Tenants of a dilapidated Bronx apartment complex are demanding the city seize the building from an absentee landlord who owes nearly $25 million in property taxes after a roughly decade-long saga over control of the property.
Residents of the 49-unit building at 2201-2205 Davidson Ave. said they’re planning to sue the landlord and the city after dealing with serious leaks, mold blooms and months-long elevator outages, despite the building cycling through the city’s various emergency repairs programs. Those who live there said rats still scurry through their apartments and intruders enter through the unlocked front door as they try to wrestle the building out of the landlords’ hands.
The ongoing fight is casting renewed attention on a stalled program meant to turn over derelict buildings with years of back taxes to nonprofits equipped to pay the mortgage and make repairs, while also raising questions over just how bad things have to get before city agencies step in.
“Every repair that we’ve done is basically on our own, out of pocket,” said fifth-floor tenant Jenel Young. “We didn’t have a choice and it’s our safety.”
Young, 27, said she and her sister have spent thousands of dollars to fix their crumbled bathroom ceiling, scrape lead paint from the walls and hire an exterminator to get rid of the rats. Steam sprayed from a bedroom radiator when Gothamist visited on a chilly day in January. Department of Housing Preservation and Development records show the building has 473 open violations.
Young and her sister said they had been waiting for HPD and the city’s Department of Finance to turn the building over to a nonprofit through the city’s Third-Party Transfer program for several years, but various circumstances have scuttled the proposed take-over.
The building’s owners filed for bankruptcy and froze an ongoing foreclosure process in 2015. A judge dismissed the case three years later.
In 2019, the city suspended the TPT program after owners of…
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