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A handyman, a sudden eviction and a gentrification battle royale

NEW YORK — Here is a vision of New York the way many people dream it: a packed room of neighbors on a Saturday afternoon, diverse in age and race and class, talking about community.

A Handyman, a Sudden Eviction and a Gentrification Battle Royale

They are long-timers who anchored the buildings through some rough years and newcomers paying top dollar during the good.

They have come to share their sense of home and belonging.

And they are ready to explode.

Finally somebody says it.

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You’re like Donald Trump, a woman yells at the co-op president, a 52-year-old financial planner in a plaid shirt.

A pen raps on a table for order. It doesn’t come.

“It was very disrespectful,” a woman recalled.

This is a story about change in the new Brooklyn, where gentrifiers and social activists are often the same people, and the threats to a neighborhood’s charms can be the people who move there to enjoy them.

The dispute at the Clinton Hill Cooperative apartments, a sprawling complex of 12 red brick buildings where people say they know their neighbors, involves a single apartment and a beloved handyman who lives there. But it is also about the narrative of a community in rapid flux: amid the upheaval, is a free apartment a glitch from the sketchier past, something to be rectified in the name of progress? Or is it a strand of continuity that people might yearn to call home?

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The Clinton Hill Co-ops were built for Navy Yard workers during World War II, and still bear maritime-themed tile mosaics over the doorways. On a recent weekday morning, a few women pushed strollers by a security stand in one of the inner courtyards. One change: there used to more benches for hanging out, said Dolores Gilliard, 73, who moved to the complex in 1979. She pointed to an adjacent laundry that no longer offers self-service, in response to the neighborhood’s churn.

Gilliard drew a line. “Gentrification is not going to change who we are,” she said. “We have the biggest block party in Brooklyn. We have seniors, millennials, gay people, kids of all nationalities. The best block party.”

When the co-op board announced last month that it planned to take away the apartment of Hector Caballero, a handyman who had lived there with his family for 19 years, it hit residents as an affront. Many thought that in their turf — a progressive enclave in a progressive part of Brooklyn — they had figured out a formula for harmonious gentrification, even as other parts of the city split apart.

“This community was always a community,” said Barbara Abrams, 74, who has lived in her 10th floor apartment, with views of the Empire State Building, since the 1970s. “People say hello. You hold the door for each other. It’s just nice.”

Now, suddenly, there was a victim.

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Caballero, 55, started working as a handyman in the Co-ops in February 1990, and he was given an apartment 10 years later, with the understanding that he would be available for emergency repairs at all hours.

The neighborhood had a rougher image then, and the Co-ops were coming out of financial distress, with apartments going vacant. Myrtle Avenue, the complex’s northern boundary, was known as Murder Avenue.

Caballero, who has an easy demeanor, became a favorite of residents, as were his two children. “He’s smiling all the time,” Abrams said. “I never saw him make an evil face.”

Seven hundred residents signed a petition urging the board to keep Caballero and his family in place. When residents demonstrated outside a board meeting in February, carrying signs that read “Worker Justice” and “Hector Stays,” someone called the police. An officer from the 88th Precinct told the crowd to disperse. “The eviction,” she announced, “is a done deal.”

This only raised the anger in the complex.

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“I didn’t think it was radical to say, We want to keep the community the way it is,” said Helen Yentus, 38, who bought her apartment 3 1/2 years ago. “As a gentrifier, as a new person, I moved here for this.”

Where the protesters saw a board driven to maximize revenue at all costs, the board’s president, Timo Lipping, looked at the same complex and saw something entirely different: a dark secret, unknown even to the full board.

Lipping, who led what he calls a “wave election” in late 2015, saw himself as a reformer in the Co-ops. He fought to reduce the number of board seats held by the co-op’s initial sponsor, and to replace old board members who had become “stagnant,” he said.

When he stepped into his position, he said, “the head of security pulled us aside and said there was a serious crime ring in the maintenance staff.”

The security chief, who has since died, outlined a range of criminal activity by a handful of maintenance workers, said Lipping and another executive board member, Peter McGuigan. The group did not include Caballero, whose work was considered good.

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“We didn’t know whether to believe any of this,” Lipping said. “I knew the guys were lazy and needed to be reformed.”

A law enforcement raid fizzled when someone inside the building administration tipped off the staff, the two added.

“They were shaking down guys who delivered paper products,” McGuigan said. “All these street-level cons.”

The executive committee quietly hired two outside investigators, at a cost of about $30,000, who confirmed the security chief’s allegations, Lipping and McGuigan said.

“When we got their report, it ranged from the guys just not doing their job up to full-blown criminal activity — mainly drugs, but maybe guns, too,” Lipping said. “That’s terrifying.”

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Asked about this account, Caballero said, “That’s news to me.” He added: “That has nothing to do with my apartment. Why are they bringing all this stuff up now?”

The committee did not inform other board members or residents about the investigation, Lipping added, because it was a personnel matter, and “because we didn’t want to scare anybody.” The investigators’ report remains in a lawyer’s office, where no one can see it.

Lipping declined to share the report. For many residents, this article will be their first word about the investigation.

“It was scary,” McGuigan said. “You walk your kid to school, and you say, ‘There’s that guy the FBI was watching.’”

The investigation also showed mountains of work that was not getting done. “We were paying people overtime, and we had 350 work tickets that were backed up,” said Audrey Churchill, a board member who moved to the Co-ops in 2004, after growing up in public housing nearby. Poor maintenance of asbestos led to an abatement cost of nearly $1 million, McGuigan said. Some workers spent days watching DVDs or taking side jobs for extra pay, including work for which residents were supposed to pay the co-op, Churchill said. Caballero was not among those implicated.

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But amid the scrutiny of the maintenance staff, his apartment raised a red flag, Lipping said. Though the co-op had formal agreements granting apartments to its two live-in supers, as stipulated in the union agreement and required by law, it had no such agreement for the four handymen who had also been given apartments.

In a staff of close to 40 maintenance men, giving free housing to a few struck board members as unfair and fiscally imprudent, especially as the apartments rose in value. After negotiating with the union, the board decided to take back two of the four apartments.

On January 15, the complex manager informed Caballero that he would have to give up his apartment in three months. Another resident handyman had gotten a similar notice and left quietly. Caballero chose a different route.

“You’re going to give me 90 days to leave after 19 years?” he said. “I want to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Caballero complained to his union but got little action. When he told Neil Donnelly, a shareholder who had been active in a previous effort to stem evictions within the complex, Donnelly gathered neighbors in support.

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“I was stunned,” Donnelly, 41, said.

Neighbors who had been tepid in the earlier effort to prevent evictions were incensed about Caballero, said Iben Falconer, who is married to Donnelly. “The fact that this happened to Hector, this was an affront.”

Told of the board’s investigation, Falconer said: “You’re going to hear me vent a little bit. We were not told any of this. They’re using it as an excuse that they’re trotting out when they want to get somebody out of his apartment.”

She added: “That doesn’t seem like the way to create the kind of community that we all want to live in. We want to have resident handymen who understand our buildings. They haven’t addressed that.”

Residents accused Lipping of putting “curb appeal” over the needs of a neighbor and his family.

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“Curb appeal is when you want to sell something,” said Dunton Black, 73, who bought his apartment in 1984 for $13,500. “My next step is the cemetery.”

Someone told Lipping to watch his back.

“So I’ve been threatened over this whole thing, too,” he said.

It was such a small matter, one apartment in a complex of more than 1,200. But in the heated real estate market of 2019, it became a litmus test of values.

For the board, which ran on promises to clean up past negligence, the apartment was a legacy of a “culture of corruption,” Lipping said.

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“I’m a financial planner,” he said. “I’m not a politician or a public speaker. I was not mentally prepared to have a bunch of people who I have spent countless hours working on behalf of call me these horrible names.”

For the residents, Caballero and his apartment were ties to a softer market that valued stability and continuity, because the alternative was decline. Caballero had been a steadying force when change was tilting toward social disorder. Now that every change brought neighbors with more resources and fancier jobs, did stability and continuity still matter?

With board members not communicating well about the decision to remove Caballero from his apartment, speculation about the reasons behind it ran unchecked. Maybe they were hiding a financial hole. Or somebody in the original sponsor’s organization was pulling the strings. Or Lipping cared only about raising the value of apartments, so he wanted the money to add amenities. Maybe it was just a heartless management company, telling the volunteer board that they knew best.

Residents aired their grievances in the media and to elected officials, complaining that they got no response from the board.

“We don’t know who made the decision to take back the apartment,” Gilliard said. “It has rallied the community to tell the board: ‘We’re not just shareholders. We care about the maintenance men.’ It’s made us closer and stronger.”

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She added: “We can’t let you get away with any slight, because we don’t know what you’re going to try to get away with tomorrow.”

Black said he was suspicious that the board suddenly needed money.

“I’ve been fighting for 30 years with these people,” he said. “They’re pushing too hard against us, who they’re supposed to be representing.”

To many in the Co-ops, the injustice was clear. Even local politicians lent Caballero support, with Clinton Hill’s City Council member, Laurie A. Cumbo, and Hakeem S. Jeffries, a U.S. congressman from Brooklyn, urging the board to keep him and his family in their home.

Finally, the board announced a reprieve of sorts. Caballero could stay until July, rather than leaving in April.

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As articles about the conflict came out in the Daily News and Gothamist, the board members kept silent. Their underlying story — of criminal activity among some now-former maintenance men — was too inflammatory, bad for both community peace of mind and co-op reputation, Lipping said.

The one neighbor to whom Lipping had confided, Michael Grinthal, had rejected it as reason to evict Caballero.

Grinthal, 45, a housing lawyer, said he had sensed that something shady had been going on. “I knew there were things I didn’t know,” he said. “This felt like, Ah, this is what that all was.”

But he added, “I don’t think that should be brought to bear on the question of whether Hector, who didn’t have anything to do with it — why is that being raised to color this decision?”

Lipping said he hoped the furor would die down as people got on with their lives. In the meantime, the board hired a publicist to help tell its side of the story.

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“I want to make sure this gets done right,” Lipping said. “It’s my home, too. If people don’t like me, whatever. But it’s important for me that we do this right. In the beginning we made some missteps, misjudging the reaction. But we’re not professionals. We’re just volunteers.

“I feel like telling people, this is the United States, you have the right to express yourself, but we only have a limited amount of bandwidth.”

For Caballero, the next step is unclear. “I wasn’t expecting that much love from the community,” he said. He arranged to meet with a lawyer and looked into a couple of jobs in other buildings — without the free apartment, he cannot stay at Clinton Hill Co-ops, he said.

“I’m 50-plus,” he said. “I was trying to retire here with honor. I came here on my own, and I would like to leave on my own.”

For him and for the others, there remained a lingering question, of home and neighborly obligation. As he put it, “My kids say, ‘If we don’t belong to this community, where do we belong?’”

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