Crown Heights tenants rally for control of their building after years of no repairs
Brooklyn Paper — January 23, 2024
By Jada Camille
Tenants of a Crown Heights apartment who got their building owner ousted from management are fighting to take control of their dwelling, and on Tuesday rallied against the former slumlord’s lack of repairs — and slow action from the city since his removal.
Residents of 567 St. Johns Place say they’ve lived with broken ceilings, cracked tiles, disrepairs kitchen essentials and infestations for years. In 2022, they brought then-landlord Gerald Tema to Brooklyn Housing Court, where a judge eventually moved to remove him as manager. After their win in court, tenants thought they would start to see repairs, but so far, their problems remain.
Sophia Stephenson has lived at St. John’s Place for over 30 years and said at a rally on Tuesday that conditions first started to decline roughly a decade ago when Tema took ownership. Over a year since his removal, she said she still isn’t seeing renovations of the deteriorating building.
“If we owned it, we could do what we have to do to live decently but since we’re paying them rent, they need to fix the building and do what we’re paying them to do,” she told Brooklyn Paper.
Stephenson is legally blind and is left to maneuver around holes in her floor. She said she even had to go without a working refrigerator for some time, endangering her health since she is insulin dependent.
“It’s just bad,” she said. “We are waiting for them to step up and start doing the renovations.”
Tenants were told the city took out a $700,000 loan from the landlord’s ownership stake in April of 2023, but they have yet to see the city step in to make any of those repairs.
By asking for a democratic public ownership of the building, tenants like Stephenson are hoping they can take matters into their own hands to renovate their backyards, install working stoves and refrigerators and get rid of pests, according to Joel Feingold, a member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union.