Avenue A tenants decry landlord after fires, demand cleanup

BY PHYLLIS ECKHAUS | Crying “Shame!” and “Housing is a human right!” tenants affected by an East Village fire condemned their landlord, Citi Urban Management, demonstrating in front of their building May 8.

The fire, the second in six months at 131 Avenue A, off of St. Mark’s Place, impacted 10 of the building’s 30 units, resulting in a partial vacate order by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Outraged residents described how their attempts to flee the April 24 5 a.m. blaze were hampered by building disrepair. Tenant Anika Blau recounted the thick smoke in the main stairwell, the fire alarms that did not work, and the rusted exterior fire escapes where, she said, “ladders were hard to manipulate and steps broke on us.” Tenants using the fire escape that had a stuck ladder were forced to jump to safety.

Kinsey Donovan decried what she called the “nightmare” tenants endured, exacerbated by apparent landlord indifference.

“After standing outside for two hours, and returning to find our door locks broken and our building walls covered in soot, we didn’t hear from Citi Urban until over 11 hours later,” she said. “It’s been two weeks since the incident and they have only sent two e-mails in total about this.”

Donovan, whose damaged apartment was not subject to a vacate order, said she has asthma and that, “even after cleaning efforts,” the air quality in her apartment and the building has “deteriorated to the point where it’s impacting my health,” making her breathing difficult if she spends more than an hour in her place.

“We demand a commitment to rectify…systemic failures, and a promise to release those like myself who cannot risk their health with inhospitable conditions,” she declared.

The Village Sun spoke to building tenants not impacted by the fire, who said Citi Urban began building clean-up efforts within hours of the fire. The building superintendent attributed the two fires to the legal difficulty of evicting an allegedly drug-dealing, rent-stabilized tenant who apparently was charging multiple lithium batteries in his apartment.

Citi Urban owns and manages 34 buildings in New York City, 14 in the East Village and another six in Greenwich Village and Soho. Staff from the Cooper Square Committee described the real estate behemoth as notorious for its neglect of tenants.

“Something is seriously wrong,” CSC organizer Jodie Leidecker said, noting that before the fire, Citi Urban accumulated more than 100 H.P.D., Department of Buildings and OATH (Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings) violations for 131 Avenue A alone.

Unhappy Citi Urban tenants have sought to form a citywide alliance. One East Village tenant in March penned a detailed and documented account of longstanding misery at 131 Second Ave./36 St. Mark’s Place, the Citi Urban-owned six-story historic building constructed in 1900 that used to house Gem Spa; in addition to extended periods without heat and hot water, he asserted that tenants now contend with extensive stairwell water damage that has caused walls to deteriorate and mold to grow, and created the risk of electrical fire.

Leidecker observed that some of the woes described by tenants at 131 Avenue A could be addressed by legislation currently before the New York City Council, the Back Home Act, a package of bills introduced by Councilmembers Jennifer Gutierrez and Shekar Krishnan, from Brooklyn and Queens respectively. These bills would create an Office of Fire Remediation to assist tenants and landlords, provide displaced tenants with information and help to secure nearby housing, plus allow displaced tenants to advocate for an administrator to take over their building if there are repair delays.

Anna Bettendorf, Gutierrez’s chief of staff, told The Village Sun that the legislation was written to assist all displaced tenants facing emergency vacate orders, meaning the package would apply to tenants displaced by construction accidents, such as those recently forced to vacate 10 Fifth Ave. and 642 E. 14th St.

Five months after next-door construction destabilized their building and made them homeless, the displaced tenants of 642 E. 14th St. remain at loggerheads with their landlord, Jack Lebewohl, the owner of the 2nd Ave Deli. They contend that he has failed to fulfill his agreement to help them get access to their belongings still in the building. They also seek to compel him to start repairs.

The developer who destabilized the E. 14th Street building, Madison Realty Capital, has provided eight of the displaced households with nearby housing and rent-stabilized lease offers.