Life After Landlords: Tenants in Foreclosed Crown Heights Building Seek to Take Over the Property
The Indypendent — January 25, 2024
By Amba Guerguerian
On Tuesday morning tenants of 567 St. John’s Pl. in Crown Heights held a rally and press conference outside their building to demand the City make needed repairs to it. In June of 2022 the tenants, members of The Crown Heights Tenants Union (CHTU), won a case with the City that ceded control of the building from the landlord for neglect.
“They just come asking for money, but no repairs for us. We are just living with rats, roaches, bedbugs — and nothing gets done!” said Yasmin, a tenant of 11 years, at the rally.
The tenants are now demanding Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) use the $700,000 it has set aside to renovate the building from public funds — a loan against the old landlord’s ownership stake — to begin work on the building and actually start initiating improvements to their living quality.
Article 7A of the New York State Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law allows housing court judges to manage residential buildings that have been “effectively abandoned,” where conditions have been deemed “dangerous to life, health, or safety” of tenants. These cases generally have two outcomes: Either the landlord pays off their debts and regains control of the building, or the building is sold to another private entity in an auction after the landlord is foreclosed upon.
567 St. John’s Pl. is an eight-unit, four story rent-stabilized building in the center of rapidly-gentrifying Crown Heights. Its tenants told The Indypendent that since it took control of the building in June 2022, HPD made repairs to the fire escapes, painted the lower exterior of the building, and has the garbage taken out but has made no internal repairs and no rodent or insect extermination. Tenants say that HPD officials, including the head of the 7A program Melissa Lima, have come to visit the building some three times, making promises of further repairs that remain unfulfilled, say the tenants.