On a recent weeknight, a packed New York ballroom became the stage for residents of a dilapidated Bronx building to recount their housing nightmares. This event marked the third in a series of 'rental rip-off hearings,' a new initiative by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, offering disgruntled tenants a direct line to housing officials and, at times, the mayor himself.
Among those present was Gulhayo Yuldosheva, who voiced fears that noxious mould in her apartment was worsening her child’s asthma. Her downstairs neighbour, Marina Quiroz, showed a city tenant protection representative a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen. Ann Maitin, a long-term resident from the same building, had just met with Mayor Mamdani, highlighting the direct engagement these hearings provide. 'He let me go over my three minutes,' she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts 'to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law.' To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building. 'It feels like such a basic question,' said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. 'You’d think we’d have the right to that information.'
Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs. The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize. 'There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,' said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. 'That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.'
For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium. Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue 'feels like waiting for Christmas in July,' said Maitin. During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to 'slide down the steps, like a kid.' Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said. Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence. 'This felt like a home before,' Rodriguez said. 'Now they treat us the same as the rats.' A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.
Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl. A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations. 'We didn’t want to become the next news story,' said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows. Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard. Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. 'There’s no one landlord,' he said. 'It’s a group of investors.' Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s 'worst landlord' list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard Avenue.
