On the topic of Ben Shaoul, currently developing the former Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on Avenue B and East Fifth Street ... as you may have seen, he was the subject of a lengthy feature in The New York Times on Sunday.
Writer Rebeccca Flint Marx chronicled how the president of Magnum Real Estate got his start ... amassing an estimated 40 buildings in the East Village alone. ... she also documented some of criticism that he has garnered from tenants along the way ...
However, as the article noted, Shaoul defends his record and wonders why he doesn't get a "pat on the back" about renovations/improvements from residents ... he also said that he doesn't understand why people hate him. "I'm a regular guy, I have feelings."
There's too much in the article, which also quotes EV Grieve, to summarize here. You can read the whole article here.
12 comments:
There's too much to say in regard to this man, so I'll just say one: karma
The fact that this all started after he borrowed money from his dad, who made the money in antiques, the celebration and preservation of the beauty and artistry of objects from the past, is so sadly poetic.
Feelings, nothing more than feelings.
WHOA WHOA WHOA, FEELINGS!
Way to carry the first half of the article, EV!
wow, ben came off great in this
Wow.
What Anon 10:19 said.
Of course Ben came off looking great. The NYT and New York magazine are completely on board with the New New York of Nana Bloomie.
Pedestrian malls and sugar- and fat-free smokeless meals for everyone! Plus a pink sweater over the shoulders and knotted at the chest....
We must have read a different article. Ben did not come out of this looking good by any stretch of the imagination. He looks thin-skinned and whiny.
i agree, i don't think it puts him in a good light. the 1st half of the article lists the properties that he'd gotten unscrupulously and the 2nd part of the article reads more like a half-ass PR attempt by the writer (possibly on purpose) to make the readers understand shaoul's thinking/actions and that he human and has "feelings" too. also, there's only 1 person in the whole article who would go on
the record to say something nice about it.
"I have no problem with rent-stabilized tenants." - Ben Shaoul
B.S.!! As a 20-year tenant in one of Shaoul's buildings, I can state unequivocally that this is a lie.
I and many other tenants I know have been subject to his henchman Josh's verbal abuse and threats on numerous occasions, simply for asking for needed repairs and upgrades. I was in fact told no, explicitly because any improvement to my living conditions might encourage me to stay longer.
The Shaoul organization are fascist, greed-driven jerks, plain and simple. They are precisely what's wrong with our country today, and our city.
The Times writer Rebecca Marx looks like a rube for taking Shaoul's protestations at face value. Shame on her and the Times for publishing a sympathetic article about these lowlifes.
The only 'patsies' here are readers who think a NYT reporter was 'tricked' into puffing up some rich POS slumlord.
Calling the NYT Real Estate section 'journalism' is a joke, they've been PR people for big landlords as long as I can remember and perhaps always have been.
It probably is worse now as newspapers around the country go out of business, property owners may be some of the few left to continue pumping in big advertising dollars into the NYT.
That's right, the Times is hanging on for dear life and needs the advertising revenue. Also explains why they soft-pedal the mayor's many scandals, instead of strongly opposing corruption - his company buys over $10 million in Times advertising a year. Journalistic ethics, what?
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