Right now it is perfectly legal for a developer who has received millions in tax abatements in return for providing some “affordable” apartments to ban those lower income tenants from the house gym or pool. Developers can even provide a separate entrance so the regular tenants will not even have to be aware that they are in the same building with these people who have won their apartment by demonstrating in a city application that they are indeed poor—but not so poor they can’t pay the affordable rent.
Council Member Corey Johnson has joined with other members in proposing legislation that would prevent developers from hanging a sign on the gym door “No Affordables Please.”
When drafting the new legislation it seems they decided to add everyone who needs social and legal protection so that if the city law is passed it will become illegal for the developer to discriminate because of actual or perceived race, creed, color, national origin, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, partnership status, alienage or citizenship or (and this line they put in bold face type) “because such person or persons occupy an affordable dwelling unit.”
