Freezing Tenants Sleep With Ovens On In Brooklyn Building

CLINTON HILL, NY — A Clinton Avenue apartment building has been without heat and hot water for almost three weeks, causing pipes to burst and leaving residents sleeping with the ovens on for warmth. Despite their pleas and complaints to the city, the landlord has given them no indication of when it would be fixed, they said.

Tenants of 174 Clinton Ave. held a rally in front of the building Sunday and announced they would be going on a rent strike until the heat, which has been out since Dec. 19 as the city faced the coldest temperatures it's had in decades, is fixed.

"We all had to vacate the premises," said Samantha Pinto, a teacher who moved into the building in the summer. "It was uninhabitable."

Building workers told tenants the issue was caused by problems with the boiler and they were just waiting on a part to fix it. However, after weeks, residents said the landlord's representatives stopped responding to emails and phone calls about when the heat would kick back on.

"The landlord has disappeared on us," said Morgan Gruer, a freelance graphic designer and animator who has lived in the building for nearly two years. "We've just been left in the dark."

The lack of hot water flowing through the pipes caused three of them to burst inside the building, tenants said. Two of them flooded Gruer's entire ground-floor apartment's living room — destroying her furniture, carpet and books — and left a hole in her roof. The other pipe sent water in bedrooms for every apartment, ruining residents' mattresses, they said.

"There’s damage to books and journals and clothing and anything that was around," said Pinto.

Most of the tenants eventually left the building and have been sleeping elsewhere, but Dr. Robin Helburn and her 90-year-old mother who've lived there for about 7 years stayed, bundling up and sleeping with the oven for warmth.

"I've been very fearful about leaving the house," said Helburn, a chemistry professor. "I was terrified that I might burn the house down."

The landlord, Stuart Venner, and his assistant did not respond to requests for comment from Patch.

The heat was first cut off in the building on Dec. 19 and the problem eventually killed the hot water too, tenants said.

Pinto tried to hold out inside, sleeping with three space heaters, but went to stay with her parents in New Jersey after Christmas when the inside of her apartment was below freezing and a bottle of olive oil in her kitchen froze.

"I made the decision I have to go to work, I have to make sure I’m taking care of myself," she said.

Helburn and her mother stuck it out, leaving the oven on all-day for warmth, sleeping in front of space heaters and buying jugs of water to flush the toilet.

"I feel like I’m homesteading," she said. "This is not the 1800 where we’ll colonizing wilderness yet that’s what it seems like we’re doing.

"When you’re paying over $3,000 a month it's not unreasonable to ask to keep the hot water and the heat going smoothly," she added.

Real-estate mogul Venner, who owns several properties around the borough, bought the building for nearly $3 million in 2013 and refinanced it for nearly $4 million days before the heat went out, according to Department of Finance records.

He made headlines in 2015 when his wife sued him for leasing a Philadelphia rowhouse to his mistress for $1 a month, but his wife dropped the suit shortly after, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Venner also faced criticism in 2013 when he sent eviction notices to nearly six mom-and-pop businesses in Prospect Heights, the New York Daily News reported.

The 174 Clinton Ave. building's boiler has long been a problem and it's left residents without hot water for days off-and-on since 2016, Gruer said. Maintenance workers told them it was completely replaced in November, but it was improperly installed and caused a gas leak, tenants said.

Residents have made nearly 50 complaints about lack of heat, hot water and other issues to the city since Dec. 19 and the House Preservation Department has 13 open violations for it, city records show. Department of Buildings inspectors visited the building on Monday and issued a violation to the owner, a spokesman for the agency said.

"The City of New York is supposed to take responsibility in times like this," said Gruer. "The city has completely failed in this."

Pinto partnered with the Crown Heights Tenants Union to organize the rent strike and said she has been in contact with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to try and get the repairs made.

Image: Anne Pruden