How Can New York Stop the City's Worst Landlords?
When the trouble came to 90 Elizabeth Street, it arrived quietly, in a flurry of white papers. They blanketed the mailboxes and the front doors of many of the tenants in the modest Chinatown apartment building, a forbidding snowdrift of eggshell, piled with angry black type. When 43-year-old Betty Eng got home one spring afternoon last year, she found one waiting for her, too. It was a lawsuit, filed by her new landlords against her, her younger brother, her father, and her mother. Eng's mother, who is in her eighties, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and had recently moved into a nursing home. Eng's father had been dead since 2010.
Photos by Jena Cumbo 90 Elizabeth Street, one of many NYC apartments with rent-controlled tenants.
The suit said that the Engs, who had lived in their apartment since 1970, a year before Betty's birth, weren't actually living there full-time, and thus were not legally entitled to the rent-stabilized unit. It warned that an eviction proceeding would be initiated against them. The suit also alleged that the Engs hadn't been paying the rent. But Betty had been paying, she says, sending the checks through certified mail. Each month, Marolda Properties refused to accept them. They piled up, uncashed.
"They were refusing them," Eng says. "The envelopes would just come back."
But the first order of business for Eng was not to try and prove that her family had been living in their apartment full-time. Nor was it to argue about whether or not she'd paid the rent. Before she could even wade into those accusations, she had to first prove that her father really was deceased — not just avoiding being served with court papers. (In the hallway outside the courtroom before the initial proceedings, she recalls, Marolda's lawyers complained about how hard he was to locate.)
Proving he was deceased took longer than one might anticipate: Like most tenants being sued in New York's housing court, Betty didn't have an attorney.
"I was just going to court by myself," Eng says. "It was very confusing. I don't have any legal training."
Meanwhile, the trouble made its way to 300 Nassau Street. There, it was a bit louder: Sledgehammers smashed through the Greenpoint building's basement in December of 2013, destroying the electrical systems, the boiler, and the pipes. When Catalina Hidalgo came home from a long day in housing court, battling her own landlords, Joel and Aaron Israel, she and her neighbors, armed with flashlights, went downstairs to survey the damage. They knew at once they'd have to find someplace else to stay. They suspected that the Israels had destroyed their own building to drive their rent-stabilized tenants out.
If that was their effort, they succeeded. Two days later, the city's Department of Buildings declared the property unsafe and ordered everyone to vacate the building immediately. (The Israels deny they had anything to do with the vandalism at 300 Nassau or another building they own, 98 Linden Street. There, tenants were told their kitchens and bathrooms were being "repaired." They arrived home to find that they'd been totally destroyed.)
Two different women, in different neighborhoods, in buildings plagued by different issues. But affordable-housing advocates say that Eng and Hidalgo are part of a particularly pernicious — and growing — New York real estate problem: landlords who deliberately make their own buildings unlivable, through vandalism, harassment, nuisance construction, legal intimidation, and outright threats, as a way to drive out rent-stabilized tenants and charge "market rate" for their units. This year alone, in addition to Marolda and the Israels, mega-developer Steve Croman has been accused of harassing his rent-stabilized tenants, as has real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Lawsuits are ongoing in each of those cases, and all the landlords deny any wrongdoing.
It's been going on for so long that the battleground is shifting, says Adam Meyers, an attorney with Brooklyn Legal Services, a nonprofit that frequently represents rent-stabilized tenants.
"You're hearing about fewer of these cases in Lower Manhattan," he says, because much of the rent-stabilized housing there is already gone. "There are more of them now in Bushwick and Crown Heights and places like that."
But despite recognition that some landlords are harassing their tenants, city and state authorities are still scrambling to come up with laws and penalties that might discourage an ambitious property owner from trying to empty his building and restock it with wealthier tenants. The penalties that do exist, affordable-housing advocates argue, are insufficient and have been implemented far too slowly to benefit apartment-dwellers. The Rent Stabilization Association, the main organization representing the city's landlords and building owners, argues that landlords who harass their tenants are few and far between. When they do come along, the RSA argues, there are already plenty of laws on the books to punish them.
In the case of 300 Nassau, the vacate order for Catalina Hidalgo was issued December 15. The Israels' company, JBI Management, assured everyone the building would be made inhabitable again as soon as possible. Nine months later, nothing has been repaired and the tenants are still scattered, living with friends or family or, in some cases, in homeless shelters. They don't know if or when they'll be able to return.
Hidalgo managed to salvage some, but not all, of her belongings, she says.
"The last time I was there was April," she says. "The rest of my items were vandalized. They destroyed the rest of the kitchen, stove turned over, fridge turned over. Dishes were scattered around the kitchen. I was so hurt. You work so hard to be able to have a good home. For someone to be able to come in a blink of an eye and take that stuff away from you, it hurts."
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