“As these businesses get drowned out by this tide of rising rent, culture disappears,” said Paula Segal, a lawyer with TakeRoot Justice, a nonprofit legal services group.

With legal help from TakeRoot Justice, Cooper Park residents stopped a plan for luxury development on their parking lot by showing that NYCHA failed to follow environmental-review procedures and did not adequately engage residents.

“I’m still hopeful that we can have what was promised–a space that will serve the residents of Lands End II until the new buildings are built. Never a parking lot,” Paula Segal said, an attorney for CAAAV.

The community groups have since then filed a zoning challenge through their counsel, Paula Segal, senior staff attorney with TakeRoot Justice, of D.O.B.’s acceptance for consideration of additional building permits.

Although New York’s tax lien sale is intended to incentivize property owners to pay, it can pressure owners to sell to speculators or cut corners with maintenance, without oversight from the city and at the expense of tenants.

Small businesses often given cheaper rents for the first year of a lease as an incentive, but then “it doubles in year two because the landlord is trying to make up what they lost during Covid.”

The lawsuit describes the slight-of-hand that the City Planning Commission used to incorrectly certify the developers' application to start the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) without an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

Lawsuit filed by TakeRoot on behalf of Chhaya CDC, Minkwon Center for Community Action and the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce argues that a full environmental review, with community input, was omitted and is necessary before City Council vote.

TakeRoot Justice has sued the authority, alleging the elevators and other persistent problems violate residents’ rights to live in safe, healthy conditions. A judge has ordered NYCHA to improve conditions, but the coronavirus has given renewed urgency to making fixes.

"We're no longer talking about a developer's fantasy world," said Paula Segal, a senior staff attorney with TakeRoot Justice.

Abogados de la firma Take Root Justice y funcionarios electos resaltaron que esta lucha de los inquilinos puede ser una larga batalla.

Daniel Carpenter-Gold, of TakeRoot Justice, which represents the tenants association, said the proposed commercial upzoning is tailored more for big box stores ... “Why would they need this [commercial] rezoning?” he said. “Their renderings showed a coffee shop.”

"You don't see places like Target in the pretty renderings that the developer gave the City," Daniel Carpenter-Gold, a staff attorney at TakeRoot Justice, said in a statement. "But make no mistake, that's what they're going for here."

“Once those changes are put into effect any new construction in this area will have to conform to the residents vision as it was developed,” says Paula Segal, an attorney with TakeRoot Justice who is working with the community groups

Uptown Council Member Helen Rosenthal‘s legislation which mandates the tracking of commercial storefronts across New York City, and a public database of vacant storefronts, was passed by the City Council today.

“It was a strategy we developed two and a half years ago. It’s based on the Chinatown Working Group. So it’s kind of exciting to plan and see it come to fruition this way. It has all been very deliberate.

Without Moya's backing, the rezoning proposal never came to a vote in the City Council, and the project was scuttled.

The latest city budget includes $750,000 to grow an underutilized housing model that creates affordable homes in rapidly gentrifying communities—a major win for housing advocates. The funds will go toward incubating community land trusts (CLTs).

“We won Two Bridges hearing, today. The judge accepted our arguments and extended the restraining order until written decision in August. He said on the record that he believes the process was fatally flawed.”

“Today, the BSA got it wrong,” said Paula Segal, senior attorney with Equitable Neighborhoods Practice at the Community Development Project, who is working with QNU. “The City cannot allow developers to bury big box stores underground to skirt...”

Building a case like this takes thousands of hours, Segal says, working with community organizers to prepare affidavits, gathering evidence to build a legal argument, responding to questions from the judge. Consistency is everything.

“The danger is, if we don’t challenge Target, national retailers will think they could put department stores anywhere in the city,” said Paula Segal, attorney for QNU. “We will no longer have residential districts. It will just be mall NYC.”

“We’re working with our clients to support community ownership and stewardship of land to develop housing and all the other things they need to support themselves,” says Paula Segal, TakeRoot senior staff attorney.

Community garden will continue its 20-year tradition of serving fresh produce to New Yorkers TakeRoot represented the Isahbaliah Ladies of Elegance Foundation in making the claim that the land was open space held in public trust by the City for

TakeRoot’s Equitable Neighborhoods team represents Queens Neighborhoods United (QNU), New York City Council Member Francisco Moya, New York State Senator Jessica Ramos, Desis Rising Up and Moving and individual QNU members in litigation against the City and the developer to

TakeRoot’s Equitable Neighborhoods team represents Tenants United Fighting for the Lower East Side (TUFF-LES), CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), Land’s End One Tenants Association (LEOTA), and LaGuardia Houses Tenants’ Association in litigation against the