Cheap housing info hidden: suit

MAYOR DE BLASIO is trying to keep a report on the racial breakdown of affordable housing lotteries secret and bar questioning of his top housing aide in a potentially explosive civil rights lawsuit, records show.

“The city is trying to hide the ball on me,” said Craig Gurian, an attorney for three black city residents who filed suit charging that a city policy called community preference reinforces segregation.

Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain shot down the city’s request to dismiss the suit, and Gurian has begun seeking documents and trying to question officials about the policy.

Community preference requires affordable housing builders to set aside some apartments for residents who already live in the community where the project is being built.

The suit, filed by the nonprofit Anti-Discrimination Center, argues that the policy keeps segregated neighborhoods segregated and makes it more difficult for outsiders who may be of different racial backgrounds from moving in.

Earlier this year, Gurian filed a report with the court drafted by a Queens College professor hired by the Anti-Discrimination Center to analyze the racial and ethnic breakdown of affordable housing lotteries.

The city quickly got Magistrate Katharine Parker to seal the report from public view, claiming that it would expose private information about city residents. Gurian has appealed Parker’s ruling.

“We are not permitted to describe his findings in any way, even though this is about a public policy that has a direct impact on hundreds of thousands of city residents,” Gurian said. “It’s just very striking that the city would take the view that this is something to be held from the public.”

“If the city is so worried about what the report says,” he added, “the city could send someone out to say the report is wrong.”

Gurian also ran into a brick wall in May when he subpoenaed Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen (photo inset), the top aide choreographing de Blasio’s affordable housing effort, to submit to questioning about community preference. The de Blasio administration frequently uses the policy as an olive branch to sell new developments to hostile locals wary of gentrification.

De Blasio’s Department of Law immediately moved to block Glen’s deposition. That request is pending.

Gurian says Glen’s effort to avoid questioning is ridiculous given that she’s leading de Blasio’s affordable housing initiative.

He produced a 2014 letter from Glen to a nonprofit that builds affordable housing extolling the virtues of the policy but noting that it’s under review.

In response, Juliet Pierre-Antoine, spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, declined to discuss the review mentioned in Glen’s letter due to the pending suit.

In an affidavit submitted to the court, Glen confirms she supports the policy but says the department’s former commissioner, Vicki Been, can answer all the relevant questions.

“I don’t micromanage the agencies that I oversee,” Glen stated.

But Parker has already questioned this, stating at one hearing, “Glen was deputy mayor. So wouldn’t she have conversations that would be outside the presence of Been?”

A ruling on the Glen deposition is expected in the coming weeks.