Inwood Tenants Living in Hazardous Conditions Demand Action by One of NYC’s Worst Landlords

January 25, 2017, NEW YORK –Tenants at 61 and 71 Vermilyea Avenue are going to court to demand that their landlord, Doran Realty Corporation, fix building conditions that are threatening their health and safety. The tenants are represented by Legal Services NYC’s Manhattan program.

Many of the building’s tenants are seniors on fixed incomes who have lived in the building for 25 years or more. They have repeatedly notified Doran Realty about dangerous conditions in their apartments and in common areas of the 65-unit building. These conditions include a broken intercom system and lock on the building’s entrance, heavy infestations of roaches, mice, and rats, crumbling walls and ceilings, holes in apartment floors, broken windows, leaking pipes, mold, faulty electrical wiring, and more. Further, the tenants’ apartments only have heat and hot water during the afternoon—there is no heat or hot water during the evening hours, even when the temperature outside falls below 55 degrees outside. The property currently has 95 open HPD violations, with 21 class C (immediately hazardous) violations.

Most of the building’s units are rent-stabilized, and the tenants’ attorneys believe that the landlord’s actions are designed to make the tenants’ lives sufficiently miserable so that they might surrender their tenancy rights. Doran Realty’s head officer, Felix Gomez, is #7 on the Public Advocate’s 2016 Worst Landlords List.

Tenant Ysabel Lara has lived at 71 Vermilyea for 41 years. “I go through the same process with the landlord each time the ceiling leaks,” she said. “I will inform the landlord that there is a leak in the ceiling, he sends over the super or other workers to plaster and paint over the leak, which only temporarily stops the problem. Soon after the problem is repaired, the leaks start again. The leaking has caused the ceiling to collapse twice, once after the leaking was supposedly repaired. The super and the other workers the landlord sends to deal with the leaks only do shoddy patchwork and they don’t permanently fix the problem.”

“A tenant came to us during a housing resource fair we had in Inwood,” said Rita Vega, Law Graduate at Manhattan Legal Services. “She expressed her frustrations over conditions in her apartment and in the building as a whole. We had a tenant meeting in the building sometime in November 2016 to speak to tenants about conditions in their apartments. Many tenants complained about the landlord’s unresponsiveness to their requests for repairs. We explained that this behavior was a form of harassment by landlords who are trying to clear out long-term rent stabilized tenants from rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. We are filing this lawsuit on behalf of the tenants in order to ensure that their voices are heard and they receive the repairs they deserve.”

(Photos: Building conditions at 61 and 71 Vermilyea)

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Contact: Kate Whalen, kwhalen (at) legalservicesnyc.org, 646-442-3654