By Jessica Easthope
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, N.Y. — For some the sound of running water is soothing, for Elsa it’s stressful. Her faucet has been on for hours and won’t shut off. When she calls her super, she gets his voicemail. She’s lived in her Washington Heights apartment for more than 40 years and the problems have added up. Her stove won’t light, her toilet leaks and her floor is crumbling. That’s why fellow tenant Anna is helping to rally her neighbors, hoping it will spark some action on the part of her landlord A&E Real Estate.
“We have really started to work together and to make more collective demands on, getting these things fixed in our apartment,” Anna said.
Anna, who’s keeping her last name private, moved in in 2021. Since then she’s seen crumbling walls and doors, roaches, mice, dark hallways, broken elevators and laundry machines and outside scaffolding has been up for years.
A&E Real Estate has held top spots on the New York City Public Advocate’s Worst Landlord Watch List for years. Their properties account for about 9,000 open housing violations across 60 buildings in the city. Earlier this year the city settled a lawsuit with A&E Real Estate for $2.1 million over hazards and neglected repairs in 14 of their buildings.”
We have to do things like try to involve 311, and we have to do things like try to, you know, write to rentals at A&E media at A&E and just see if there’s anybody that would get back to us,” Anna said.
“So far in A&E buildings, we’re definitely pursuing to have ownership be transferred to more responsible hands,” said Gisell Rondon, a tenant organizer with the Met Council on Housing.
Rondon says New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) will be launching a new program later this year that could take A&E Real Estate’s buildings out of its hands. It’s called “Fix the City” and will serve as an enforcement tool, allowing the city along with other city and state agencies to take legal and financial action against repeat offender landlords, going as far as transfer of ownership.
“A&E is not doing a good job. So if you can’t do a good job – you have to give up this ownership that is keeping folks in conditions that are less than, less than humane,” Rondon said.
“Our neighbors feel very forgotten in this apartment,” Anna said. “So what we are really fighting for now is each other.”