Inwood Tenants Sue Landlord To Stop Displacement

INWOOD, NY — Inwood tenants and housing activists marched down the neighborhood's streets Tuesday night with a message for their landlord: "Enough is enough."

Tenants leaders at 252 Sherman Ave., a typical Inwood apartment building with a high concentration of rent-stabilized apartments, said Tuesday that efforts to displace long-term tenants have been ramped up in the years since Lewis Barbanel of Barberry Rose Management bought their building.

Emmanuel Antigua, who has lived in the building for 10 years, said that in 2018 the landlord claimed two Major Capital Improvements at the building in order to drive rents up more than $500 per month for some units, but that tenants only saw a deteriorating quality of life in the building.

"The new boiler that we are paying for did not keep my neighbors and I warm this winter. The new roof we are paying for did not keep the water out of our apartments," Antigua said during Tuesday night's rally.

Another tenant leader, Sarah McDaniel Dyer, said that the practice is typical at buildings owned by Barberry Rose Management. Repairs for the homes of long-term residents are neglected in favor of unnecessary projects such as replacing apartment front doors or tile floors in the lobbies. Dyer said she noticed the change shortly after Barbanel bought their building in 2016.

"Shortly after he moved in he started doing MCI repairs, and then we started not getting heat or hot water for the first time," Dyer said.

In addition to using legal measures such as MCIs to drive up rents, Barberry Rose has also engaged in tenant harassment, Dyer said. The tenant leader said her "heart broke" when an elderly neighbor asked her to help him pack up his apartment because he was being evicted because he couldn't pay added fees on his monthly rent bill, but later found that the charges were illegal. Dyer said that tenants are often faced with inflated bills and frivolous lawsuits and that one tenant leader had even been physically threatened by a building super.

Tenant leaders at 252 Sherman Ave. and housing advocates with the Met Council on Housing said that the situation is similar at all of Barberry Rose Management's buildings in Inwood and Washington Heights. Housing advocates estimate that the landlord owns as many as 33 buildings in the neighborhoods with more than 1,000 apartments and tied his investment in the neighborhood to the city's controversial rezoning of Inwood.

"[Barbanel] and his ilk say they were investments made in good faith — sorry I get really worked up about this — they would not know what good faith means if it were dropped on their head and exploded like a watermelon. They have been speculating in Inwood and Washington Heights since Mayor de Blasio began his rezoning process, we were here last year at the exact same time in the summer heat fighting that rezoning," Graham Ciraulo of the Met Council said Tuesday.

State Senator Robert Jackson and State Assemblymember Carmen De La Rosa also spoke Tuesday night in support of tenants in Barberry Rose buildings and urged them to continue fighting against the landlord. The lawmakers touted recently-passed rent laws and described the new laws as some of the most pro-tenant ever passed in the state. The new laws place more restrictive caps on rent increases a landlord is allowed to claim after doing renovations and makes the increases expire after 30 years.

Read more about the new rent law here.

Following Tuesday night's rally in front of 252 Sherman Ave., tenants from Barberry Rose buildings marched down the avenue — stopping at Barberry Rose buildings on the way — to the landlord's office and delivered a list of demands. The tenants' association at 252 is planning to sue Barberry Rose with the aid of Manhattan Legal Services.