At 1422 Greene Avenue, tenants are paying the building’s gas bill. Earlier this year, residents at 1335 Hancock Street went five months without hot water. The lock at 1339 Hancock is broken, and a metal bar holds the door open.
These Bushwick buildings have one trait in common: their landlord, Aron Stark.
In a rarity for negligent landlords, Stark spent eight days in Rikers Island in 2023 after failing to respond to the court about repairs ordered to 1422 Greene. But more than two years later, Stark hasn’t cleaned up his act. Tenants say Stark has abandoned several of his properties, and many continue to rack up housing code violations, city fines and property tax bills.
The city put some Stark buildings into a program that lets regulators make repairs and then bill the owner, but even that hasn’t had much effect on the situation, or the landlord’s operations.
Since the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act’s passage, falling property values and rising costs have surpassed income at many buildings, making major repairs financially untenable. In cases like Stark’s, it can be cheaper to abandon a building than fix it.
The conundrum shows off the difficulty of city enforcement in a rent-stabilized market under strain. If the city does its own repairs and sends the wayward landlord the bill, that’s just the cost of doing business. (That is if a landlord pays the fines; Stark, who did not reply to requests for comment, has not paid program fees in several years, according to records from the city’s Department of Finance.) Even the worst the city has to offer, jail, didn’t lead to reform. Meanwhile, tenants get stuck with hazardous conditions, as both the landlord and the city fall short.
Bugs and broken boilers
The saga at 1422 Greene began in 2013, when Stark tried to evict a rent-stabilized tenant. But after investigators found he had committed food stamp and Medicaid fraud, the case unraveled and Stark served a 14-month prison sentence. In 2020, while he was in prison, tenants carried out a rent strike over neglected repairs. The following year, the city’s Alternative Enforcement Program took over, which meant more inspections, fees and sometimes the ability to make repairs at the landlord’s expense.
Stark’s 2023 stint in jail still led to no reform. “He’s not doing any work,” Michael Grinthal, a lawyer who represents the Greene Avenue tenants, said. When anything gets fixed, it’s almost always by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, he said.
The property, a three-story building with white clapboard siding and 12 tenants, now has 79 open violations, of which 32 are deemed immediately hazardous. Stark also owes the city more than $140,000 in property tax and charges for emergency work, which included repairing the front door and replacing the boiler. Tenants say they still had to pay about $10,000 to keep gas running themselves.
“We essentially run the building on our own,” a representative for the 1422 Greene Avenue Tenants Association said. “Any issues that come up, we deal with with our own funds or through working with the city. They’re a mile wide and an inch deep, not well-funded enough to actually deliver on their missions.”
“The safety of New Yorkers is always our top priority, and through the Alternative Enforcement Program, HPD is able to conduct frequent inspections, work directly with tenants, issue violations, and, in some cases, carry out emergency repairs to quickly restore safe, stable living conditions,” a spokesperson emailed.
Stark’s other properties have similar problems. Three buildings on Hancock Street looked in disrepair during a recent visit. Tenants at 1335 Hancock say that Stark has abdicated. “We clean, we sweep, we take out the garbage,” said a current tenant. “We do everything.” The building has 77 open violations, including roach infestations, inadequate hot water and broken radiators, even though it too is in the city’s Alternative Enforcement Program.
Before Stark stopped showing up, a tenant said that he would often barge into their apartment and take bottles of water from the refrigerator. The entryway is plastered with HPD notices of violation and unopened letters to Stark.
Next door at 1339 Hancock, where the city now also oversees repairs, one tenant runs electricity into his apartment with an extension cord plugged into the hallway. A Con Edison notice warns service could be cut off because the landlord hasn’t paid his bills. The front door hangs broken, and tenants have installed their own cameras for safety. The building has 138 open violations, 46 immediately hazardous. Across the street at 1336 Hancock, there are 139 more violations. (These are figures from mid-September, but violation count can fluctuate.)
The number of violations in Stark’s buildings outstrips that of comparable buildings. Rent-stabilized units typically have about one or two deficiencies; even NYCHA units, long derided as some of the worst housing in New York, average 2.4. Stark’s Bushwick buildings average 5.6 immediately hazardous violations or 18 overall violations per unit.
No easy fix
In cases like Stark’s, where an owner refuses to cooperate or pay bills, the city’s enforcement program can fall short too. “[The Alternative Enforcement Program] is about getting the landlord to clear violations, not about being a landlord,” Grinthal, the tenant lawyer, said.
The housing department said it does try to stay involved when it is needed: “We will continue to monitor these buildings closely and use every tool available to hold the owner accountable as we work to ensure that every New Yorker has a safe, affordable place to call home,” a spokesperson for HPD wrote.
The broader financial pressures of rent stabilization can help explain why some landlords abandon repairs. Because the 2019 law limited rent increases, many owners say they no longer earn enough to cover upkeep. Stark may be an extreme case, but he may not be as far from the average as first appears.
“It’s financial suicide to keep fixing things,” Shaun Riney, a multifamily broker at Marcus & Millichap, said about rent-stabilized operations. “There’s no hope.”
“If someone was forcing you to show up to work every day, and not only were you not getting paid anything, but you were losing money by showing up to work every day, eventually you just lose your mind and you give up,” Riney added.
To be sure, even among rent-stabilized landlords, most have no more than a quarter of the violations that Stark does.
And, the Alternative Enforcement Program can work: More than half of the 2,630 buildings discharged from the program since its inception in 2007 were brought into compliance before the city had to issue a correction order, the HPD spokesperson said, adding that eligible owners whose buildings are in the enforcement program can apply for low-interest loans for moderate to major renovations.
But Stark’s buildings illustrate how little difference any regulation can make when a landlord refuses to cooperate. Buildings belonging to Daniel Ohebshalom, one of the only other landlords in the city to be jailed for failing to make repairs, are also in the program, but a legal representative for Ohebshalom’s tenants said that there was no marked difference on the ground before and after the buildings entered the city’s purview.
“If you asked the tenants today, they would say, ‘We have no idea what it means to be in the AEP program,’” said Rebecca Whedon, a lawyer in the Tenants Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC who represents Ohebshalom’s tenants. “‘We don’t see any difference. We still feel abandoned by the city and the landlord.’”
Because buildings like Stark’s have lost so much of their value since 2019, it’s almost impossible to sell them. For a distressed property, especially one in the city-run enforcement program, to be sold, the price would need to be a fraction of what the owner originally paid, and “it has to go through this long and painful ride of foreclosures and tax liens,” Riney said.
Last resort
New York City has one last weapon against negligent landlords: the tax lien sale.
Properties with lots of tax owed or unpaid bills can end up on a lien sale list. If that happens, a private trust takes on the debt and charges the owner high interest. Then, if the owner doesn’t pay, the trust forecloses and takes control of the property.
Usually, the threat of a tax lien sale motivates a landlord to make repairs or pay up. If the building has a traditional bank mortgage, its lender is also paying attention because unpaid liens can wipe out the bank’s collateral.
But Stark doesn’t have a conventional lender.
Property records for all four buildings show that in 2019, the mortgages were sold to 189 Hart LLC, which lists its address as 156 Adar Court.
The LLC that owns the Hancock Street apartments has an address of 152 Adar Court, according to records of the 2007 purchase by 1335 Hancock St LLC, of which Stark is the managing member.
But both addresses appear to refer to the same building, a seven-bedroom house in Monsey, New York, according to Zillow. It is currently owned by Rgp Equities LLC, which bought it for $10 in 2014 from “Stark Ignat M.” During his fraud case, Aron said the house was owned by a relative that he has never met.
Whatever the exact relationship of Stark to his lender on these four mortgages, without a bank the usual leverage of a lien sale is weaker, with less financial pressure pushing him to make repairs or pay off debts.
In this case, neither owner nor lender appeared to care much about holding on to the buildings, and tax liens for all three Hancock properties were sold in June, though tenants worry a new owner might not improve conditions. At the Greene Avenue property, tenants successfully fought to keep their building off the tax lien sale list, fearing another slumlord.
The only other real method of enforcement in cases like Stark’s is litigation. The city sued Stark, and won, in the Greene Avenue building case — but enforcing the judgment is a different ballgame. Residents are still trying to receive the damages they’re owed.
Tenants “don’t really see a ton of value in going back to court because they already did that and they won and it didn’t bring about justice,” said Grinthal, the tenant lawyer. “Right now I think we’re all trying to figure out what direction to go.”
At Greene Avenue, the group of residents is hoping to form a co-op to take over ownership of the building. This is at a standstill since they say Stark won’t show up to negotiate a sale. “It’s hard to negotiate legally and financially when someone’s not there,” said the representative. “He’s not shown up to a single hearing or a single milestone in the last five years.”
While Stark has been absent at his Bushwick properties, he hasn’t fallen off the map completely and doesn’t seem deterred from the real estate business. Property records show that in 2024, he purchased a multi-family building in Harlem for $6.8 million (which currently has 97 open violations).
“You would think that someone who is so egregious would face some sort of accountability, but he’s essentially living his life normally,” the tenant association rep said.
