Harlem Building Came Back, But Now Units Cost Less Than SUV

When a rental building in West Harlem was listed for $1.375 million, Jay Martin flagged it.

“Less than the price of a Kia Telluride,” he tweeted. “$57,000 per unit.”

Martin wasn’t marketing the property. The New York Apartment Association exec was noting the devaluation of rent-stabilized buildings and mocking the claim that “the tenants can just take them over.”

“Here’s a 24 unit building an owner is running away from under this regime,” he wrote, daring tenants to buy it.

The post seemed like landlord propaganda to X user jkitsallgood. He couldn’t find the listing for 502 West 135th Street online, and $57,000 per unit seemed impossibly low. “This is likely fake,” he declared.

It isn’t. Even before the Rent Guidelines Board delivered on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to freeze the rent, the per-unit cost of rent-stabilized buildings resembled that of a luxury SUV.

One example: Chaim Eli Bleeman just sold three Bronx buildings with 252 apartments for $16.7 million, or $66,000 per unit. The buyer of 3572 and 3576 Dekalb Avenue and 3224 Grand Concourse was Bronx GS Properties LLC.

For the West Harlem property, records show a rocky but not uncommon history. Individual owners traded it several times from 1969 until 1987, when the city filed to foreclose for unpaid property taxes.

Those 18 years coincide exactly with my childhood, from birth to graduation from Midwood High School. Times were tough in New York, and it appears the building’s fortunes sank with the city’s. In those days, you walked with one eye looking down for dogshit and the other looking up for muggers.

Anything not nailed down — and many things that were — were routinely stolen. I once left a red tricycle in front of our stoop for a minute; gone. Thieves would dig plants out of gardens in Park Slope. My cheap 10-speed vanished from a gated lot at Brooklyn College. Our minivan was boosted from in front of our house and later found littered with crack vials.

But 502 West 135th Street survived. After four years on the “in rem” list, its back taxes were paid and the city dropped its foreclosure attempt.

As New York regained its footing, the building’s prospects improved. Two mortgages totaling $510,000 were paid off. Fred Marolda bought the property in 2001 and sold it two years later for $1 million.

NH Property Group’s Jacob Namdar (Linkedin)

In April 2019, Great Neck–based Klosed Properties — Steven Kachanian, Jacob Namdar and Adam Hajibai — bought the building from the Pecora family for $3.6 million, or $144,000 per unit, and borrowed $2.5 million against it. This marked the high point of 502 West 135th.

“It was a great value-add deal,” recalled Jack Zalta, who brokered the 2019 sale, “until the laws changed.”

Klosed Properties’ Steven Kashanian (Linkedin)

The first half of that year was the absolute worst time to buy a rent-stabilized building. That June, the state legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo shocked the industry by enacting the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. The value of 502 West 135th has since fallen by more than 60 percent. Rising interest rates played a role.

In 2024, the owners got an extension of the $2.5 million mortgage at 8 percent interest, reflecting the increase not only in rates but in risk. It’s hard to see how that loan ends well.

The interest alone is about $700 per unit, per month. It’s no wonder the building was listed.

Klosed Properties’ Adam Hajibai (Linkedin)

Martin sniffed that if the 24 tenants would like to buy it, the price comes to $1,600 apiece, per month, for three years. Similar to their rents, probably. “So why isn’t this happening?” he asked, rhetorically.

He answered that under the HSTPA and Mamdani, operating expenses will exceed rent revenue. Ownership would cost tenants more than renting.

If that were the case, the building would have no value. We’re not quite there yet. As experts told TRD’s Lilah Burke, it’s still true that “buildings aren’t free.”

Not yet. But they were in the 1980s, back when “in rem” spread like the plague and the city foreclosed on and sold buildings for $1 each.

Could it happen again? If nothing changes, how couldn’t it?