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After Bronx building collapse, tenants face new hurdles to returning home
By
David Brand
Published Jan 6, 2024
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David Brand
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David Brand
Published Jan 6, 2024
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Mayor Eric Adams’s office is threatening legal action after tenants displaced by a partial building collapse in the Bronx say they faced pressure from their landlord to waive rent reductions, drop lawsuits and claim responsibility for illegal apartment alterations in exchange for access to their homes.
The Department of Buildings on Wednesday lifted a partial vacate order for 21 of the 46 units at 1915 Billingsley Terrace, where six apartments collapsed last month in what city officials have called a botched construction job. The move allows tenants in part of the building to return home.
But some tenants and their lawyers said the landlord and his associates presented them with documents containing provisions that could harm their chances for repairs, or even set them up for eviction, and told them to sign in exchange for keys to newly installed locks on their units Thursday.
Adams’ spokesperson Charles Lutvak said the “landlord’s egregious attempt to weaponize our safety measures is completely unacceptable.”
“When the city lifts a vacate order, residents have the right to return to their homes — immediately,” Lutvak said. “We will work to support the residents’ right to return to their homes promptly, including supporting legal action if appropriate.”
An attorney for the building owner, a limited liability company tied to landlord David Kleiner and various associates, rejected the tenants’ claims that they had to waive rights or cop to renovations to get the keys.
Attorney Lawrence McCourt said his client denies any allegation “that the statements signed by the tenants were a quid pro quo in order to receive keys.”
Reached briefly by phone Friday, Kleiner told Gothamist he and his associates presented the documents to tenants to inform them why he removed the walls and changed their unit layouts.
Gothamist viewed three separate documents presented to tenants seeking access to their apartments Thursday and Friday. One form asserts that a tenant agreed to forgo a rent decrease ordered by the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal and would withdraw a lawsuit she filed last month to demand repairs in her apartment.
Another form given to several tenants includes a statement claiming the renters erected unlawful partitions in their own apartments — potential grounds for an eviction, according to housing attorneys. A third says the tenant had inspected the apartment and found it to be in good repair before actually entering the unit, a claim the tenant denies.
A corner of 1915 Billingsley Terrace in the Bronx collapsed in December as a result of what city officials have called a botched construction job.
David Brand
Tenants, their attorneys and city officials say the landlord is attempting to use the key return to secure signatures and deflect responsibility for egregious conditions and illegal alterations they claim the landlord made inside the building.
Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, who is allowing attorneys to work with tenants out of her nearby office, said the documents are “absolutely problematic.”
“To condition the returning of people's keys to their own apartments where their own belongings are… that's not OK,” she said.
Legal Aid Society attorney Jessica Bellinder said she is working with several tenants who received the documents and who mistakenly thought they were necessary agreements with the landlord. She said at least two signed the forms pertaining to the alterations even though they denied doing the renovations.
“Many of the tenants are in shelters or very precariously housed and worried they’d end up on the streets with nowhere to go so they’re desperate to get into the apartment,” she said. “They have a right to a key, the landlord can’t put conditions on that.”
‘I signed it because they told me to’
The documents have already started to emerge in court, just hours after tenants began returning to the building.
Eva Gomez, a seventh-floor tenant, filed a lawsuit against Kleiner and the LLC in December demanding repairs following last month’s collapse.
Shortly before she was set to appear for a court hearing Thursday, she visited the building to pick up her keys and said people representing the landlord handed her several papers in English and Spanish. She signed one document written in Spanish stating that she would drop the emergency repair lawsuit and waive a rent reduction order from HCR, which administers rent-stabilization rules.
Gomez said she made a mistake and only signed the document because she wanted to get the keys to her home of the past 12 years and return after nearly a month in a Manhattan hotel.
“He told me I could get the keys. I signed it because they told me to,” Gomez said in Spanish. “It was like it was premeditated because they knew I was coming to court.”
Just a few hours after signing, McCourt, the owner’s attorney, used the document against her during her court appearance and asked a judge to dismiss the case based on her signature.
But Gomez’s attorney, Emilio Paesano, responded that she thought she had to fill out the form as a condition for getting her home back.
“Ms. Gomez has indicated to me already [that] she didn't understand what she was signing. She thought she had to sign this to get the keys,” Paesano told the judge, adding that Gomez “maintained that the conditions inside the apartment were deplorable prior to issuance of the vacate order.”
The judge scheduled a new hearing for her case in February.
After the appearance, Paesano told Gothamist that tenants are legally entitled to the keys to their apartments and should not have to sign anything.
“Getting your keys back should never be conditioned upon giving up your right to sue your landlord about the underlying conditions,” he said.
Walls come down
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has hit the landlord with more than 100 housing code violations at the building in recent years. Following the collapse, the DOB also issued several violations for illegally reconfiguring at least 11 units and for creating “SRO conditions” — a reference to single-room occupancy units — in the building’s cellar and three other apartments.
Changing apartment layouts in rent-stabilized units without permission from HCR, New York’s affordable housing agency, could violate state rent laws and subject building owners to additional penalties.
DOB spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said it doesn’t matter who put up the partitions, the landlord is responsible for the conditions.
“In New York City, property owners have a legal responsibility to keep their buildings in a safe and code-compliant condition,” Rudansky said. “That includes making sure that unpermitted construction work is not being performed at their property.”
But a tenant who signs a document saying they did renovations in their apartments could be exposing themselves to possible eviction, said Bronx Legal Services lawyer Cynthia Ramos, one of the attorneys working out of Councilmember Sanchez’s office.
Ramos said Friday she had met with five tenants who came to her after they said the landlord told them to sign a form claiming they put up walls in their apartments to reconfigure the units. All of them denied doing any renovations in their apartments, she said.
“It’s predatory,” Ramos said, adding the same tenants are now moving into apartments with fewer bedrooms because the partitions have been removed.
A screenshot from the Citizen app shows the structural collapse in the Bronx in December.
Screenshot via the Citizen app
Gothamist obtained a copy of a form presented to tenants stating, “I understand that the owner/landlord has removed my wall that I put up as required by the NYC/DOB in order to be allowed back into my apartment.”
Contacted by phone Friday, Kleiner — who also goes by David David and who signed mortgage documents and tax forms related to the property — read from a version of the same document. He told Gothamist he and his associates did present the forms to tenants to sign and denied that he and his associates made the illegal alterations.
“There were about 20 tenants that had illegal walls in their apartments and the DOB instructed me to take them down,” Kleiner said. “They [the tenants] put up illegal walls.”
Kleiner hung up the phone when questioned about his claim that tenants in about 20 different apartments independently erected walls in potential violation of their leases, and city and state regulations.
McCourt, the attorney for Kleiner and the LLC owner, said in an email that his clients deny “erecting any of the partition walls ordered to be removed by DOB and maintains they were not put up by the landlord or done with the landlord’s consent.”
But tenant lawyers and Sanchez, the local councilmember, called the landlord’s claims “remarkable.”
“It strains credulity that 20 different current tenants all erected illegal partitions” in the same building, said Bellinder, from Legal Aid. She said such renovations are more often completed by workers hired by building owners.
At least one tenant said he refused to sign anything at all after the landlord’s associates handed him a document Thursday.
Raza Chaudhry, who lives with his wife and daughter in a fifth-floor apartment, said he told the landlord’s representative he would call his lawyer if they made him sign the document as a condition of receiving the keys
“I started saying, ‘That’s not right. This is my apartment,’” Chaudhry said. “You guys changed the locks. Youre saying we can move back in, the keys are mine.”
He said he and his family have been staying in a hotel in the Bronx and don’t want to return to their old apartment, where the gas is turned off and they feel unsafe.
“The building doesn’t feel comfortable,” he said.
Tagged
housing
bronx
David Brand
David is a reporter covering housing for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 908-310-3960.
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