'Slumlike Conditions' in Foreclosed Slope Building
The Daily News had an article on a group of tenants who live in 294 Fifth Avenue in the Slope and say conditions in the rent-controlled building have deteriorated since the property went into foreclosure a couple years ago and a receiver was appointed to take care of it. The building’s boiler, for example, didn’t…
The Daily News had an article on a group of tenants who live in 294 Fifth Avenue in the Slope and say conditions in the rent-controlled building have deteriorated since the property went into foreclosure a couple years ago and a receiver was appointed to take care of it. The building’s boiler, for example, didn’t work for three weeks this winter, and the front-door lock is broken. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio held a news conference yesterday to support the tenants in seeking a court order that would force the receiver to make repairs. According to the article: “The slumlike conditions at 294 Fifth Ave. spotlight a growing concern: smaller apartment buildings that fall into disrepair in part because the building is overleveraged. ‘We think this is a growing problem around the city that the banks and lenders are not taking responsibility for,’ said de Blasio.”
Park Slope Tenants, de Blasio Team Up to Force Building Repairs [NY Daily News]
I see you’re all fighting over hear today.
Time for a haiku:
Rent control debate
Brownstoners get defensive
DeBlasio. meh.
a) I cede all future arguing duties to MM, who does a much better job, and whose presidential bumper sticker I am currently affixing to my modes of transportation.
b) It should also be pointed out how well the free market has done at making buying housing affordable in NYC. I would assume equally stellar results on the rental front.
c) People seem to vastly overestimate how easy it is to do all these things. I lived in a terrible apartment where the heat went out with enough regularity that I had HPD on speeddial. It still took forever to get fixed, and some time with an angry and confrontational landlord who was incensed that I had done so. Fixing a lock requires figuring out what the right lock is, the time it takes going out and finding it, paying for it, paying for someone to install it, the time it takes to do that, the coordination and time it takes to get keys to everyone and not have them be locked out, etc. I don’t know that I could do it, less so if I was working.
d) My sibling sounds a lot like the ‘borderline hoarder’ slob scenario described somewhere above. She works a shit job, commuting an hour to work in a convenience store, has two kids, a fairly lame husband, no money, and the (market rate) apartment slowly slides into disrepair because hey, when you have a lot of other shit to try and deal with and very very few resources to do it, something falls through the cracks. I guess you’d have her just be homeless.
How could the rent be 149, was that the original rent from 40 years and was never raised????
It doesnt make sense.
and from the outside the building looks fine, I don’t get the slum thing either.
and stop crying the poor elderly woman and she is on oxygen, and cry me a river…….
149 dollars amonth. please already
RC tenants get to vote on capital improvements????
WTF…THIS IS FAR MORE FUCKED UP THAN I THOUGHT.
If that’s the case then the hell with them. they get what they deserve if they vote these down when the LL is trying to improve the building.
DH, I doubt higher ppty tax would lower prices much. look at the coop and condo units with the big ass taxes, they still selling at huge ASKs. the issue is way too many people in this city is willing to pay MORE for less.
By Montrose Morris on May 10, 2011 12:27 PM
“OK, bring it on.
First of all, I’ll beat the class warfare drum whenever I like. Someone has to drown out the trumpeting of those who have never known want in their lives, making snap judgements on the poor. My main point was that no one here knows squat about the people who live in this building, other than what the article said. No one. To read a short article in the paper and extrapolate that these people are entitled, is inflammatory, to say the least, and here I quote dave:
“they largley all have a sense of entitlement and won’t pay for anything, unlike the way people in normal renting situations behave, where they take care of their apartments and make certain improvements themselves.”
And for stating our opinions, we get jumped on? I don’t think so. The discussion is not whether or not rent control is good, bad or indifferent. I don’t care about tales of relatives, friends and someone you know who knows someone, who is living large in a rent controlled apartment somewhere, the discussion is about these people in this building. Some people seem to think that because one 71 year old woman on oxygen is paying only $149, that she and her neighbors deserve what they get. They do not. They deserve to have habitable apartments, they deserve to have heat in the winter, locks on the door and other necessary repairs.
Why does everyone ASSUME that this woman, or the rest of the tenants are either lying about their financial status, or lying about the conditions of this building? Why don’t they get the benefit of the doubt that what they say is true?
“But there are PLENTY of people in RC apartments making a lot of money…and by that I mean more than $100,000. For all we know this woman will leave an estate of $1.5MM when she dies. Maybe, maybe not.”
We’re not talking about PLENTY of people, we were talking about these people. Somehow I don’t think she’s leaving an estate of $1.5MM, that’s hyperbole, and damning with faint conjecture.
“Did they have a videocam monitoring the situation so that they could verify this fact?”
Does anyone? Really. Is the only acceptable proof a frozen corpse? “Yep, they were really freezing to death.”
“Seriously, I have one question: how do you know that these tenants are poor?”
You can actually ask that? Really?”
Montrose Morris,
That is the best stated bunch of:
Hasty Generalizations,
Unsupported Assertations
and
Baseless Accusations
that I’ve had the pleasure of
reading on Brownstoner this week.
For all you know, the main reason the tenants have been able to keep the rents low is by refusing capital improvements; in order to pass them on, the landlord needs written consent from the RC tenant. Say the building needs $100,000-worth of work to bring it up to code, that would be $100,000/9 units*2.5%=$277/month increase for Marta Rivera. $149 is astonishingly low, it means that in the past, her landlord(s) have not even filed for lawful increases. Either they were inept, or they were hoping to vacate by neglect, or the tenants were skillfull in fighting reasonable work to the building. It’s also possible the receiver is pocketing the commercial rents and ignoring the residential tenants’ needs (a not so subtle form of harassment.)
These stories are always more complicated than a short NYDN article (especially one derived from a pol’s PR team) can explain.
By dirty_hipster on May 10, 2011 12:41 PM
“As a LL, if my taxes were higher, so too would be the rent.”
if taxes were higher, property values would be lower.
You could raise mine by 50% or more and it’d have no effect on the price of the building. I pay $2,100 currently.
It’s the one form of liberal entitlement that I personally can wallow in.