Applause for Calogero

RIOC Board Chair Judy Calogero, who will be leaving that post within the next month, is leaving behind what could be a crowning achievement. On Thursday night, she guided the Board through the difficult decision to keep Paul Mas on as real-estate consultant through the completion of deals for tenant ownership in Island House and Westview.

It was a long meeting and there were clear prospects for failure – a clearly expressed feeling, as discussions began, that Mas was conducting a kind of hold-up, forcing the Board to accept his terms for staying with the negotiation he’s been conducting, on behalf of RIOC, with the tenant groups at the two buildings and with the owners of the properties. The goal: the opportunity for home ownership in the toughest real-estate market in the world.

It’s a crowning achievement because it does so much:

• Owning one’s home means a lot. It means roots – a place to call your own. Property.

• It snatches these two properties out of the reaching hands of possible real-estate speculators whose motives are pretty much restricted to profit.

• It lends a new stability to the Roosevelt Island community. Property owners are unavoidably more invested in the community than are tenants who are more likely to move on to something else.

• It gives both buildings a chance at beating the deadline of a change in administrations in Albany, working with members of the current RIOC Board who have learned the rules of the game over the years. While the change of administrations is welcome, it holds the danger of delay while Governor-elect Spitzer gets his team in place. And delay, in this Roosevelt Island real-estate game, could be fatal to tenant interests.

• It may very well result in the two buildings being "saved," in the sense that, as rentals, they have tended to be more subject to abuse than a building where there’s an ownership stake.

Calogero has submitted her notice that she’ll be leaving her post as Commissioner of the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal at the end of the month, with the change in administrations. It means she’ll leave related posts, too, like being the Chair of the RIOC Board of Directors.

But she has made it clear that she’s in the game, intensely, through December 31, and here, at least, the game is making the moves that will put Island House and Westview into tenant hands.

Applause.

 

And for Tenant Leaders

You can see how tough it is to stand up and try to lead your fellow residents when you watch meetings in which those who risk taking leadership roles catch the verbal spears and sneers tossed their way by those they would lead.

Yet they do it and, more often than not, they do it very well. There’s the occasional ego-trip or errant super-mouth. But those who step forward and offer themselves deserve our thanks and applause, too.

DL