No boys allowed

Lesbian-only building irks local activist - NYPOST.com

No boys allowed

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Last Updated: 2:40 AM, October 31, 2010

Posted: 1:49 AM, October 31, 2010

Sorry, fellas!

An East Village co-op that's home to one of the city's top housing officials has become a women-only building where dirt-cheap units are marketed only by word of mouth to the residents' pals, The Post has learned.

"I find it strange that no man has ever moved in," said Roberto Caballero, a former district leader in the neighborhood. "I would consider that a form of discrimination."

Caballero, who is openly gay, says he believes "lesbians are favored for apartments" -- as more than half of the building's 12 known female residents are gay.

The seven-unit building on East 11th Street near Avenue B was once owned by the city but was given away for peanuts in 1989 at a time when the neighborhood was overrun by junkies and drug dealers.

Intended as low-income housing, the five-story tenement has become a destination for well-to-do lesbians, including Margarita Lopez, the $187,000-per-year Housing Authority board member and one-time city councilwoman, and Rosie Mendez, a current councilwoman.

Despite the area's gentrification, units sell for an astoundingly low $250 apiece plus capital improvement fees, with the caveat that the owner cannot sell for a profit, according to a contract with the city.

The contract requires that new tenants be found "through a communitywide outreach program that will be nondiscriminatory." But Lopez admitted, "The apartments are not marketed. It's through word of mouth to the people we know in the community."

No man is known to have applied or been turned away. Gender discrimination in housing is against the law, which Lopez has a hand in enforcing in her day job as commissioner of the city's 178,407 public-housing units.

Lopez declined to answer questions about the alleged discrimination, instead combatively asking back: "Are you implying that we have a problem with men?"

She insisted the demographics of her own building have "nothing to do with me being the No. 3 official in NYCHA." She added, "I lived in this building long before I ever dreamed of being an official."

Lopez has also long tapped the residents of the five-story tenement building for government jobs. When she was on the City Council, she hired Mendez, who bought a unit in 1995, to her council staff. Later, Lopez groomed Mendez to be her successor on the council.

When Lopez was named to the Housing Authority's three-person board in 2006, she hired her upstairs neighbor as her executive assistant, paying her $121,000 a year.

In the 1980s, Lopez and five other women put in hard labor renovating the gutted building, in return for $630,000 in building funds -- nearly all of it in the form of charity and taxpayer grants and loans.

Residents had to qualify as low-income, at least initially. But once you're in, you're in forever -- even if you start making big bucks, like Mendez's $112,500 council salary.

Mendez said that when there was a vacancy the residents didn't discuss gender.

"It wasn't couched in terms of men and women," she said. "It was couched in terms of vacancies and 'Let's start interviewing people.' "

She said she didn't know if a man had ever applied but added, "I've never heard of any."