KLLF Files Complaint on Behalf of Affordable Housing Tenant Subjected to Sustained Racist Abuse at Luxury Condo

This Tuesday, KLLF and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Deborah Heard, who has experienced shocking racial discrimination while living at Sky, a luxury apartment in Midtown Manhattan. Ms. Heard has lived at Sky since 2016, in one of the tower’s affordable housing units. The tower is owned and managed by the Moinian Group, whose website proudly proclaims the group is “one of the largest privately held real estate investment companies in the world.”

The Complaint alleges that, last year, a man moved into the apartment next to Ms. Heard’s and promptly began a sustained campaign of racial harassment against her and other low-income tenants. Among other things, the Complaint alleges that he scrawled racist graffiti on the door of the garbage room, called Ms. Heard the n-word, and said “n-words, sp-cs, and Asians should go back to where they came from.” It further also alleges that he threatened Ms. Heard, telling her that if he contracted COVID-19 he would cough on her “so that she would die,” and that he falsely reported Ms. Heard to the police—a well-documented practice of racial harassment.

Ms. Heard frequently emailed management about her neighbor’s harassment, and typically called Sky’s concierge for assistance dealing with her neighbor multiple times a week. The Complaint alleges that, despite this, building management repeatedly refused to assist her. What is more, it alleges that Ms. Heard is not the only tenant who has experienced race discrimination at Sky: other tenants of color in the building have confirmed management systematically fails to address the concerns of tenants, like Ms. Heard, who are people of color or receive rental subsidies—even though management regularly responds to the complaints of white tenants and those who do not use rental subsidies. 

In New York, developers who set aside a certain number of units for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers receive lucrative lax abatements and special financing. As Ms. Heard’s case demonstrates, it is distressingly common in these “mixed-income” luxury buildings for there to be tension between the wealthier tenants and their less privileged counterparts, and also common for property management companies to treat tenants on rental assistance programs worse than they treat wealthier tenants. You can read more about these phenomena here and here. 

You can read more about Ms. Heard’s over at Gothamist. KLLF’s Alanna Kaufman is lead counsel for Ms. Heard.