Is the Wolkoffs’ 5Pointz redevelopment cursed?

It was right around Christmas when a prospective tenant noticed that 5Pointz, the Wolkoff family’s 1,122-unit luxury rental project in Long Island City, had pulled all its listings.

The StreetEasy page for the two-tower complex at 22-44 Jackson Avenue — controversially developed on the site of a warehouse-turned-graffiti mecca — indicates that listings for 13 units were yanked in May 2022, just about a year after leasing began.

The weirder bit, though, is that no new listings have surfaced since. 

The would-be tenant, who requested anonymity, assumed that the 48- and 42-floor towers had such demand that units didn’t need to be marketed. So he tried the number for the leasing office run by MNS Real Estate. It went straight to a full voicemail box. 

“We decided to head over in person a few weeks later,” the prospective tenant recalled. Staffers at the building were of no more help. They could only share that the leasing office was closed. 

“I was like, ‘Oh man, closed today?’ and they’re like, ‘No, it’s been closed for a while, we don’t really know why,’” he said. 

Talk to David Wolkoff, who has helmed the family firm G&M Realty since his father Jerry Wolkoff died in 2020, and he’ll stress that the project is humming along just fine: It’s mostly occupied, and the few vacancies are just undergoing minor renovations. 

But a dive into 5Pointz’s history suggests that there is more to the story. Residents complain of shoddy construction, unusable amenities and vacant commercial space two years after work on the project wrapped. An insurance lawsuit reveals substantial flood damage, and the gap in leasing suggests Wolkoff had a strong reason to keep some units empty. 

Superstitious locals and residents, citing the street art the Wolkoff family had whitewashed to bring the development online, chalk up those challenges to a project that was “cursed” from the start. 

More realistically, its problems point to a developer new to high-rise construction and in over its head. 

Something’s not right

A gap in listings is not inherently abnormal, rental brokers say, but a lengthy gap during one of the hottest rental markets in the city’s history is a red flag.

When 5Pointz pulled the active listings last year, the buildings’ earliest one-year leases would have just been coming up for renewal. 

The timing should have been perfect: Between January and March 2022, median asking rents for one-bedroom apartments near the Court Square subway stop, a block north of 5Pointz, had jumped 30 percent year-over-year to $3,390 a month, according to data from RentHop. 

“It’s something with that building,” said Patrick Smith, a broker in Corcoran’s Long Island City office. 

“If you told me they hadn’t had a listing in two weeks or a month, I’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s normal,’” Smith said. “But to not have a listing on StreetEasy since last spring — something’s not right.”

In late January, the broker compared the building’s listing gap to that of nine other LIC luxury rentals. The longest any other had waited to post a unit was 48 days. As of Feb. 28, 5Pointz had taken a nearly 300-day break.

Wolkoff, who touted the project’s quick lease-up and 90 percent occupancy rate, downplayed the hiatus.

“I saw some things that I thought I could make better,” Wolkoff explained.

He and MNS then made a “business decision,” he said, to wait until this spring to list the available units again. 

“During our initial lease-up, we were leasing 100 apartments a month for a six-month stretch,” said MNS CEO Andrew Barrocas in a statement to TRD, echoing Wolkoff’s plan to relist the units in the spring.

Holding off through winter in hopes of higher rents in spring typically makes sense, but in the nine months since 5Pointz last posted an availability, asking rents in Queens have notched new records. The borough’s median rent topped out at a fresh high of $3,369 in January — up 14 percent year-over-year.

To hold off units in such a hot market suggests the repairs weren’t aesthetic, but vital. 

Vox populi

“I wouldn’t even recommend this place to my WORST enemy,” a Google user named Christine wrote about 5Pointz in January. “After living here for almost a year now, it is very obvious that this place took a lot of shortcuts while building.”

“Every day it is something new … leaky ceilings, no hot water, no running water, stoves not working, entrance doors un-usable, elevators not running … you name it,” she continues. “If you value your life and sanity do not live here.”

Complaints lodged with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development cite building-wide hot water and gas outages in late June, mid-November and most recently in January.

Lack of soundproofing is a recurring complaint by tenants saying they’re exposed to drafts, “screeching wind” and the sound of the 7 train that snakes around the towers.

Ongoing construction is another gripe. Apartments reportedly pool with water when it rains, residents say, and multiple tenants claim the south tower’s floors are “tilted.”

“I look around this building sometimes and I generally feel it is all going to come down,” said a 5Pointz resident who requested anonymity.

“Every inch is just so covered in incompetence and cost-cutting,” he added, noting that key amenities such as the “sky deck” roof lounge remain unopened and the front revolving door feels like “you’re pushing a sled through sand” most of the time.

Wolkoff dismissed the online comments as one-off gripes from folks who may not even live in the building. 

“Google reviews — I don’t take those things for reality because it’s Google,” he said, touting the positive reviews the building has received.

Leaks, Wolkoff attests, are common in new buildings, and he “doesn’t know anything about floors being tilted.” He said the towers have triple-paned glass on the windows and have met all the city rules around sound dampening. 

As for the roof deck, Wolkoff said it was never part of the amenity package and that he’s “trying to figure out what to do with that.” 

Cursed ground

The development’s 40,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space has remained vacant even as Long Island City saw retail demand rebound from the pandemic faster than commercial corridors in Manhattan.

Wolkoff characterized the two years he’s waited to fill the retail space since construction wrapped as another business decision.

“We have a tremendous amount of interest,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how I want to split it up: whether it’s large tenants or a couple of tenants.”

Other buildings in the neighborhood have wasted no time in landing retail anchor tenants. The Durst Organization, for one, nabbed a brewery for a 15-year lease at the ground floor of its Sven building five months after construction finished in 2021. 

To the chagrin of some residents, 20 artist studios in the project — set aside as a way to make amends after artists sued the Wolkoffs for painting over their murals — remain unoccupied.

The artists secured nearly $7 million in damages from the developer in 2018, a ruling upheld on appeal in 2020. Wolkoff said G&M would begin marketing the artist spaces soon, as it had recently secured a certificate of occupancy for them.

In the interim, Wolkoff said, he’d “strategically placed graffiti inside and outside the buildings.”

“I love the medium,” he said.

Overwhelmed

Redditors, residents and real estate insiders chalk up the building’s supposed problems to inexperience: The project is the Wolkoff family’s first high-rise. 

It’s not uncommon for pandemic-era buildings to have hiccups. After the state shut down nonessential construction between March and June 2020, developers facing supply chain issues and pressure from lenders scrambled to finish what they could.

But the 5Pointz construction timeline shows that the bulk of its delays predate the pandemic.

“It requires a lot of technical expertise that not every developer is going to have,” Smith, the Corcoran broker, said about construction of large-scale rental projects.

“The building systems, the elevator systems, it all becomes a little bit more sophisticated.”

Wolkoff acknowledges that G&M is new to the tower game, and said it hired a “very, very experienced construction manager,” Westchester-based Fuller Infrastructure, to bridge that gap.

But compare the project’s timeline to that of Durst’s Sven, which rose a mile up the road at 27-29 Queens Plaza North.

The projects started leasing about eight months apart in 2021. But while the 67-story, nearly 1,000-unit Sven took less than three years to wrap, the similarly sized 5Pointz took nearly five. 

Headlines throughout the construction also point to delays.

In November 2018, New York YIMBY reported that work was “nearing completion” and expected to finish by the end of 2019. In April 2019, construction was again “nearly complete.” By March 2020, work was “wrapping up” and expected to finish before the end of the year. In August 2020, “final touches” were being made. 

Ultimately, the building listed its first unit on StreetEasy six months later, in March 2021. By comparison, the Sven started leasing less than two weeks after finishing construction. 

Wolkoff maintains the timeline was not abnormal.

For “a building of this size,” he said, “the delays were not that great.” 

Casualties of construction

Public records, meanwhile, point to poorly managed construction.  

Complaints lodged with the city’s Department of Buildings between 2016 and 2019 reveal 16 reports of injuries to workers, seven that demanded an ambulance or EMS call and nine that resulted in a hospitalization. 

Calls from eagle-eyed locals suggest unsafe conditions. One filed the day after Christmas in 2019 reported a contractor installing scaffolding 60 feet in the air without a harness or guard rails.    

“Caller states … they seem to have no experience,” the complaint reads. “Caller is afraid of an accident.”

Complaint logs are littered with the site safety manager’s failure to report accidents, including in October 2016, when a worker fell and broke his leg. And at least seven DOB entries describe ongoing construction despite a stop-work order. 

“They are doing work when they are not supposed [to],” one complaint reads. “Someone has already fallen out of the building, which is why the order was given but they are neglecting it.”

The Real Deal reported in 2016 that the Wolkoffs had initially agreed to use union labor on the job but reneged on that promise before construction began.

Wolkoff, again, batted away those accounts.

“I thought we ran a very safe site for a building of this size,” he said. “Compare me to other large developers.”

Compared to 5Pointz’s 138 total complaints, city records show Durst’s Sven project racked up just seven, and none that describe injuries.

Wet behind the ears

Perhaps the most damning evidence of problems at 5Pointz is in a lawsuit filed late last year.

G&M’s insurance company sued two of the project’s contractors after a plumbing failure flooded the south tower, releasing “large quantities of water into the building” in October 2020, less than six months before leasing began.

The waters infiltrated and damaged the building from the top floor to the lobby, the suit reads, costing Wolkoff about $5 million.

Wolkoff was tight-lipped on the impact of the flooding, describing it merely as “water damage” but denying that the renovations underway were in response to the flooding.

“We’re painting, patching, whatever the tenants may have left within the apartment,” he said, adding that the firm is installing higher-end appliances in some units and doing “stonework” in others.

Despite the multiple accounts of a project gone awry, it’s possible 5Pointz, as Wolkoff claims, is “doing great.”

All of those unlisted units may pop up on StreetEasy this spring, sporting fresh paint jobs and shiny new stoves. Perhaps the ongoing construction residents complain of will end. 

And regardless of tenants’ gripes about the lack of promised luxury, it seems Wolkoff is game to go for round two.

“Yes, it is our first high-rise,” he said. “But it’s gone so well, I’ll probably do another one.”