BY JACKSON CHEN | Seven tenants of a single-room occupancy building on the Upper West Side are beginning to receive much-needed repairs after filing a lawsuit against their landlord and winning the case in Housing Court.
For several years, the residents of 361 West 116th Street have been living amongst rodent and roach infestations in their rooms that are pockmarked with holes in the walls and cracks in the floor. Since the three-story building is set up as single-room occupancy (SRO), the tenants share bathrooms that have been laden with mold reaching from the floor to the ceiling on each floor.
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Thomas Tesfagabr, an 11-year tenant, fired off a list of serious violations in his room, including a missing stove, a broken freezer, and several water-damaged areas of the wall and floor. During winters, he resorts to taping up the wide cracks of his window frame to keep out the cold. According to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the building has 204 open violations, with 41 of those classified as Class C, or the most severe.
Winston Pitts, a 10-year tenant, said the building was built in 1903 and has had building inspectors visit and wonder how the residents can live in such conditions.
“This house is disastrous,” Pitts said. “Nobody did nothing here from 1903 to 2016.”
Pitts, a retired construction worker, said his main worry was the building collapsing over the next couple of decades and that he wants to find a more suitable place to live.
“You know how much mail people steal from us,” Pitts said, adding that mail is often dumped on the floor or in a milk crate. “This building doesn’t have a doorbell, doesn’t have a mailbox.”
Pitts’ next-door neighbor Tesfagabr said that discolored water, with a hue similar to milky brown coffee, has leaked into his apartment. The tenant lifted up a corner of the flooring that resembled shipwrecked wood, tossing slivers of it to the side.
To address these longstanding tenant complaints about building conditions, attorneys from the Goddard Riverside Law Project and Manhattan Legal Services represented them in filing a lawsuit against the landlord, John Lasala.
Tayyaba Khokar, a Goddard Riverside attorney, said Lasala quickly earned a negative reputation among the tenants after he filed eviction proceedings against them when he took over the building in May. Khokar said the eviction cases were dismissed, but the tenants continue to contend with the poor living conditions.
After an October 6 court hearing, Lasala signed consent orders to make repairs in the building, addressing the most severe cases first. While he had roughly 24 hours to fix the Class C violations, the consent agreement laid out dates for the landlord to complete remediation on the rest of the violations affecting individual tenants’ rooms.
“The landlord has consented to make all the repairs, therefore we’re able to resolve it there,” Khokar said. “But if he doesn’t, we can certainly bring the case back and say he didn’t actually follow through with them.”
During a visit on October 17, this reporter found evidence of repairs in a few of the bathrooms, which had fresh coats of paint, but the tenants’ rooms looked untouched in their disrepair. For the tenants and attorneys, the issue now becomes making sure Lasala follows through on the court-mandated repairs.
“The problem with this is you either keep coming back or bringing it up,” Khokar said of keeping tabs on Lasala. “He signed off on the agreement but it doesn’t necessarily make it enforceable if no one follows up on it.”
Tesfagabr said he was given repair dates of October 19, 20, and 21 — others tenants indicated they had not yet received any dates for their renovations — but, after conversations with the landlord, he expressed doubt that all the problems would be addressed in a timely manner.
“He told me he’s going to move me upstairs to fix my place,” Tesfagabr said. “I tell him fix it with the court dates they give you — October 19, 20, 21, which is for my room. He said forget about the court dates.”
Lasala told Manhattan Express the repairs are progressing and on schedule, adding that the dates for working in individual rooms were set at the election of the tenants.
