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List Alert: The Worst Landlords in NYC
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 17, 2010
Modified Mar 17, 2010
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 17, 2010
Modified Mar 17, 2010
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Think your landlord blocking out the windows makes him a slumlord extraordinaire? You might have to re-evaluate: the Voice has recreated their compendium of the sleaziest, most exploitative landlords in the city. It's a long piece (part 1 of 2), but filled with balanced reportage and some priceless personal anecdotes (on the record, to boot!), and well worth a look through.
Consider Moishe Indig, a Rabbi and developer in Williamsburg's Satmar community, who runs a four-story walk up on 684 Flushing Avenue which has at least 132 violations on record; it's a building which he readily admits has become decrepit:
Apartment 4D is ridden with bedbugs and mice, and the wood floors sag dangerously. A woman and her children live in a first-floor apartment that's missing a kitchen ceiling; it collapsed in a flood a few months ago.
The building has at least three abandoned apartments—their doors are boarded up with plywood and sprayed with graffiti. Two of those apartments, according to tenants, belonged to residents who fled because they couldn't stand the deathly cold. Like everyone else in the building, they kept their oven doors open and the gas on in the winter months—if there was gas, that is. "We haven't been able to cook for three months," says Leo Smith, a 55-year-old carpenter.
Michael Juliano, a musician who lives on the third floor, pleaded with the landlord last year to put a padlock on the basement door to stop crack addicts from spending nights there.
Then there's Humphrey Stephenson, who lives on the first floor of his four-story building at 141 West 119th Street in Harlem, and seems to have serious anger issues:
Current and former tenants tell similar stories of Stephenson's rages and alleged acts of downright cruelty. All but one requested anonymity because they say they fear retribution.
Two female tenants—one former, one current—say that as they headed off to work every day, Stephenson would trail them out the door and down the block, cursing them and calling them prostitutes, worthless sluts, and thieves...
Tenants say Stephenson routinely denies them use of the bathroom at night. The Jamaican immigrant says she had to urinate and defecate in a pail, which she would dump into the upstairs toilet in the morning before leaving the house. This situation is especially dehumanizing, tenants say, for a sick, elderly tenant who has trouble walking up the stairs on her own and struggles with the bucket. (The woman, a longtime tenant, declined to comment.) Another current tenant says that, for the better part of 2009, he had to take showers at a friend's house across the street because Stephenson locks the bathroom.
And then there's Bahram "Danny" Hakakian, whom public advocate Bill de Blasio has called a "slumlord" and actively rallied against, and who owns at least 5 buildings in Washington Heights:
Hakakian's buildings have more than 5,000 total violations. One Hakakian building, 1534 St. Nicholas Avenue, is on the city's worst-violations list, which is weighted by the seriousness of the violations and the number of violations per unit. The 28-unit building has 399 violations. A nearby 14-unit building has 290 violations (That's an average of 20 violations per unit. To give a sense of scale, landlords who average only three violations per unit qualify for de Blasio's Slumlord Watch List.)
Tagged
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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