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Two sisters on the Upper East Side are fighting to remain in the affordable apartment they’ve lived in for more than a decade, according to a recent report by PIX11 News, which first covered their story.
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Roseann and Evelyn, both in their 70s, moved into a Mitchell-Lama unit on Second Avenue and East 92nd Street years ago, sharing the apartment with a close friend who was the official shareholder. When that friend left New York for Florida in 2018, the sisters began the formal process to take over the unit. But in 2019, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) denied their succession application. The sisters say they never received additional communication from the agency and continued paying rent as usual.Then, this past spring, an eviction notice arrived.
Their nephew, Javier Lopez, told PIX11 that both women live on fixed incomes — one earning just $11,000 a year — and that losing the apartment would be devastating. Lopez said he has since helped his aunts reopen the case with HPD, submitting new materials intended to show that the sisters and their longtime friend functioned as a family.
According to Lopez, the filing included letters from neighbors, medical and financial records, and photos documenting their household life. “There are caveats within the Mitchell-Lama HPD system, and we were able to prove that there are kin-like relationships,” he told PIX11. His aunts echoed that sentiment, with Roseann saying, “We were a family, we shared everything.”
Lopez said he hopes city leaders — including the incoming mayor and the speaker’s office — will intervene, arguing that seniors should not face “processes like this that criminalize them.”
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HPD offered a different view, emphasizing that the rules guiding Mitchell-Lama succession are strict for a reason. Under city guidelines, those seeking to assume a shareholder’s place must have lived with that person for at least two consecutive years before they moved out (or one year in the case of seniors), must meet the agency’s definition of “family members,” and must have appeared together on required income affidavits during that same period. All criteria must be satisfied to take over the apartment.“Mitchell-Lamas are a critical piece of NYC’s housing stock,” HPD Press Secretary Matthew Rauschenbach said in a statement to PIX11. “The clear, specific rules around succession rights in Mitchell-Lama units are critical to ensuring fairness in access to these units, and making exceptions, as we’re being asked to do in this case, puts that fairness at risk.”
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