“BEHIND A STOLID FACADE, A WHOLE NATION’S CRISIS”

A feature article in the October 19th issue of City Limits tells the story of 1328 Gates Avenue, whose residents have been fighting for both their homes and their quality of life with the help of Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A, a program of Legal Services NYC.

Right: Brooklyn A Bushwick Office Managing Attorney and Comprehensive Rights Unit Director David J. Bryan, who has represented the tenants of 1328 Gates since 2007.

From the article:

Built in 1931 in the midst of the Great
Depression, 1328 Gates Avenue is a six-unit rental apartment building
in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It has seen the streetscape grow
and change, prosperity ebb and flow, and generations come and go. It
survived the Second World War, the blackout and riots of 1977, and the
crack epidemic of the 1980s. It took the housing boom of the 2000s to
nearly destroy it.

Unremarkable from the outside, a passer-by would
have no reason to look twice at the modest structure with a red brick
facade. Yet the travails of this one building and its handful of hardy
residents encapsulate the rowdy, often ruinous, excesses of this
decade's real estate market in New York City.

“It really got ugly
before the bubble burst because people were looking at Bushwick as a
natural resource,” a commodity to be exploited, said David Bryan, the
managing attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A, who has
represented the tenants of 1328 in court.

By the time Bryan visited the building in 2007, it had accrued 361 violations from the city’s Department of
Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). He says he was shocked by
the tenants' living conditions: “It was just awful. There were vermin,
mold, and a hole in one of the walls that went straight through to the
hallway.”

Until a court-appointed administrator was named to care
for the building in March, the residents of 1328 were passengers on a
ship without a captain. With landlords that refused to make lasting
repairs, the tenants lived for five years under a leaky, porous roof,
with mold on their walls and ceilings, mice in their bedrooms, roaches
in their kitchens, and poisonous lead-based paint on their walls. The
locks on the front door were busted; drug users would creep into the
building to get off in the basement.

“I had so much mold in my
bedroom that it was black, looking at me, talking to me, moving,” said
Socorro Medina, 49, who has lived on the third floor for 13 years.

It was never a palace, but 1328 had been decent
affordable housing for some of Bushwick’s low-income residents for
decades, having come under rent stabilization in 1984. Tenants say that
changed in 2003 when a man named Kharl Pinnock, at age 25, bought the
building for half a million dollars. With a good credit score and no
collateral, Pinnock was given a six-figure mortgage and became the
landlord of a multi-family apartment building.

After years of serious neglect, exacerbated by a case of mortgage fraud, residents saw some relief last fall when the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development gave the owners of the 200 worst buildings in the City four months to bring their buildings up to code or have HPD do the
repairs itself and charge the expenses and fines to the owner. HPD spent nearly $300,000 on repairs at 1328. 

While the repairs were being made, Brooklyn A Staff Attorney Vance Gathing was successfully petitioning  the court to appoint a
third party to take over the building, an action that is allowable under Article 7A of New York state property law when living conditions become
extremely dire or the landlord has abandoned the building. By March, a 7A administrator had been appointed, leading to a period of relative calm for the residents of 1328 Gates. Now, however, a new challenge has arisen:

But after six relatively calm months with
Nakos as her landlord, Socorro Medina suddenly received a foreclosure
motion in the mail this month. A company called Novastar Mortgage, Inc.
had come into possession of the note and initiated foreclosure
proceedings against the building's owner of record, Beverly Britton. A
total of $982,738 is owed on the mortgage, not to mention close to
$350,000 in liens against the building from HPD’s renovations.

Novastar
will attempt to auction 1328 off, but the $1.3 million that is
owed—nearly three times the market value of $476,000, as determined by
the city’s department of finance—could make it a tough sell, depending
on how much of a loss the bank is willing to incur.

Any new
owner will have to go to housing court and convince the judge that he
or she intends to be a legitimate steward of the building to get the 7A
order lifted. Either way, the tenants are protected under the rent
stabilization law no matter who controls their building. Still, it is a
new chapter of uncertainty for the tenants who had just began to enjoy
a measure of stability.

Even so, Socorro Medina, a Brooklyn
native, says she doesn’t fear what comes next. “I don’ know if you
believe in God … I know I do," she said last week. "And it gives me the
strength to move on through the good, the bad, and the ugly. And—I tell
you—I been through the good, the bad, and the ugly in Bushwick. I don’t
give up.”

Read the full article at CityLimits.org.