![]() ![]() That increase would have required more than $89,000 worth of improvements to the apartment, the suit say, but no such improvements were made. in Washington Heights, for instance, was 230 percent higher than a previous tenant’s rent. The rent of one plaintiff, who lives in a rent stabilized apartment at 344 Fort Washington Ave. "We had people literally cry and beg us to help." “All one would have to do to determine if A&E is a good landlord is to go to their buildings and talk with their tenants,” said Aaron Carr, of the advocacy group Housing Rights Initiative, whose investigation of A&E led to the class action lawsuit. Nearly 70 current and former tenants across 22 A&E buildings filed a lawsuit - which is seeking class action status - in October claiming the company illegally raised rents of stabilized units and falsified paperwork with the state. There are dozens of tricks including intimidation, unnecessary construction to disrupt the environment at all hours, or raising the rent in violation of rent stabilization rules.”įox believes that many landlords factor evictions into their business models when they buy rent stabilized properties. “They tell people the building is being demolished, the people leave, then they don't demo the building. For example, demolition evictions,” Fox said. ![]() “They have a whole bag of tricks to evict tenants. "Before the city trumpets a huge tax giveaway to a developer they should be reviewing the widely available data around evictions and other housing violations,” he said.Ī&E ranked 18th in the city for eviction attempts based on the data from the Public Advocate’s office that Rentlogic obtained through ProPublica.įox noted that the top 10 percent of private developers are responsible for creating 80 percent of eviction attempts, according to the analysis.īut the number of eviction cases only tells part of the story since the formal process of evicting a tenant is often used after other measures fail, Fox added. Rentlogic's Yale Fox questioned whether the city should be so quick to praise such a deal. “I really felt like I was representing as their agent, the person who was standing on the public side with the strength and the tools to ensure that they were protected,” Patchett told the Real Deal last week.īut A&E was also responsible for filing more than 2,230 evictions cases between January 2013 and June 2015, according to an analysis by Rentlogic, a rental listings platform that aims to empower tenants by using open source data to grade landlords on things like vermin infestations, mold problems and construction violations. James Patchett, the incoming head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation who previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, the mayor's point person for affordable housing, recently highlighted that deal, which he brokered, as a source of pride in reaching the administration’s housing goals. One of the prime examples, they say, is A&E Real Estate Holdings.Ī&E, which is believed to be the fifth biggest landlord in the city, inked a $201 million deal in 2015 to buy Harlem’s Riverton complex and pledged to keep its nearly 1,000 units affordable over the next 30-plus years in exchange for $100 million worth of tax breaks and incentives from the city, according to reports. MANHATTAN - Much of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan hinges on the preservation of existing affordable units.īut advocates worry that some landlords who get city subsidies to preserve affordable housing are the very same landlords who have the highest rates attempting to evict tenants from rent stabilized homes - and are therefore contributing to the loss of affordable housing. Crown Heights, Prospect Heights & Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens & Red Hook. ![]()
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