City Prevents Trinity School’s Exit From Real Estate Business
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The elite Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would like to get out of the real estate business, but administrators are finding that is easier said than done.
The school was attempting to sell a rent-controlled apartment building it owns to a private developer, Pembroke Properties, but the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is rejecting the sale.
The building, an apartment complex on 91st Street called Trinity House, falls under the city’s supervision because it is part of a state-sponsored “affordable” housing program called Mitchell-Lama aimed at keeping middle-class tenants in the city.
A spokesman for HPD, Neill Coleman, said the city rejected the sale because it would jeopardize the building’s relationship with the Mitchell-Lama program.
Trinity’s director of development and alumni relations, Myles Amend, said Trinity built the apartments in the late 1960s as a way to provide housing for staff members.
Tenants who have protested the sale are celebrating the city’s move.
“We really warmly welcome this action by HPD, and we’re moving ahead to prepare an offer that we will make to Trinity School to preserve some sort of long-term affordable status,” the co-chairman of the Trinity House Tenants Association, Jim Paul, said.
Mr. Paul acknowledged that, given soaring real estate prices in Manhattan, finding a way for middle-class residents to stay in the building could be difficult.
He said options include being purchased by a nonprofit and an arrangement under which tenants could buy Trinity House with help from the city.
Mr. Amend said the school has not received notice from HPD, but remains firm in its intent to sell. “Trinity’s made it clear,” he said. “We believe that we do not belong in the real estate business.”
Mr. Amend said school administrators had worked to find a buyer that would protect the interests of the tenants and believed they had found that in Pembroke.
He said that owning the building was not financially beneficial to Trinity; the school has not made profits from rent for years and, in 30 years of ownership, has sometimes had to subsidize the building.
