From left: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio
City Council overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto and passed the “living wage” bill yesterday, the New York Post reported. The bill guarantees a minimum pay of $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 per hour without for workers on projects that receive city subsidies. [more]
From left: 620 West 182nd Street and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio
A man who New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio dubbed “NYC’s worst,” has racked up 1,187 building and housing violations and is under investigation by city, state and federal officials for everything from tax fraud to selling narcotics, DNAinfo reported.
Josh Neustein, who owns eight buildings, four of which are in Upper Manhattan, is under investigation by the New York City Police Department, the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies, after a probe by the city’s Department of Investigation was concluded last month. [more]
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio released his third annual list of the city’s worst buildings and landlords meant to shame the landlords into improving conditions, according to the New York Daily News.
The worst building is 245 Sullivan Place in Crown Heights. The 40-unit rental building has 654 open violations thanks to crumbling ceilings, exposed wiring and a lack of electricity, hot water and heat in certain apartments. It’s been owned by James Crossman since 1971, public records show, and the News reported he is now 92 and in ill health. [more]
The Brooklyn Housing Court’s disrepair gives “special privileges” to landlord attorneys and fosters “a culture of disrespect towards tenants,” according to a report from the New York Daily News. The News cited a recent report by nonprofit group Make the Road to New York, which is one of several agencies pushing to change the facility.
The groups met with Judge Fern Fisher, who is in charge of housing courts citywide. Fisher said she is working to engineer some of the changes recommended by the group, including easier-to-read signs and better accommodations for tenants, but admitted budget restraints make change difficult. [more]
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has encouraged the New York City Housing Authority to discontinue Section 8 rent subsidies termination notices until problems with the agency’s new computer system are fixed. De Blasio will release a report today showing the agency’s failings during the last year, he told the Post.
“Tenants are getting eviction notices slipped under their doors because NYCHA has withheld months’ worth of rent that it should have paid,” the public advocate told the Post. “Months of unpaid rent is not a simple glitch — it’s a full-blown crisis. NYCHA needs to ensure that actual human beings are checking these cases to ensure the agency isn’t wrongfully throwing landlords into default, and tenants out on the street.” [more]
David Bistricer, a Brooklyn landlord highly ranked on Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s slumlord watchlist, has been slapped with a lawsuit by the Flatbush Gardens Tenant Association, according to Crain’s. The suit alleges that Bistricer failed to live up to his part of an agreement with the association that the tenant organization would provide a letter of support for him in his attempt to buy Brooklyn’s huge affordable housing complex Starrett City in 2007 in return for his efforts to improve conditions at 1402-04 Brooklyn Avenue, a Flatbush Gardens building. The letter of support was delivered, the improvements were not, the tenants say. [more]
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio latest stop in his campaign against negligent New York City landlords? Craigslist. According to the New York Times, apartment searches on the listings site now turn up a link to “NYC’s worst landlords,” which leads wary home hunters to a Google Maps-powered visual of the building owners with the worst histories of building code violations. The list was first launched last year and currently has more than 400 buildings and 320 landlords. The Craigslist deal is one of eight new initiatives de Blasio is set to propose today, intended to coerce landlords into compliance. [more]
The City Council is set to approve legislation tomorrow that would give stricter penalties to landlords who violate city heat laws, the Wall Street Journal reported. The legislation was sponsored by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to sign the bill into law, an aide confirmed. “For too long, bad landlords have profited by withholding heat from tenants every winter,” de Blasio said. “Passing the Heat Act will toughen penalties on those repeat offenders and make them think twice before leaving tenants in the cold.” [more]
City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio will announce the removal today of 13 of the city’s worst landlords from the slumlord watch list, thanks to improvements which cleared 22 buildings from the list, according to the Daily News. These will be the first landlords to “graduate” from the online registry, which launched in August. David Bistricer’s 59-building Flatbush Gardens complex is on the list. “These are buildings that were falling apart, with holes in the ceilings and floors, with unsafe fixtures and dangerous molds,” de Blasio said. “But now real, solid improvements have been made.” [more]
A group of elderly tenants at the 59-building Flatbush Gardens complex in Brooklyn have received eviction notices from landlord David Bistricer on the grounds that they’ve been holding raucous parties at their apartments, the Daily News reported. “You… or guests of yours, have been observed smoking, drinking alcohol, loitering and gambling in the common areas of the building,” Bistricer, principal of Clipper Equity, wrote to tenant Victoria Davis, 69. Davis, a survivor of two strokes who has no children and who says she hasn’t had a drink in decades, pays $680 per month for her one-bedroom home.
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