Croman of Croman Real Estate and 9300 Realty was arrested last month. In a lawsuit via New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, "Croman directs an illegal operation that wields harassment, coercion, and fraud to force rent-regulated tenants out of their apartments and convert their apartments into highly profitable market-rate units." In total, Croman was hit with 20 felony charges and faces 25 years in prison.
The Croman revelation was just one finding from The Real Deal's investigation of DOB permits dating to 2012 to determine which landlords filed the most permit applications relative to the number of units they own in the East Village.
Per TRD:
Other East Village landlords with a high alteration strike rate include Mark Scharfman’s Scharfman Organization, which owns about 4,000 units citywide ... The company filed 19 alteration permits at its 118 East Village units since 2012, a rate of about 16 percent.
Jared Kushner’s Kushner Companies, which has acquired a sizable portfolio in the neighborhood since 2012, also made the top five. It filed 77 alteration permit applications and owns at least 522 units in the neighborhood. Raphael Toledano’s Brookhill Properties, which owns about 400 units in the East Village, was fourth on the list and filed 53 alteration permit requests.
Per previous published reports, Kushner and Toledano have been accused of trying to force out tenants at East Village properties in the past. (Like here ... and here... and here...)
And what might all these filings mean?
Emily Goldstein, an organizer at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an affordable housing advocacy group, believes any correlation between a high rate of renovations and harassment allegations may be more than coincidence.
“I think it raises a red flag,” she said. “I think absolutely an unusual rate of alt filings is cause for concern.”
However, reps for the landlords "emphatically rejected such characterizations of renovation work."
Find the the full Real Deal report here.
8 comments:
If renovation applications are an indication of a landlord's subterfuge, Stuyvesant Town should be scrutinized.
WTF! how many violation does it take for our elected officials to act against these landlords? does there have to be an actual murderof a tenant!
the bad press on just these landlords would fill a file cabinat.
what a sneaky way for our mayor to give to real estate while avowing to preserve what he calls affordable apartments.
what a sham.
diblasio should have to live, for a year, in a tenement walk up owned by croman.
Someone needs to alter that guys face. With all that money he should have set aside a few bucks for some mastic surgery.
Is he the guy who invented the cronut?
Owners are allowed to renovate apartments. In fact it used to be tenant groups complaining that owners were not making enough repairs or upgrades. Owners have every right to repair, renovate or remodel vacated apartments. They just have to follow building codes while doing so. It is when owners do not follow building codes that tenant harrassment can occur and windfall profit from rent stabilized tenant vacancy occurs.
Only 32%? I'm surprised, given the age of the housing stock, that it isn't more than that.
Is it really that difficult to see a potential correlation between unlawfully forcing tenants out of stabilized units and applications for alteration? Sometimes I wonder if people are honestly just so literal they seem dumb or playing dumb to support their own beliefs and agendas.
De Blasios self proclaimed push for affordable housing stops at the point of inconvenience for real estate bigwigs, or interrupting their greedy destructive schemes. Coward.
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