The Buildings Department slapped new violations on the owners of the building where three tenants died in a fire last week after inspectors found padlocks on doors leading to rooms with fire escape exits, records show.

Inspectors also alleged that a rear courtyard where the fire escape leads to was obstructed by debris, blocking access to the street.

“This poses a safety risk to tenants,” according to a violation served on owners Jack Bick and SB Dyckman LLC on May 7, three days after a fire allegedly caused by a dropped cigarette ripped through the six-story tenement at 207 Dyckman St., killing three tenants and leaving five others in critical condition.

Inspectors also discovered the basement of the aging tenement had been illegally subdivided into what they described as four single-room occupancy flats.

The danger of a blocked fire escape was made clear by the May 4 fire, which prosecutors say started with a flicked cigarette in the lobby that soon ignited and raced up the stairwell to the bulkhead leading to the roof. 

Escape by the stairwell was impossible, forcing tenants to instead seek a way out via the fire escape. Three tenants, including a fashion journalist for People magazine and her mother, perished in the blaze. Five other tenants were critically injured.

The Buildings Department served the owners with three violations, including one that alleged they “observed throughout different apartments second means of egress was obstructed.” That included discovering padlocks “on the doors leading to some of the rooms leading to the fire escape in apartments #21 and #33.”

An attorney for Bick did not return THE CITY’s call Wednesday.

Homicide Charges

On Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Victor Arias, 29, a tenant in the building, with criminally negligent homicide. Prosecutors allege Arias returned home shortly after midnight on May 4th and sat down on a window sill in the lobby to smoke a cigarette. Law enforcement officials say he tossed his cigarette into a cardboard box and went upstairs to his apartment to go to bed.

The boxes soon ignited and the fire then jumped to the stairway. When firefighters arrived they found several tenants scrambling on to the fire escape fleeing the blaze.

THE CITY reported Sunday that the city Department of Housing Preservation & Development has sued the landlords of the Dyckman Street building 16 times over serious violations at 10 buildings they own across the city. The owners have also racked up more than 1,300 housing code violations, including citations for non-functioning self-closing doors.
Fire Department officials said apartments in the Dyckman Street building where the entry doors were closed suffered little damage. Eight units where the doors were left open were gutted.

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Demolition might conjure images of bulldozers, sledgehammers and wrecking balls slamming into structures that crumble dramatically. 

But in New York’s Good Cause Eviction Law, the definition of “demolish” is not straightforward. What does it mean to demolish a home? And can a landlord demolish just an apartment, or an entire building?

Those are questions looming over tenants whose landlords opted not to renew their leases by citing an intent to demolish. It’s one of the few reasons a landlord can evict rent-paying tenants in unregulated apartments under the 2024 law, which caps rent increases and requires landlords to offer most tenants renewal leases.

“We don’t know what demolition of an apartment means,” said Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society who worked on the law. “It’s a live question.”

For several tenants in New York City, the right to remain in their homes hinges on the answers — like for roommates Feryal Nawaz, Carla Orlandi and Parisa, whose landlord refused to renew the lease for their East Village apartment, citing a plan to demolish it.

The roommates, all 27 years old, were excited to stay in their three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment. They’d become close, hosting movie nights and decorating for each other’s birthdays. Their home became a central gathering place for friends; they kept deflated air mattresses in a corner of the living room for guests staying over.

Over many previous months, the roommates had rebuffed their landlord’s offers of several thousand dollars to leave early. But then the landlord officially said they had to leave when their lease is up at the end of June. Facing the uncertainty of the Good Cause Eviction Law, the roommates have been reaching out to tenant hotlines, lawyers and their local representatives to seek insight before they make plans to either move out, or head to court.

“There’s so many loopholes in these laws,” said Parisa, who declined to share her last name. “If it’s really meant to protect us, you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer. You shouldn’t have to go to court and fight and hope and pray.”

The roommates said they’d make a decision about next steps by the beginning of June.

“As May still plays out, I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” Nawaz said. “I want to make sure that we put up a fight regardless, even if we do end up leaving.”

David Hazout, an agent of the LLC that owns the roommates’ apartment building, declined to comment. A lawyer representing the LLC had sent the roommates renovation plans that show the kitchen and one of the bathrooms would be relocated within the unit. Permits filed with the Department of Buildings in March show plans to renovate 10 apartments in the building, records show.

But does a renovation count as a demolition? And what is the definition of a “housing accommodation”? That’s the opaque term the Good Cause law uses to refer to where tenants live. 

Shafeeqa Kolia, a spokesperson for Sen. Julia Salazar, sponsor of the Good Cause law, said the provision was intended to refer to the demolition of a whole building. Kolia said the Senator’s team would look into drafting legislation to clarify the definition of “demolish” in the law.

Absent a legislative update, those key questions must be answered in court.

Defining Demolition

Already, there are at least two cases in Housing Court that are grappling with what “demolition” really means.

One case concerns some tenants of two apartments in an East Village building, just three blocks north of Fawaz, Orlandi and Parisa. In March 2024, those other tenants got notice from their landlord that their leases would not be renewed. In that notice, the landlord indicated the “housing accommodation” would be demolished; in later court documents, the owner said they would renovate the apartments. 

The tenants’ lawyer, who declined to comment for this story, cited the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of demolish in court documents: “pull or knock down (a building)”… “to tear down,” “to destroy,” “to flatten,” “to raze” and “wipe off the face of the earth.”

The lawyer argued a single apartment cannot be demolished, and that a demolition is not the same thing as a renovation.

Tracy Ferdinand, the judge presiding over the case said that an individual apartment — not an entire building — could be considered a “housing accommodation,” but left open whether a renovation counts as a demolition.

The landlord submitted architecture reports and cost estimates for the renovations. But the judge, too, resorted to a dictionary definition of demolish — this time, from Merriam-Webster — to cast doubt on whether those documents established plans to demolish the apartments, and ultimately said they failed to do so.

The case will go to trial. But whatever the court decides, it likely won’t affect other tenants fighting similar evictions. Legal precedent can only be set through appeals courts.

That means another case in Housing Court may end up with a totally different outcome compared to what happens in the East Village tenants’ case. The second case concerns the tenants of five apartments in an Upper West Side building, whose landlord would not renew leases because of demolition plans. (The tenants declined to comment for this story.)

The building is a Renaissance Revival-style townhouse in a historic district, and the lawyer representing the tenants, James Fishman, pointed out demolition would require the approval of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. He, too, argued that demolition was not the same as renovation, and that a single apartment in a building could not be demolished.

“I think the whole point of the statute is to protect tenants in their apartments, and this is kind of a loophole,” Fishman said.

Neither the landlord nor the attorney representing the landlord in the Upper West Side case responded to requests for comment.

Worth the Fight?

While “demolish” stays undefined as it relates to the Good Cause law, risks remain for tenants who want to try to stay in their apartments while a landlord is claiming demolition.

“You have to decide whether it’s worth fighting when we don’t know for certain how the statute is going to be interpreted,” said Davidson, the Legal Aid lawyer. She said she’d ask the landlord for records of permits and architectural plans for any proposed demolition.

Sherwin Belkin, an attorney who represents landlords, said he would tell any clients who would want to evict tenants under Good Cause that they’d need to pursue at least a gut renovation.

“You’re leaving the four walls of the apartment and maybe some of the partitions, but I wouldn’t leave in much more. The more you leave, the more there’s issues about whether or not you’re demolishing,” Belkin said. “Your best case is to create a blank box.”

Housing lawyers do not expect courts to come to a final determination on what “demolish” means for at least a year as cases and appeals proceed.

In the meantime, tenants like Nawaz, Orlandi and Parisa are left to navigate uncharted waters.

“It does suck being the guinea pig, but I’m not entirely mad about it,” Nawaz said. “I do think this is probably happening to a lot of people out there … It’s not just about us.”

The roommates suspect the landlord will renovate the apartment — as has been done with other units in the building — and increase the rent. They’re already paying about $6,200 for their apartment. 

They’re also worried about the prospect of finding a new place. Nawaz and Orlandi have been in the apartment for almost three years, the longest they’ve lived in a place since college, they said. Parisa moved in last year after coming from Atlanta and not knowing anyone in New York, but made fast friends with the two others.

Above all, the three roommates are frustrated about the ambiguity in the Good Cause Eviction Law.

“This was supposed to be put in place to help out the tenants,” Orlandi said. “But they made the lines so blurred and all the words so vague that no one knows — not even lawyers, not even ChatGPT — no one knows what that even means.”

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Three days before a fatal fire May 4th at 207 Dyckman St. in Inwood, housing inspectors appeared at the six-story walkup and issued a dozen code violations.

One of those was for a non-functioning self-closing apartment entry door that was deemed “immediately hazardous.”

After the blaze was put out, firefighters discovered severe fire damage in eight apartments where entry doors had been left open. Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore made a point of noting that units where the doors were closed “had very little impact, no fire.”

The city’s housing code requires property owners to fix “immediately hazardous” violations — such as the self-closing door at Dyckman Street — within 24 hours.

But, according to city records and sworn statements, the building’s owners have a track record of letting dangerous conditions linger. 

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development has issued more than a thousand violations over the last few years to the landlords of the Dyckman Street building at properties they own across New York, an investigation by THE CITY has found.

The problems are so bad that HPD has been forced to file suit 16 times since 2020 alleging a persistent failure to address serious health and safety issues at 10 properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens controlled by co-owners of the Dyckman St. property, Jack Bick, Chaim Schweid and their affiliated real estate companies, records show.

Bick ranks 80th on Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ list of the city’s 100 worst landlords.

“I have heard complaints that they don’t respond,” said a 22-year-old tenant of one of Janjan’s Manhattan buildings. “Like, they take years to, like, fix a problem.” 

As of last week those 10 buildings had racked up a total of 1,343 open housing code violations, including 406 listed as “immediately hazardous.”

On April 27, HPD sued Bick, Schweid and their firms Janjan Realty and SB Dyckman LLC over serious code violations at 209 Dyckman St. — the building next door to the fire site. That included citations for two fire safety issues: a blocked egress and a missing smoke detector.

As of last week both Dyckman Street buildings had a combined total of 336 open violations, 100 of them “immediately hazardous.”

A ‘Top Priority’ for Mamdani

At the time of the fire, 207 Dyckman St. had been placed in HPD’s “alternate enforcement program,” which targets landlords who accumulate an alarming number of serious violations within a year. Property owners in the AEP program are then subject to random inspections to clean up past outstanding violations. At 207 Dyckman, HPD and Janjan had resolved 85 past citations as of Thursday.

HPD told THE CITY it “will use every tool in its toolbox to ensure tenants are safe and landlords meet their obligations.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani “has been clear that enforcing housing quality is a top priority for this administration, and we will continue to take action against unsafe conditions and bad landlords whenever and wherever they exist,” the agency said in a statement.  

The lawsuits HPD has filed against Bick, Schweid and their firms highlight a persistent failure to address serious code violations at specific buildings. Over the last year, HPD had to sue Bick three times over violations at one of his buildings on Bessemund Avenue in Far Rockaway, then another three times over a building he controls a few blocks away on Hartman Lane.

Both locations included violations for non-working self-closing doors.

‘Unsafe Conditions’

At another Bick-owned Far Rockaway building on Bay 30th Street, HPD last month filed suit accusing the landlord of deliberately “neglecting those unsafe conditions as part of an intentional and aggressive campaign to harass and displace rent stabilized tenants.” They allege at one point a tenant without a lawyer was offered $100 to vacate their apartment.

Schweid controls four properties sued by HPD over the last few years, including a 49-unit rental building on Ocean Parkway in Kensington, Brooklyn.

In the last two years housing inspectors have fielded dozens of complaints about unsafe conditions there, and HPD has at times been forced to bill Schweid for repairs city-hired vendors had to perform when the landlord failed to do so. 

As of this week the Ocean Parkway building had 91 open violations, 30 of them “immediately hazardous.” Since December the building has been cited five times for non-functioning self-closing doors.

A lawyer for Bick did not return THE CITY’s calls seeking comment, and a message left at a number listed for Janjan Realty was not returned. A lawyer for Schweid did not return a call or an email from THE CITY.

On Thursday, fire department officials cited the Dyckman Street fire at a press conference touting a recent public service announcement they released following an April fire at a building on East 187th Street in The Bronx that resulted in two deaths. Officials said firefighters entering that building found many apartment entry doors had been left wide open.

First Deputy Fire Commissioner Dan Flynn advised New Yorkers to always close their doors and leave them closed when fleeing the scene of a fire.

Open doors create a chimney effect that spreads fire, smoke and flames — a factor that was in play during the May 4 Dyckman Street conflagration that killed three tenants, including People magazine journalist Yolaine Diaz and her mother, Ana Mirtha Lantigua.

“This year we’ve had many fatalities that have resulted from residents opening doors or leaving doors open,” Flynn said. “Closed doors will limit the spread of that fire, limit the spread of toxic gases and smoke.”

Flynn cited two examples in The Bronx where open doors contributed to the rapid spread of fatal fires — a December 2017 blaze on Prospect Avenue that caused 13 deaths, and a January 2022 fire in the Twin Parks building that killed 17.

“If not for an open door, I am confident that nobody would have died in either one of those fires,” he said.

Contributing: Lilly Sabella

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In its first vote under a new mayor, the Rent Guidelines Board left the door open for a rent increase despite Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise of a price freeze for a million rent-stabilized tenants in New York.

The board approved a range of possible rent levels in its preliminary vote: 0 to 2% for one-year leases and between 0 to 4% for two-year leases.

The nine-member Rent Guidelines Board — six of which had been appointed by the new mayor earlier this year — settled on those figures during a rowdy hearing at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City on Thursday evening.

The vote was nonbinding. The board must by law take a final vote by the end of June.

Tenant groups and labor organizations that filled the auditorium loudly booed and demanded that the members roll back the preliminary vote that passed after all motions for a rent freeze failed. 

They rallied before the vote took place outside the college, holding “Freeze the Rent” signs and demanding a halt on price increases for stabilized tenants.

Mamdani made a promised rent freeze a signature part of his campaign. The members of the board are charged to act independently from City Hall, but the rent freeze commitment looms over their vote.

Tenant-aligned board members attempted to pass a range that would have either rolled back rent or frozen it, with a proposed rent level of -3 to 0% on one-year leases and -4.5 to 0% on two-year leases. That measure failed. Afterwards, members aligned with landlords floated higher ranges: a 3 to 5.5% increase on one-year leases and 6 to 8% on two-year leases. That idea also failed to pass.

“I was very disappointed to hear the possibility that rent will still go up, particularly since we were promised a freeze,” said Douglas Ostling, 78, of Flushing, after the hearing. “I’ve lived in the city all my life. I love it, but I’m being priced out of it, and if something doesn’t change quickly, I’m going to have to move.”

In the coming weeks, the RGB will host five sessions to hear testimony from the public on the proposed rent increases before taking a final vote on June 25.

In a statement delivered after tonight’s preliminary vote, the mayor encouraged New Yorkers’ to participate in the upcoming sessions.

“New Yorkers are being crushed by the cost of living, and they need real relief,” the mayor said. “As the RGB begins its public hearings, tenants, owners and New Yorkers from every borough should make their voices heard and speak directly to what this housing crisis looks like in their lives.” 

“I’m confident the board will weigh those perspectives carefully and arrive at a decision later this summer that reflects the urgency of this moment,” he continued.

In considering how much to jack up rent, the law requires the board members to take into account data on tenant and landlord finances.

According to reports prepared by board staff, landlord income was up 6% in 2024, the latest year for which it was studied, but varied widely based on the location and age of the building stock. At the same time, landlords’ costs outpaced inflation between 2025 and 2026.

On the tenants’ side, RGB research showed the median renter income grew by just 1.8% adjusted for inflation. Renters in all boroughs except The Bronx saw their incomes increase. More than half of renter households paid more than a third of their income in rent — placing them into a category known by housing experts as “rent-burdened.” 

Historically, landlords have said that hikes approved by the RGB are not high enough to cover the expenses of maintaining their buildings, while tenants said they’re financially squeezed and can’t afford to pay more.

That played out last year, when the board voted on rent increases of 3% for one-year leases and 4.5% for two-year leases, after previously weighing hikes between 1.75% and 4.75% for one-year leases and 3.75% and 7.75% for two-year leases.

“We’ve been here every year, but this year feels different,” said Kit Klee, an organizer with the tenant group CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria and appeared hopeful for a rent freeze before the vote took place.

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They’ve popped up all across the city, scores of new building plans by different companies in very different neighborhoods, with one thing in common: They all have exactly 99 apartments.

In the past two years, developers have filed permits for more than 150 residential buildings with that precise number of units, per city data.

Why? Because at that size, savvy builders looking to take a major tax break for residential developments can avoid paying a higher minimum wage to construction workers — while minimizing the number of affordable apartments they must include.

“It feels very counter to the overall goal of what we’re trying to achieve here, which is that we’re trying to build more housing,” said Justin Pelsinger of the development firm Charney Companies, which is not working on any 99-unit projects.

Just 1% of proposed developments that have registered to use the tax break have 100 units or more, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). Several proposed 99-unit buildings are clustered on the same lots and share a common facade so that they appear to be a single, larger building.

For labor leaders, the trend is a big problem. Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, described the practice as “a scam,” and said he raised the issue earlier this year with city officials in an attempt to close the loophole. 

“The sad part of it is, who suffers? The people suffer because they’re building less affordable units,” LaBarbera said.

But developers say their approach is just a reasonable, if creative, solution to make their budget math work under the constraints of the relatively new tax exemption program: 485-x. It came into effect in 2024 to replace another tax break program that helped spur the majority of new residential construction in New York City between 2010 and 2020.

The program is meant to create new housing developments with a combination of market-rate and affordable apartments — that is, units with rents determined by the income level of the tenant — using only private dollars, without government funds.

That program, 485-x, requires developers of buildings with at least 100 apartments to pay construction workers a minimum hourly wage of $40.

If a project has less than 100 apartments, only 20% of its units must be income-restricted, or “affordable,” and permanently rent-stabilized. No wage minimums apply.

The proportion of affordable apartments goes up the more units a 485-x building has. For buildings with 100 to 149 apartments, 25% of the total must be rent-stabilized and affordable for a family of four making about $129,600.

For buildings with at least 150 apartments in certain areas of the city — including Lower Manhattan and parts of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront — a quarter of the apartments must be permanently rent-stabilized and affordable for families of four making about $97,200. There are also higher wage requirements. 

Developers, architects and consultants say the requirements for minimum wages and affordability levels, taken together, increase costs and limit incomes of the development projects. They’re finding ways to work around them in order to build much-needed housing.

“For a bigger building at the edge of 99, you can goose the unit count down by combining the units,” said John Woelfling, partner at Dattner Architects. “So you’re not providing more housing, you’re just providing bigger units.”

Elie Pariente, principal at EMP Capital Group, said his company plans to construct several projects with 99 apartments each, some with multiple 99-unit buildings on the same lot, though he didn’t specify where. He said if his developments were any larger, and thus subject to the 485-x requirements, he wouldn’t be able to lean on his longstanding relationships with certain contractors.

“A lot of the trades that we normally use wouldn’t work,” he said. “If we were to go for more than 99 units, we would have to hire brand-new trades and brand-new contractors that we’ve never worked with before.”

Of the 299 proposed developments that have registered to use the tax break, about 10% of them contain exactly 99 apartments, according to data from HPD. 

Between April 2024 and 2026, developers have filed permits for more than 120 additional buildings with exactly 99 apartments, but those do not appear in HPD’s registration data, according to a review by THE CITY.  

This is a notable leap from the 13 buildings with 99 apartments that developers proposed between 2008 through 2023, a previous analysis by the Real Estate Board of New York found.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on building 200,000 affordable apartments over a decade, using union labor. The early results of the 485-x program — which was authorized by the state in 2024 — may raise questions about how feasible that goal is, but City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said officials are monitoring the program’s implementation.

“We will continue to work with our partners in Albany, labor, tenants and the City Council to build a more affordable city — including by both building new housing and ensuring that the people building it have good, safe, quality jobs,” he said in a statement. 

More Buildings, More Costs

Some of the developments Pariente is working on are single buildings with 99 apartments, such as one that will be located on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. Others, he said, will have multiple 99-unit buildings on the same lot.

“Different lots lend themselves to the 99-unit concept more than others,” he said. “The larger the lot, the more flexibility you have subdividing it.”

Such developments — say, three 99-unit buildings acting as one — have duplicative elements, which can add both up-front costs and be more expensive to maintain than a comparable individual building with 297 apartments in it.

“We’re now putting in added walls, added trash rooms, added stairs, added elevators, so we’re basically losing square footage that would have been available for units, and putting it into these new structural elements that are some of the most expensive and highest-carbon elements in a building,” said Toby Snyder, senior associate at FXCollaborative Architects, referring to energy-intensive materials and processes. 

Examples abound: On the Upper East Side, a building under construction appears as one tower, but is technically two, each with 99 apartments. In Highbridge, not far from Yankee Stadium, a developer planned twin buildings nestled together on one leafy street corner, with 99 apartments each.

In Boreum Hill, a developer filed permits for three buildings with 99 apartments each. In architectural drawings, the buildings appear seamlessly connected. One lot in Downtown Brooklyn will see five buildings with 99 units each.

But breaking apart a development into separate 99-unit segments on one lot meets its limit on small lots in dense areas. For instance, in Midtown and Long Island City — all neighborhoods recently rezoned for more housing — a lot that could accommodate a tower with several hundred apartments would likely be too small to split the building apart into several 99-unit buildings.

“If we’re not building those larger projects where the zoning and density allow for it, then we’re leaving units on the table, and we’re not really solving for our affordability or housing crisis,” said Basha Gerhards, executive vice president of public policy at REBNY.

Labor leaders are critical of the 99-unit playbook. 

“Of course the developer is going to say, ‘Oh, the numbers don’t work,’ because they’re trying to justify the scheme that they’re engaged in,” LaBarbera said. “They don’t want to pay fair wages. They want to profit, profit, profit.”

Kevin Elkins, political director of the carpenters’ union, said developers risk losing their tax breaks as they move forward with multiple, clustered buildings each containing 99 apartments.

“A lot of these buildings are sharing the same mortgage. They’re sharing the same amenities. They’re sharing the same tax lots. It’s so clear what’s going on,” Elkins said. “We will be providing, if necessary, evidence that this is one building, that workers weren’t paid the wages they were supposed to be paid.”

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine would ultimately be the enforcer of the prevailing wage portion of the tax exemption, though his office hasn’t received any related complaints.  

Exception to the Rule

There is one exception to the 99-apartment trend, based on city data. Developer TF Cornerstone will rely on the 485-x tax program and still go big, with 1,060 apartments planned across three buildings on the Greenpoint waterfront, and 278 apartments planned in Chelsea.

Jon McMillan, TF Cornerstone’s senior vice president and director of planning, said those developments are possible because the company has long been a union contractor, and by using its own money, it doesn’t have to rely on others for financing. But the process hasn’t been easy.

“This is very, very challenging for us. We want to move forward with these two projects but they don’t work for us nearly as well as projects we’ve done in the past, or as we’d like for projects to work,” McMillan said. “We’re doing these buildings at a lower rate of return than we normally do and than is sustainable, but we want to keep our organization busy.”

Still, there’s a chance more developers could use 485-x to construct larger apartment buildings in the future, like those finishing projects under a previous tax exemption program. And some are waiting on higher-level changes before moving forward, including the lowering of interest rates, costs of goods and materials and tariffs. 

“If we were in a lower interest rate environment and commodity pricing came down, and insurance pricing was not at record high, could we make something work with the $40 wage floor?” said Eli Weiss, principal at Joy Construction Corp, whose projects typically contain 150 to 175 apartments. “Absolutely.”

Additional reporting by Kennedy Sessions and Haidee Chu.

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The city’s main voucher program, CityFHEPS, has been a lifeline for many homeless New Yorkers who have secured permanent homes with the rental subsidy.

But a broad swath of people in New York’s shelters are not eligible, cutting them off from a key avenue out of homelessness, according to data from two major local shelter providers.

About two-thirds of the roughly 600 families and individuals in the seven shelters operated by Volunteers of America-Greater New York are ineligible for CityFHEPS, according to the nonprofit’s analysis. The majority of those households don’t qualify because they work either too much — putting them just over the income line — or too little.

The same pattern holds true for the services nonprofit Win, which runs 15 shelters that house about 5,200 people each night. About two-thirds of its clients are currently not eligible for CityFHEPS, according to a Win analysis.

Broadly, to qualify for the voucher, people in shelter must work at least 10 hours per week but earn no more than 200% of the federal poverty level. That comes to $31,920 for an individual or $66,000 for a family of four.

“People have to find a way to somehow meet a very narrow criteria to gain access to a voucher,” said Jeffrey Ginsburg, president of VOA-GNY. “At the simplest level, we have this idea that we want people to work, but we don’t want them to make too much money. On its face, you can say that sounds fair enough, but when you look at the details, it creates a narrow window and a very perverse set of incentives.”

Homeless advocates and city officials agree that CityFHEPS helps people in shelters move into permanent housing and stay housed. City data bears it out. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani is fighting a legal battle against implementing a package of laws City Council passed in 2023 that would expand eligibility for the vouchers. As a candidate, he promised to put the laws — which his predecessor Mayor Eric Adams did not implement —  into effect, but reversed himself once in office as he faced budget pressures. 

About 68,000 households rely on CityFHEPS vouchers, which allow New Yorkers to pay about a third of their income toward rent. Another 47,000 households could come to depend on the program if it’s expanded in line with the 2023 law, accounting to one estimate.

The homeless New Yorkers who qualify for theCityFHEPS voucher must thread a needle to be able to keep it — like Ali Austin, a 51-year-old grandfather who has been living in a Coney Island shelter operated by another provider for nearly four years.

Austin said he’d initially lost his home after the 2020 death of his mother. He’d been living with her in New Jersey, taking care of her while she battled cancer. 

When he moved to New York in 2022, he got a job working full time as a front desk agent for a supportive housing nonprofit. Because of that gig, he made too much money to qualify for CityFHEPS and hoped to get a different kind of rental assistance voucher. That never came through.

In August of last year, he secured a different job, working three days a week with a reentry program. Now he earns less, putting him “in the money frame that they say I need,” to get a CityFHEPS voucher, he said. But he doesn’t know how he’ll pay for all his other living expenses. 

“Once I move, I won’t be able to survive off just that and I’ll have to work more,” he said.

Austin this month got approved for a voucher and plans to move into a rooming house in Washington Heights, where he will have his own room but will share a kitchen and bathroom with others.

“I don’t like the idea of it because even in the shelter I have my own bathroom, but I gotta get out of there,” he said. “I’m at the point where I’m ready to accept whatever I can.”

The bills passed by the City Council in 2023 — now being challenged in court by the Mamdani administration, a continuation of the Adams-era approach — expanded the eligibility for vouchers, allowing the required income level to rise and making people facing eviction eligible, too, along with people already living in shelters. Under the law, people earning up to 50% of the federally-designated Area Median Income — about $56,700 for an individual and $81,000 for a family of four — would qualify.

If those new rules went into effect, the average eligibility rate in the seven shelters run by Volunteers of America would shoot up from about a third to about three-quarters. At Win, about a third of the clients currently not eligible for CityFHEPS would become eligible.

Austin said he would’ve qualified for the CityFHEPS voucher when he was working full time, if only the expanded program was in place.

“It’s frustrating and it’s unfair,” he said. “It would’ve been more money I could’ve brought in and saved. Just because I’m in a shelter didn’t mean I didn’t have family obligations.”

In particular, he said expenses sometimes crop up related to his grown children and grandchild.

As Mamdani faces a budget gap of over $5 billion, his administration has not only pushed back against the law expanding the program but floated scaling it back to save money.

In a statement, mayoral spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said, “Mayor Mamdani has been clear that CityFHEPS is an invaluable tool to prevent homelessness and support homeless New Yorkers. That is why our team is working hard to ensure that it is fiscally sound and sustainable for the long-term.”

The current program’s cost has ballooned from about $26 million in 2019 to over $1.8 billion this year. The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development projected the cost to grow to over $3 billion annually by 2030 — for a total cost of $12.6 billion between now and 2030. 

If the expanded program goes into effect, the annual cost would be over $4 billion by 2030, according to an Independent Budget Office analysis.

Still, homeless advocates have argued the city would save money overall if there were more New Yorkers housed, rather than in shelters. A shelter bed costs $4,600 per month for a single adult, compared to the standard monthly voucher payment of $2,646 for a studio, according to the city Department of Social Services.

Ginsburg pointed to the economic gains that are possible when households can work and afford to spend money.

“When we are more housed, we are more successful,” he said. “This is an issue we know the mayor cares about in making a more affordable city. Without the expanding of the voucher system, that will not happen.”

That’s true for Austin, who wants to get on his feet and start his own business by opening up a chain of video gaming lounges.

 “I’m trying to do something to make a legacy for my granddaughter,” he said.

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Jin Tao Wu has survived Japan’s invasion of China, the rise of the Communist Party and the massacres of the Cultural Revolution. 

Now, thousands of miles and many decades later, the 93-year-old sits in a beige-walled public housing apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, confronting what he sees as the biggest crisis of his life.

The New York City Housing Authority has told Wu that he and his 90-year-old wife, Qiong Zhong, who has dementia, must vacate their apartment in a seniors-only development as soon as possible, relocate another development for up to four years, and then move yet again into a new non-seniors-only building.

“I’m not going to move,” he said recently, speaking in Cantonese through an interpreter. “I’m 93. If you’re going to move to a general [public] housing, it’s not going to be good. It’s not going to be healthy. It’s not going to be safe. I feel I don’t have that many years left.”

Wu and his wife are among 24 households in NYCHA’s Chelsea Addition refusing the authority’s demand to relocate twice while their building is demolished and replaced. The authority insists the dual moves are necessary first steps in its grand plan to demolish 18 NYCHA buildings in Chelsea and replace them with 15 new towers. 

If all goes as planned, the new buildings will house the displaced residents of Chelsea Addition and the Fulton, Elliott and Chelsea Houses, and add another 2,500 market-rate apartments and 1,000 permanently affordable ones.

Under this $1.2 billion project, the mega-developer of the nearby Hudson Yards, The Related Companies, and their partners, Essence LLC, would handle demolition and construction. NYCHA would maintain ownership of the properties but turn over management of the buildings to their private sector partners.

The first phase of the plan, which requires the demolition of Chelsea Addition and one nearby building, was slated to start this spring. But the entire plan is on hold as one lawsuit contests the legality of all of it and another fights the eviction of the seniors who are resisting moving, including Wu and his wife.

‘There Was War’

For Wu and his wife, NYCHA’s proposed move is a traumatic prospect, after a long and momentous journey from the cities of China’s Guangdong province to the streets of Manhattan.

Wu was born in 1934. When he was still a child, the Japanese army invaded China, in a brutal occupation until their surrender to the Allied Forces in September 1945. During the conflict, Wu received just three years of intermittent elementary school education. 

“No middle school. No high school,” he said. “There was a war. We were fighting Japan.”

Four years after the war’s end, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power. When he was in his 30s, Mao unveiled the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge what he declared were capitalist influences compromising his vision. Across China, fighting between factions erupted, and in 1968, a series of massacres took place in Guangdong Province where Wu lived.

Wu declined to further discuss his years in China except to say, “I’m 93 years old. I’ve seen quite a few kings.” Asked if there were any he admired, he replied, “Not one of them.”

He married Qiong Zhong and the couple had one daughter, Li Ching Wu. All three emigrated to New York City, with Jin Tao Wu and his wife arriving when he was 60 in 1994. Soon he found a job cutting string in a Garment District factory.

Wu retired a few years later and the couple’s sole income became Social Security. They lived in Chinatown off Canal Street, which is where they resided on Sept. 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the resultant fallout blanketed the surrounding neighborhoods, including Chinatown, with toxic dust.

Later the couple signed up for NYCHA’s waiting list and snagged an apartment in the Taft Rehab Houses on W. 117th St. near Columbia University. This was Wu’s first experience with the Housing Authority’s general population developments — and it did not go well.

In the summer of 2021, Wu heard knocking at his door.

“I opened the door and they pushed their way in and robbed the place,” he recalled. “I called 911. The police couldn’t catch him. They asked if we were scared. Of course we were scared.”

He says his neighbor knew the robbers and wouldn’t cooperate with police. Because of that, he says, NYCHA granted their request to transfer to an all-seniors development. In August that year, they moved into a cozy one-bedroom in Chelsea Addition.

The building sits across from athletic fields where children from a nearby public school fill the air with their voices during recess on school days. The street is otherwise quiet, as their fellow tenants are all over 60 and there’s a security guard assigned to patrol the building and the surrounding area seven days a week. Many of Wu’s neighbors are, like him, immigrants from China who speak little English.

“It is better here. It is peaceful. No harassment,” he said.

It is also where he and his wife expected to spend their final days. They live off of a combined Social Security income just short of $1,500 a month while paying NYCHA around $450 in rent — the required 30% of income all public housing tenants pay.

Their circumstances do not allow them to venture far from their apartment.

Wu’s wife, suffering from dementia, has on occasion become lost in the neighborhood. Wu presents a five-page document listing 44 medications that he must take for a daunting conflagration of medical conditions that includes heart disease, kidney disease, asthma (related to his exposure to 9/11 toxic dust) and diabetes. He relies on a walker. 

The couple’s daily regimen is overseen by home-health aides who monitor them 24 hours a day, seven days a week in shifts. They occasionally go out to nearby restaurants but must rely on the publicly subsidized and often unreliable Access A Ride. 

“If we don’t have transportation, we don’t go,” he said.

NYCHA v. Wu

Last summer Housing Opportunities Unlimited, a non-profit hired by the developers overseeing the NYCHA project, began knocking on doors of Chelsea Addition residents, slipping notices under doors and calling them, advising that they needed to immediately sign an agreement to relocate to a nearby general population NYCHA development.

“I got lots of notices,” Wu said. “They came and knocked on the door. They called. They were always calling.”

The non-profit showed Wu an apartment in the nearby non-senior-exclusive Chelsea Houses, but he said the bathroom was only accessible through the sole bedroom, an arrangement the home health aides would not accept, he said. He declined to sign NYCHA’s relocation documents, mentioning the robbery that took place in the general population NYCHA development on W. 117th ST.

In October, NYCHA filed suit against Wu, claiming that he had violated the terms of the lease by refusing to consent to relocation.

Their daughter, Li Ching Wu, who is raising a family in Queens and works long hours at a Chinese restaurant, says she is upset about the twilight-of-life disruption her father and mother have been forced to endure.

“Of course this isn’t good. They’re already so old, how are they supposed to pack themselves up?” she told THE CITY. “The government already says it wants to help the elders. Why does it have to use senior housing for development?”

Li Chin is worried about her parents’ safety now that NYCHA wants them to move back to a regular development, noting, “Even young people get robbed in the streets. Of course I’m at least a little worried about my parents.”

And she says two moves would likely confuse her mother.

“My mom has to readjust to an entirely new environment and learn to recognize it,” she said. “She already doesn’t remember many places nearby. But you can’t stop her from going outside — or sometimes you don’t even catch her going outside. It’s guaranteed trouble when she can’t recognize her way back.”

“Everyone’s already of such old age,” she added. “If the government needs to take back the building, they should just let them live out the rest of their lives there and take the units back gradually, one at a time, when they pass over to the other side. That way the elders aren’t thrown into such chaos.” 

In December NYCHA withdrew its violation-of-lease suit against Wu and more than a dozen other Chelsea Addition holdouts, shortly after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David Cohen denied the authority’s motion for a preliminary injunction forcing tenants to sign their relocation agreement.

That lawsuit is now pending before an appeals court that last month suspended the project while it considers the case. After that happened NYCHA began offering to relocate residents of Chelsea Addition in other seniors-only buildings.

Thomas Hillgardner, a lawyer for Wu and the 23 other holdouts, contested the notices in a separate suit filed in civil court in March. That litigation is also pending.

Recently THE CITY visited the couple in their apartment. Wu’s wife sat in silence, gazing at the floor. Dried lettuce and scallion hung on the back of the apartment’s entry door as an old country tradition commemorating the New Year. Against one wall of the living room, boxes filled with food were stacked next to a bag of yams spilling across the floor. Wu’s walker rested nearby.

When THE CITY suggested taking a photo of the couple, Wu asked to put on a nicer shirt first. He and his wife then sat on the couch and posed in silence.

Outside their window the blue-glass towers of Hudson Yards — a huge project of the Related Companies, the developer preparing to demolish and rebuild the Wu’s building —- glimmered in the distance.

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New York’s first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice says her job is to grow the economy by delivering on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s agenda for helping those who need it the most.

In: Affordable housing, free childcare and city-owned grocery stores. 

Out: Billions in tax breaks and incentives to big developers and employers, unless they improve the lives of working class New Yorkers.

In a sharp U-turn from policies pursued by mayors for decades, Deputy Mayor Julie Su says priorities that include building 200,000 new apartments and establishing universal child care will create a healthy economy. 

Gone, she says, are the days when city taxpayers helped fund new office developments that sometimes showed little public benefit. 

“Building housing at the scale that we’re talking about is a job creator and an economic engine,” Su said in a wide ranging interview with THE CITY. “Childcare is both an economic generator because when you grow that industry, there’s jobs in that industry and you allow other people to join the workplace.”

The turnabout is clear from the Mamdani administration’s new approach to tax breaks, favoring them only after tougher scrutiny and with provisions for union labor. Su said taxpayer-funded incentives would require “benefits for working class communities,” though she wasn’t more specific on what that might mean.

Mamdani’s agenda is hemmed in by a $5.4 billion budget deficit and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to go along with his demands for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and inflation in New York City outpaces the national rate.

Speaking at City Hall, Su — a former top official in President Joe Biden’s Labor Department — emphasized the need for equity in economic growth. 

“This is a little bit of a crude metaphor, but I think about it as we want everybody to have a real slice of the pie,” she said. “We also want to grow the overall pie, and we want to make sure that the pie is filled with good ingredients that make people healthy and happy.”

That includes possibly implementing the mayor’s campaign pledge to nearly double the minimum wage from its current $17 an hour to $30 over the next several years.

Not on the agenda so far are the kind of direct city investments in industries and neighborhoods that have spurred growth in the past.

In the early 2000s, the Bloomberg administration financed the expansion of the 7 subway to the far west side, provided tax breaks to jumpstart the office and luxury residential district at Hudson Yards, and overhauled the management of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to create a home for light manufacturing. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio offered $5 billion in tax breaks in a failed effort to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to the city and pursued growth outside Manhattan with investments and tax incentives. 

Eric Adams pursued projects like turning the Brooklyn Army Terminal into a center for climate innovation companies, provided millions of dollars to help expand the city’s film studios and relentlessly worked to lure tech companies and universities.

“We believe that all tools should be on the table to attract and retain high-quality, family-supporting jobs in New York City,” Su said. “In the past, tax incentives have enriched those at the top of the economic ladder while depriving the city of critical revenue and often failing to yield tangible benefits for working New Yorkers.”

Of a planned Hudson Yards expansion that relied on another $2 billion in public money, a Mamdani spokesperson said: “We are not actively engaged in negotiations to move this project forward at this time.”

A key indication of Mamdani’s economic policy may be who is named to run the Economic Development Corp., a semi-independent agency that has historically been the spearhead for development efforts. 

Shortly after being appointed, Su wrote a memo that called for the agency to focus on “the quality (not just number) of jobs created for the people who call N.Y.C. home,” The New York Times reported, raising alarm among business leaders. Su declined to say where she stood on filling the job but added that EDC is “firing on all cylinders.”

Business leaders are closely watching who will be appointed.

“Folks are still waiting to see who the administration’s point person on business recruitment and job retention will be,” said James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York who worked on economic development in the Bloomberg administration. “If you want a progressive city, you need a prosperous city. Someone needs to pay for the progressivity.”

Ruffled Hedge Fund Feathers

Su, who served as California’s labor secretary before joining the Biden administration, moved to address a growing storm over the mayor’s calling out of billionaire hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin by filming a social media post touting the pied-a-terre tax proposal in front of Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse.

Griffin’s fund, Citadel, moved hundreds of people to New York from Chicago and is in the process of building a new headquarters on Park Avenue — but a letter to employees last Thursday said it might not move ahead with the plan.

“We are about to commence the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, creating 6,000 highly paid construction jobs and supporting the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York,” wrote chief operating officer Gerald Beeson. “The project — if we move forward — will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending.”

Gov. Hochul announced Tuesday she would meet with Griffin amid continuing media focus on the issue. Su tried to calm the waters in her interview with THE CITY.

“We value Wall Street. We value companies that have made New York City their home,” she said. “We value the job creators who are really fundamental to creating the kind of growth that is required for shared prosperity. And we absolutely welcome the opportunities to work with them to deliver on an economy that works for everybody.”

Su declined to say whether the Administration would support a bill in the City Council to raise the minimum wage, noting uncertainty over whether the city had the power to do that without approval from state legislators.

But she strongly supported the efforts to end what the administration sees as corporate gouging of consumers — especially online. Mamdani has required companies offering online subscriptions provide an easy unsubscribe option, and moved to force hotels to disclose fees more clearly.

Some of Mamdani’s appointees worked for Lina Khan, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, who pursued aggressive regulation of tech companies. Khan has emerged as an important adviser to the mayor, and with the Trump Administration undoing much of their work in Washington, they are attempting to reestablish regulations on the city level.

“If you as a company operate in New York City and your practices, including subscription traps, impact New Yorkers, then we are charged with protecting New York workers and consumers,” Su said. “And we are going to exercise our full authority on that front.”

The mayor has taken two steps to aid small businesses in the city. In January he ordered all city agencies to review regulations affecting small firms that could be reduced or eliminated. He also appointed small business development executive Delia Awusi as his “Mom-and-Pop Czar” to help the smallest of those companies.

Mamdani is far from the first mayor to promise changes.

“I’ve been around for four mayors and all of them promised to reduce fines and fees and didn’t,” said a skeptical Laura Rothrock, president of the Long Island City Partnership.

Su says that the agencies have submitted their list of regulations that could be revised and it is under review. She said she understands the failures that have preceded her but added that this administration will be different — and not just by helping small businesses.

“I have been getting advice that we should tinker at the margins rather than set broad goals that people are going to point at, that you failed at,” she said. “That is not who we are. That is not who this mayor is. We have to prove that government can deliver.”

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday established the Office of Deed Theft Prevention and named a longtime homeowner assistance lawyer as its director.

Peter White, an attorney who has worked on deed theft litigation, foreclosures, bankruptcy and landlord-tenant disputes, will helm the new office. He most recently worked as a supervising attorney at Access Justice Brooklyn, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal services to low-income residents.

“The establishment of this office and the work going forward is an act of empathy for people,” White said. “I see it as a direct correlation and an extension of the work that I’ve previously done. I’m excited to get this going.”

Deed theft — often made through forged documents, short sales and foreclosure rescue scams — can strip families of generational wealth, ripping away what can be their most valuable asset.

“The theft of a home is the theft of a family’s future,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Deed theft preys on the New Yorkers who can least afford it. Today, we are bringing the full force of city government to bear to stop it – to protect homeowners, defend generational wealth and make clear that this city will not tolerate the exploitation of our communities.”

The Wednesday arrest of Councilmember Chi Ossé (D-Brooklyn), as he attempted to prevent the eviction of a grandmother from a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone, thrust deed theft in New York City into the national spotlight.

The Brooklyn resident, Carmella Charrington, as well local activists who have rallied to her cause, has said that her eviction is the result of deed theft. Public records point to a more complicated story, one involving an older relative in a conservatorship in Georgia and competing claims about the sale of the home. 

The state Attorney General’s office said it had determined the situation was not deed theft, but rather a property dispute. 

Either way, Ossé said he expected the new Office of Deed Theft Prevention to be able to provide clarity, even in murky cases like Charrington’s.

“Having a dedicated office that is creating awareness and educating people will help them figure out if they’re dealing with deed theft or not, or point them in the right direction to seek help even if they’re not dealing with deed theft,” Ossé told THE CITY. 

Ossé’s district, which includes Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, is one of several historically Black areas around the city with rising property values where deed theft and other predatory real estate speculation run rampant. 

“It’s patently unfair,” White said of what he described as economic and racial targeting that can drive families of color out of the city. “I want to help stop it.”

White said his office will be a place people can turn to even if they aren’t sure what’s going on with their property so that he can do a “deep dive on their individual case” to ascertain what’s happening — and then take action from there.

The Office of Deed Theft Prevention will be housed within the Department of Finance, working closely with other agencies like the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and the Commission on Human Rights.

The office will advance a three-pronged strategy for addressing deed theft: catching it early, educating homeowners about the risks and getting people’s homes back, according to White.

It’s uncertain whether or not the office will actually be able to enforce current laws, White said, but it will coordinate with the Attorney General’s office and district attorneys to get them to take on cases. He will also attempt to bring in pro bono attorneys to help homeowners.

As a candidate, Mamdani promised to create an Office of Deed Theft Prevention to “protect homeowners from scam artists” and fund it to the tune of $10 million. 

The mayor’s preliminary budget allocates $500,000 to the office in the current fiscal year and $1 million for the years after.

It is unclear how many dedicated staff the office will have other than White. Mamdani’s executive order creating the office also names a position for a deed theft prevention advocate.

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An ongoing fight to keep a Brooklyn grandmother in her family home escalated on Wednesday morning when the police arrested Councilmember Chi Ossé as he protested the move.

Ossé (D-Brooklyn) was in front of the Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone with community supporters to prevent longtime resident Carmella Charrington from being evicted when officers from the New York Police Department pulled the Council member to the ground and cuffed him, face down, video shows.

New York City marshals were at the home to evict Charrington and to look for her father, who is under a conservatorship in the state of Georgia. Over two dozen protestors were also on the scene. The marshals called the NYPD for backup, as the protestors were blocking access to the house, and ended up making four arrests, including Ossé, according to an NYPD spokesperson. 

NYPD officers took Ossé to the local precinct, according to a statement from his office, and released him in the early afternoon. He was taken to a local hospital for evaluation shortly afterwards. Ossé and those arrested were charged with obstruction of governmental administration and disorderly conduct, NYPD said.

Charrington spoke with THE CITY Wednesday at the brownstone, just after she said she spent five days on Rikers Island, held in contempt for the conservatorship case involving her father and linked to the property.

“I swear I feel like I’m in ‘Get Out,’” she said, referring to the 2017 horror film. If she and her family lose the house, she said: “It’d be devastating. It’s four generations of irreparable harm.”

Charrington’s son, William McFadden, said his 6-year-old daughter was rattled by the police action taken Wednesday. McFadden, the daughter and his 7-month-old son were among the family members in the home when the police, marshals and members of the sheriff’s office arrived.

“No child should have to ask, ‘Daddy, why are they taking our house right now? Daddy, why are they changing the locks?’” McFadden said.

The family and their allies, including Ossé, are adamant the situation is deed theft. But officials and records point to a more complicated story.

Charrington’s home on a tree-lined block of Jefferson Avenue has been the subject of a fraught saga that goes back several years. Charrington said her family has owned the home for decades, but an LLC that claims to have purchased the home has tried to evict her for the past two years.

Speaking outside the Bedford-Stuyvesant precinct where he was held and before he went to the hospital, Ossé said it was a “very violent, fast, traumatic experience.”

“I was just there to stand for my neighbor who I didn’t want to see her and her family removed from her home,” Ossé said outside the precinct. “To be met with violence from the NYPD for doing my job has been really disheartening and truly traumatic.”

He said he would file a misconduct report, and he advocated for resources and funds to help homeowners fight deed theft.

Deed theft — made through schemes related to forged documents, short-sale, foreclosure-rescue scams and other mechanisms — can strip families of generational wealth, separating them from a valuable asset.

The office of Attorney General Letitia James also indicated it had determined in April 2025 that the situation at Charrington’s home was not a deed theft matter, but instead a property dispute owing to competing claims from the property’s former owners, including Charrington’s father.

In a social media post, James said her office has “been in contact with the resident of this home for over a year to offer guidance and advice on her legal battle.”

The history of the property is complex. 

In 2021, a company called Brooklyn Gates LLC signed an agreement with a family member who had a stake in the property at 212 Jefferson Ave. 

Brooklyn Gates LLC was run by brothers Elliot and Joseph Ambalo and their partner Etai Vardi, whose dealings THE CITY uncovered in a previous investigation. The trio was among the groups of speculators targeting homes in gentrifying, historically Black and Latino neighborhoods whose owners died and left a network of dispersed inheritors. The three men would buy partial deeds from the heirs — often well below the value of the multi-million-dollar homes — and leverage their new partial ownership to force out longtime residents.

By 2023, the LLC had terminated the agreement with the person who claimed to have a stake in the property. Vardi told THE CITY he canceled the contract because he didn’t want to take on such a risky matter. “We saw it’s very complicated with the family. Not for us. It’s too much problems,” he said.

In 2024, another company called 227 Group LLC purchased the home for $1.4 million from several alleged family members as part of an estate of the former owner. Some property records show 227 Group LLC and Brooklyn Gates LLC share the same address in Long Island City. Vardi chalked up that detail to a paperwork mistake, and emphasized his group is not involved with the property. 

An agent behind 227 Group LLC, Simon Blitz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment and another, Daniel Gazal, could not be reached. 

In an email, a spokesperson for the 227 Group LLC called the deed theft allegations false.

What’s in dispute has to do with whether those family members and the estate had the authority to sell the property to 227 Group LLC.

Allman Charrington, Carmella’s father, is in a conservatorship based in Georgia. A conservator is appointed to manage the finances, assets and property of a “ward” who is not competent to manage those affairs.

Georgia attorney Luanne Bonnie, who is listed as Allman’s conservator on property records, signed the deed on his behalf. Carmella and other family members have said the people who signed the deed over to 227 Group LLC did not have the right to do that. (Bonnie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

A more recent deed, from January 2026, shows Allman Charrington transferring the property to Carmella, his daughter.

A judge sent Charrington to Rikers Island on April 16 after she did not bring her father to court as part of a case related to the conservatorship. Charrington and her family at the brownstone had been caring for him, they said. The city sheriff’s office and marshals who went to the home this morning had been looking for the father.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who made fighting deed theft a priority in his mayoral campaign, on Wednesday morning had not seen the video of Ossé’s arrest, but responded when a reporter described it to him. 

“That’s exactly something that we’re going to follow up on, not just on the nature of this arrest, but also what was the underlying issue that was being protested,” Mamdani said at an unrelated event in Queens. “I know [Ossé’s] been on the front lines of fighting deed theft. It’s especially prevalent in his Council district, and I appreciate, frankly, the efforts that he’s led in the past on ensuring that this is front of mind for all of us.”

Mamdani later posted to social media saying he had “seen the concerning footage of Council Member Chi Ossé’s arrest earlier today and am in touch with [NYPD] Commissioner Tisch about the nature of the arrest.”

Additional reporting from Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Katie Honan.

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