PUBLISHED BY MOSHOLU PRESERVATION CORPORATION

New Enforcement Program Aimed at City’s Worst Buildings

By ALEX KRATZ

In the summer of 2005, New York City unleashed a new proactive campaign against the city’s most notorious landlords, including Moshe Piller, who owns several health and safety violation-ravaged buildings on Valentine Avenue in North Fordham. As a result, Piller and other landlords are being taken to task for their neglect and indifference to tenant complaints, but other serious offenders continue to slip through the cracks, city officials say.

The new aggressive approach has not consistently targeted the city’s worst buildings and there are several logistical kinks that need working out, according to a recently released one-year report on the Targeted Cyclical Enforcement Program (T-CEP) by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

But on the whole, the city and housing advocates are calling T-CEP a success, as valuable relationships have been forged between city agencies and community housing organizations, and many landlords have reacted promptly to make repairs.

The T-CEP program, implemented through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City Council and the mayor, is a collaboration between HPD, the City Council and non-profit housing advocates.

Breaking the Mold
This proactive concept is the brainchild of HPD and the Association of Neighborhood Housing Development (ANHD), an umbrella group comprised of dozens of community housing organizations scattered throughout the five boroughs, including local stalwarts like the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC). Aggressive and packaged with the threat of legal recourse, T-CEP was designed to break the ineffective HPD mold of reactive inspections and toothless penalties.

“Most of our work here is reactive because we get such a high volume of complaints; responding to those [tenant] complaints takes up the majority of our time,” said HPD spokesman Neill Coleman. “This allows us to do more proactive work.”

The idea behind T-CEP is simple: target the most neglected buildings in each Council district and do periodic roof-to-cellar inspections on them, in the process identifying all building code violations, both new and outstanding. HPD then takes steps to force the landlords to fix the violations.

Once inspections are completed, HPD creates a violation summary and consults with Council members and housing groups to decide what action to take. As a group, they decide on enforcement tactics based on a landlord’s past history with HPD and its Division of Anti-Abandonment, which tracks the worst of them.

HPD wants landlords to do their own repairs, says Coleman. If the violations are less severe, HPD will work with landlords to remove the violations through a self-certification program, which Coleman admits is not always foolproof. “But I would stress that if we find that [landlords] have falsely certified repairs, they will be referred to housing court,” Coleman said.

In more drastic cases, buildings with serious safety and health violations, landlords must enter into a Voluntary Repair Agreement (VRA), promising to fix their most egregious, class “C,” violations – leaky roofs, blown boilers, or dead refrigerators – by a determined deadline or face litigation.

Finally, the most aggressive tactic in the T-CEP arsenal takes a habitually offending owner, such as Moshe Piller, straight to HPD’s litigation arm.

Conclusions and Recommendations
In the first year, HPD completed inspections of 270 buildings and 4,697 apartments in 12 out of the city’s 51 Council districts. About 400 units per district are targeted. In total, 14,634 new violations have been identified and 7,612 violations were removed.

Of course, numbers can hardly quantify how effective the program has been, considering there are more than 2.7 million outstanding code violations in New York City, according to HPD.

“Overall, we would certainly say that it’s been successful, especially in getting more up-to-date information on the violations of these buildings,” Coleman said.

Dave Hanzel, the policy director for ANHD, agrees. “The program theory has proven correct,” he said. “If you have the threat of follow-up and comprehensive inspections, then landlords will respond.”

Perhaps the most intriguing by-product of T-CEP is the fact that Hanzel and Coleman agree on anything. HPD and the city’s housing and tenant advocates don’t often see eye-to-eye.

“Initially, HPD was resistant and community organizations thought HPD was a huge bureaucracy that wasn’t going to do anything, but now I think they both realize that we have the same goals,” Hanzel said, which are to improve living conditions throughout the city.

Both sides say scheduling has been a problem. Decisions in the program are based on meetings between HPD, housing groups, and Council members. If there are scheduling conflicts, the entire process is delayed. Oftentimes, HPD and ANHD say, Council members are slow to commit and come ill-prepared for meetings.

To solve this problem, Hanzel wants to provide more training to Council members, whose districts are only up for inspection every three years at this point, and “making them better prepared to sit down,” he said. “They have a huge agenda and we know there are competing issues. But the window of opportunity is narrow on this.”

Because of T-CEP’s limited cope and periodic nature, HPD wants to do a better job of identifying the most neglected buildings, saying the majority of violations it discovered through the program were class “A” violations, or those considered the least serious. Thus far, HPD has allowed Council members and housing groups to choose all 400 units, but is now planning to pick half the units itself. “It will better enable us to inspect the worst of the worst,” Coleman said.

Both ANHD and HPD would like to expand the program to do more districts, more often. NWBCCC organizers say they would like each council district to be inspected once a year, which would mean three times the manpower. In total, HPD uses about 10 of its 416 inspectors for T-CEP.

Locks Still Not Fixed
Meanwhile, tenants like Xiomara Mejias, 34, her husband and three young children still don’t have locks on their building’s entrance at 2654 Valentine Ave. The building’s owner, Moshe Piller, was named the second worst slumlord in the city in 2005 by the non-profit tenant umbrella group, Housing Here and Now.

Mejias’ building, which showcases both the success and most difficult challenges of T-CEP, boasts a well-documented history of neglect. It had been referred to HPD’s litigation department even before T-CEP started. Then, last summer, after roof-to-cellar T-CEP inspections, HPD piled on more violations, many of them class “C” (the worst) infractions. (On the morning of the inspections, Piller had workers frantically painting and cleaning to make the place halfway presentable. Inspectors uncovered rusted, deteriorated pipes due to be replaced, that were instead wrapped in plastic bags and “sealed” with duct tape, Mejias said.)

On Sept. 11 of this year, Piller finally settled with HPD in housing court, agreeing to pay a $30,000 fine, make all repairs within 45 days, and depositing $50,000 in an escrow account to ensure that all the repairs would be made. Just last week, HPD did a follow-up inspection to find that 81 percent of the violations had been repaired and levied another $5,000 fine (it also issued 21 new violations). And still, the locks haven’t been fixed, allowing drug addicts and vagrants to enter the building at will, Mejias said.

“Any way you want to put it, things aren’t being done,” Mejias said. “You could walk into my building right now.”

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