and other issues at the development. “Everything was built up to code,” he said. “That’s not to say that there haven’t been problems.”

Robert Pascucci, president of Jobco in Great Neck and a defendant in the lawsuit, did not return a call for comment.

Simpson called the segregation complaint “absolutely absurd.” U.S. District Court Judge Leonard B. Sand, who presided over the city’s lengthy desegregation case and 2007 settlement plan, “signed off on this development,” he said.

Marketing plan was approved

Noonan at the Housing Action Council said the federal court approved the agency’s affirmative marketing plan for the development. Noonan said she heard no complaints of segregation from residents before the lawsuit was filed.

Simpson said Amicone “was pretty angry” about the lawsuit brought by McLaughlin, who has long been a litigious opponent of city officials. “What the city did at Father Pat Carroll Green was actually a good thing,” Simpson said. “The city was really on the side of the angels here” by making affordable first homes available in a neighborhood being transformed. “To have a class-action lawsuit, it was really kind of a slap in the face to the city.”

Regarding the Ashburton Avenue redevelopment, the lawsuit “kind of puts a shadow over the whole thing that shouldn’t be there,” Simpson said.

McLaughlin said the legal case “is a warning message to developers in the county of Westchester. Affordable housing should be quality housing.”

For the city that sponsored the project, “When you build affordable housing, make sure you comply with the Fair Housing Act and you apprise people of the opportunities,” he said.