When a housing market collapse kicked America into recession, it was reasonable to hope that one benefit would be to reduce housing costs for low-income people. No such luck.
Tenants may for the first time experience a code enforcement system that rewards their organizing efforts with lasting improvements in their buildings and their lives.
“It doesn’t feel good to see your own brother featured in the news as the year’s worst landlord. It would feel even worse to be doing nothing about it.”
Two people associated with a notorious portfolio of troubled Bronx buildings took guilty pleas after a welfare fraud investigation involving fake eviction cases.
The Bronx activist group had targeted landlords and lenders before. This time, however, they were rewarded with a million-dollar lawsuit and a court order to leave the owner alone.
Prosecuting property owners for alleged negligence linked to fatal fires is hard to do, experts say. It’s only regularly attempted in high-profile cases involving firefighter victims.
After years of complaints about one Bronx real-estate figure, the city housing department issued an unprecedented subpoena. The records it turned up made for interesting reading.
The mortgages were massive—$36 million here, $32 million there, $19 million a couple years later. But the buildings remained in dismal shape, plagued by lead paint, rats and crime.
A Housing Court judge ordered repairs to the electrical system at the building on DeKalb Avenue. A year later, the work undone, an eight-year-old resident died in an electrical fire.
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