Clinton Hill Coop's Evicted Handyman Will Get To Stay, Board Says

CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN — A months-long battle to keep a live-in handyman from being evicted from a large housing cooperative in Clinton Hill has ended with a deal to allow him to stay, but start paying rent.

Hundreds of residents from the Clinton Hill Cooperatives, a 12-building complex of 1,200 apartments, learned at a special meeting last week that the coop's board had negotiated a deal with handyman Hector Caballero and his attorney, the board confirmed to Patch.

The deal will allow Caballero and his family, who have lived rent-free with his family at the coop for 19 years, to start paying rent and stay in their home instead of leaving by the eviction deadline of July 1. Caballero was originally told in January he would need to leave by April 15, a move-out date the board later postponed after residents began rallying and gathering petition signatures to keep Caballero from being evicted.

Those residents said this week that, although they are relieved Caballero will get to stay, they are still angered that the deal will include a nearly market-rate rent and that it took as long as it did to reach the compromise.

"And all this, from a crisis that never had to happen at all, and that was caused by the board blindly following advice of a management company that has no interest in our community beyond the bottom line," the group said in a summary of the meeting sent to its members. "(We feel) disappointment that it took all this protesting, petitioning and arguing even get the board to listen at all and have the conversation. After all, the meeting only happened at all because of petitioning for a special meeting."

The deal the board is negotiating with Caballero and his attorney will have him pay a monthly rent at least 30 percent below the market rate, though an exact amount has not yet been decided on, Audrey Churchill, the board's secretary, told Patch. The market rate for the complex is $2,250.

Caballero and his attorney have so far verbally agreed to the deal but it is still being finalized. The same deal is also being offered to another live-in handyman that was told he would be evicted and already left the coops, Churchill said.

"We want to be fair to both handymen, who still work for our coop," she said. "We negotiated in good faith through (Caballero's) attorney, they accepted the terms and now we have to make sure the deal is finalized."

The board's reasoning surrounding Caballero's eviction centered largely around the argument that allowing some of the maintenance staff, and not others, to live rent-free in the co-ops has created an unequal system for employees.

The number of overtime hours to make the rent-free apartments viable aren't available, Churchill said, and offering these hours and an apartment to just a few members of the maintenance staff was seen as unfair. The live-in arrangement was made back in the 1970s through a verbal agreement, not an official coop policy.

But residents organizing for Caballero have argued — in addition to the "human level" of kicking out a longtime tenant — that his rent-free arrangement is justified because of his ability to be on-call 24 hours and because of his decades of experience working in the complex. They also have said that the inequity rationale doesn't seem to fit with the other maintenance staff who have joined the fight to have Caballero keep his apartment.

More than 700 residents signed the original petition aimed at stopping Caballero's eviction.

Churchill said, though, that "the board has never once been given any type of evidence that a majority of our shareholders support what the vocal minority have been trying to achieve." She added that members have heard from other residents that they agree with how the board has handled the issue.