Washington Heights Building Battles the Management

by Emma Silvers

For the third day in a row, Henry Brown woke up wanting nothing more than a hot shower. It was a frosty February morning and the hot water would wake him up, maybe make his usual walk through Washington Heights to work at a grocery store a little more comfortable. Testing the bathroom sink faucet at the apartment he has shared with his wife and in-laws for 12 years, Brown was not surprised to find only a thin stream of ice-cold water. It was the same way his day had started the day before, and the day before that.

For Brown and the other residents of 551 W. 170th St., the lack of hot water was just the latest episode in an ongoing series of impediments to daily life: the saga of trying to live comfortably in a six-story, pre-war building whose landlord and management company routinely ignore maintenance issues, say tenants, to the point of putting residents in danger.

“The water is a big thing, it goes out constantly,” says Brown, sitting on the building’s stoop on a mild early October afternoon. “It might not sound that bad now, but in the winter, three days without hot water––are you kidding me? That’s just basic.”

Other problems in the building, say tenants, pose more of a direct threat to safety. The elevator, the subject of many tenants’ most frequent complaints to building management, stops working so often some tenants say they just take the stairs by force of habit. Over the summer, the elevator was non-functioning for three months straight while managers installed and configured a new motor.

“My mother-in-law is very old, and having to go up and down those stairs every time you want to run to the store is just not that easy for her,” said Brown. “It affects peoples’ lives.” He throws up his hands, shrugs.

In the building’s dimly lit foyer, missing floor tiles are prevalent, with empty spaces dotting the entryway. In the hallway, to the left of the doorframe, exposed electrical wire protrudes from the wall about a foot off the floor. According to New York City’s Housing and Preservation Department (HPD) records, these would most likely be class A and class B violations, respectively––non-hazardous and hazardous––while issues such as the lack of hot water or heat, the presence of rodents, or blocked fire escapes would be class C, “immediately” hazardous. Data from the HDP website shows that 551 W. 170th St. currently has 145 open (unresolved) violations, including 23 that fall into class A, 76 that are class B, and an alarming 46 that are class C, including three different unresolved complaints of evidence of exposed lead-based paint within the last year.

“You name a problem, this building’s got it,” says Julie Caballera, who has lived here with her mother for nine years. Caballera says she moved in when she was 17. “We got roaches, we got rats, we got pipes leaking, they don’t turn the heat on when they’re supposed to,” she says, counting off the complaints on her fingers. “We used to call and complain a lot, but we kind of stopped. No one comes. They don’t care.”

“They” are Perseus Management, LLC, a property management firm that runs between 30 and 40 buildings in upper Manhattan, most of them in Washington Heights. Though the company’s main office is actually attached to 551 W. 170th St.––separated from residents by a gate with its own intercom system––tenants who have requested repairs in their apartments say getting a response, let alone a timely one, is a rarity.

“They’re like a ghost company, they’re so hush-hush about everything,” says Fany Hernandez, a tenant for more than 20 years, in a phone interview. Hernandez is the president of the Community Union of Washington Heights and Inwood (or Union Communal), a 10-year-old group of tenant associations and community members working to educate tenants about their rights and demand improved conditions. “They removed all the supers from their buildings, so if there’s an actual emergency there’s no one to go to. They won’t see you if you just try to go over there [to the office]. All you can do is call and most of the time they don’t pick up the phone, so you leave messages, and then no one calls you back.” She says there’s a hole in her ceiling that she’s been complaining about for at least a year, and that the radiator in her bedroom hasn’t worked in three years.

It makes it all the more frustrating, she says, that Perseus obviously has the means to perform repairs in a timely fashion, even labor-intensive remodeling jobs––because she sees the company fix apartments every time a tenant moves out. The company will remodel an apartment to the point that it hardly looks like it belongs in the building, says Hernandez, and then raise the rent to double or triple what it was for the previous tenant. She says she’s seen it with at least seven apartments in the building, including one right next to hers, within the past few years.

Hernandez’s observations serve to support the notion of what some community members are calling a concerted effort by Perseus Management––as well as other landlords in the area––to push longtime residents out of their rent-stabilized apartments and bring in new, higher-paying tenants in order to cover the company’s investment in the building.

“From a landlord’s perspective, if they acquired any of these buildings between 2000 and 2008, they probably paid too much,” says Cheryl Pahaham, chair of the Housing and Human Services committee for Community Board 12. “They probably can’t cover the mortgage, so in some sense they are forced to do things like not make repairs, charge fees where they weren’t before. But there’s no doubt in my mind that because this is truly the last affordable area in Manhattan, there are private investment firms just salivating to find ways to get people on stabilized rent to move out.”

Some of those ways, says Pahaham, include things like not fixing holes in the walls, or not putting much effort into getting the water fixed when it goes off.

“They demoralize people,” says Pahaham. “The housing becomes unlivable when people can’t do basic things like cook food for their children.”

At the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. (NMIC), a non-profit that seeks to serve the area’s poorest residents, community organizers run a monthly know-your-rights workshop for tenants. Recently, they have been working with tenants in Perseus-managed buildings to demand repairs, and they organized a rally outside the Perseus office in July that drew a crowd of several dozen tenants. From these meetings, staff say they have come to see Perseus as just one of a number of “predatory” equity firms not only neglecting the upkeep of their buildings, but taking advantage of their low-income, predominantly immigrant tenants––whom organizers say are less likely to question an illegally implemented late fee or an inappropriately high charge for repairs.

“It’s hard to prove, because sometimes the things [landlords] are doing are legal,” says organizer Diegoenes Abréu, in an interview at the NMIC office. “They get people to sign the wrong lease renewals, or they’ll send phony notices about things they have to pay for, or they’ll try to take them to housing court over nothing. And a lot of [tenants] don’t know their rights. So they just won’t show up, won’t question anything because they’re afraid.”

Many tenants in these rent-stabilized apartments are especially vulnerable to such tactics, say organizers, because there is such a large immigrant population––which creates both a language barrier, and an extra fear of interaction with city government for those who are undocumented.

“If you don’t speak the language, how are you going to find out what your rights are?” says Pahaham. “And if you’re low-income, an immigrant, you can’t afford a lawyer, so maybe you wait in line for your free legal services, if you have the time…and there just aren’t enough housing lawyers here to deal with the number of people that need help.”

Fany Hernandez says she knows that tenants in her building have been offered money if they will move out. “That’s harassment,” says Hernandez with a sigh. “That’s what we’re working against, and there are a lot of people in this building, elderly people, especially, that are easy targets. We need to empower people with the knowledge that will help them fight that.”

Speaking on the phone on behalf of Perseus Management, property manager and leasing agent Adam Foreman says he understands tenants’ frustrations with maintenance issues, but he strongly refutes any claims that the company ignores or takes advantage of its tenants. In terms of repairs and maintenance, Foreman says Perseus is doing the best any company could with buildings that date back to the 1920s.

“These buildings are old, and I guarantee if you go into any walk-up on the Upper East Side, they’re having these issues too,” says Foreman. “Hot water and heat issues are a nightmare for us. Even if you go into a hundred-year-old building and put in a brand new boiler…it can take a whole winter to figure out how to tweak things for that building in particular.”

Foreman says Perseus employees are as timely as possible with responses, and that with heat or hot water complaints, a crew is generally at the building within 30 to 60 minutes. In terms of the 145 violations currently listed for 551 W. 170th St. on the HPD website, Foreman says that, while he hasn’t seen the list, he believes many of them are outdated and “have probably been done,” adding that HPD makes it difficult for landlords to accurately manage their records.

As for accusations that Perseus takes advantage of its low-income, immigrant tenants who may not know their rights, Foreman says they’re “silly,” because the vast majority of Perseus employees speak Spanish, many are from Washington Heights, and many live in Perseus-managed buildings themselves. In terms of intimidating tenants with legal action, he says the company has taken tenants to court four times in the last 18 months for issues “other than non-payment cases,” which he says is a far lower rate than other management companies he knows of in the area.

“We do the best we can, I think we have very good people, and we take tenants seriously, but we’re not perfect,” says Foreman. “If someone’s going to try to make us out to be some management company that doesn’t care about tenants, I think that’s silly…we wake up early and work late and what we do most days is an impossible task. We try to tell tenants what’s going on, and we have to manage tenants’ expectations.”

On the front stoop of 551 W. 170th St., as people return home from work, smile and exchange tired greetings, cooking smells start to waft through the bedsheet-curtains on the first floor windows. Tenants’ expectations don’t seem to be very high.

Henry Brown says the only time he’s seen repairmen come to the building is when there’s an inspection coming up. “They change some light bulbs and repaint the elevator,” he says. “Of course they don’t actually care. They don’t have to live here. As long as they get their rent, why should they care?” He says Perseus hasn’t turned the heat on in this building yet, which he knows New York City landlords were legally required to do last week, on Oct. 1.

“Really, most people, they don’t care as long as they got a roof over their heads,” he says. “My thinking is, you pay X amount of dollars and you don’t give the landlord problems, for you to have to go through these conditions, paying what you’re paying, it’s just not fair.” He pauses to hold the door for a neighbor carrying a stroller.

“We learn to adapt to it,” says Brown. “We shouldn’t, but we do.”