The New York Post reports:
Eight holdout tenants who fought for five years to keep their millionaire landlord from turning their Lower East Side tenement into a mansion for himself agreed to be bought out yesterday.
The last rent-stabilized tenants of 47 E. Third St. said they gave in because they weren't confident they would beat real-estate baron Alistair Economakis in the Manhattan Supreme Court trial scheduled to begin yesterday.
Economakis, the son of a Greek shipping magnate, bought the six-story building for $900,000 in 2003 and said he needed it as a home for himself, his wife and two children.
He reached deals with seven of the 15 tenants but the others fought until yesterday.
The tenants will each receive $75,000 under the settlement, except for one elderly resident, who will get $175,000.
Here is the Web site for Alistair Economakis -- The Other Side of the Story: 47 East 3rd Street
Previously on EV Grieve.
5 comments:
where are they people going to go--re-locate??homelessness is rising--I hate this-
Obviously, certain individuals of privilege are allowed to escape the long arm of the gutted rent law (thank you Shelly Silver).
The outcome of this case threatens all rent regulated tenants. Owners have now carte blanche to mass-evict tenants through owner occupancy. I have never met any individuals who got such a kick out ruining other people's lives as Alister Economakis.
The worst part is that there is no recourse if the owners decide to sell the building at an enormous profit of eleven times their investment, convert the units to luxury housing or engage in other kind of fraud (yes, it is fraud).
Since our legislature is and has been busy making back room deals with the real estate lobby (Silver & Co.), it is now up the karma police. What goes around comes around.
Readers should know that the settlement is subject to full income tax and that their attorneys usually take a 20%-30% cut. When all is said and done tenants have and equivalent of 12-20 months rent or approx. one third of a down payment unless they leave the City.
There is no justice for tenants in New York! (Don't be fooled, that includes market rate tenants).
Actually, EV, the tenants were in the Housing Court. After their case was lost at the Court of Appeals, who declared that there was no limit to the number of apartments a landlord could take, the tenants had to go back to Housing Court to try to disprove the landlord's claim of "good faith" at trial. The week before the trial,they were denied use of information that was crucial to their defense by the appellate term. The landlord was also planning to demand that the tenants be ordered to pay his legal fees should they lose, which would have driven many of the already financially strapped tenants to bankruptcy, or years of having their wages garnished and with nowhere to live as well.
Also, the other 7 tenants did not all settle. Two were evicted and another tenant had already made plans to move before the owner occupancy case started. Another tenant,who was living with a serious illness, died a few months after the owners announced their plans to evict the whole building.
Thanks for your blog,EV, it's appreciated.
BAD VIBES
I can't wait to piss on this guy's stoop.....
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