Yesterday The Brooklyn Ink published a sad story about the plight of the tenants at the small three-story apartment building at 274 Malcom X Boulevard in Bed Stuy. Last winter the 16 residents went without electricity, and last summer they had to do without water for two months. The problem was not a negligent landlord, but a dead one. And a deadbeat family member who wanted to collect rent but not perform any repairs. The building residents didn’t realize for months that the landlord had died last year; when they finally figured it out and one of them tried to navigate the bureaucracy involved with getting services restored when you are not the owner, they hit a wall. It took a protest by a local with political aspirations to draw enough attention to the problem for HPD to step in a make basic repairs. Positively Kafkaesque.
Bed-Stuy’s Waterless House [The Brooklyn Ink]