A pair of local, elected officials joined housing advocates and attorneys in taking a bow during a recent virtual discussion, following the passage of “Jashawn’s Law,” which establishes deadlines for landlords to make court-ordered repairs to buildings.

 

State Sen. Robert Jackson joined Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz in a Zoom conference call on Monday, Nov. 16, along with officials from the Legal Aid Society and housing advocacy groups, Take Root Justice and the Fordham-Bedford Housing Corporation.

 

The bill was put forward by Dinowitz in 2003 in response to the Aug. 6, 2002 blaze at 3569 DeKalb Avenue in Norwood that took the life of Jashawn Parker, aged 8, who lived there with his father and brother. At the time, the building had over 350 building code violations, and its owner had been ordered to make repairs by a housing court judge but those repairs were never made.

 

Explaining the passage of Senate bill 3320 during the call, Jackson said, “It was being blocked by my Republican colleagues in the New York State Senate.” He continued, “They held it up all these years, and now, finally, because in 2019, the Democrats became the majority in the senate, this legislation has passed like many other pieces of legislation. The life of this child should never have ended. I mean, he should never have died as a result of an electrical fire or any other situation regarding life, health and safety.” Jackson added that the law should have been passed a long time ago.

Meanwhile, Dinowitz said John Reilly of the Fordham-Bedford Housing Corporation played a “very major role” in ending the life-threatening conditions at the fire location, once the corporation was appointed as a 7-A administrator of the building, and took control of it from the landlord in November 2002.

 

With the rent payments of residents going back into the building, rather than into the landlord’s pocket, Reilly said, “The conditions in the building were deplorable. There were hundreds of very serious code violations that had been neglected for many years.” He continued, “So, tenants started to see improvements right away.”

 

According to Reilly, thanks to financing from the City, the building had all its plumbing replaced, the electricity was upgraded, and the building’s leaky roof was replaced. Lead paint violations and other hazards inside individual apartments were also addressed and corrected. Reilly concluded, “So, it didn’t really need to come to a tragedy to force this to happen. This law will hopefully help avoid this from happening in the future, that repairs can be gotten [to], in a timely manner.”

 

Jessica Bellinder of the Legal Aid Society said it was critical for housing court judges to be better attuned to the dangers faced by tenants in some buildings. “Having the court recognize that time is of the essence is a really important aspect of this legislation, because what we find often is the court process doesn’t really recognize the urgency that tenants feel.”

 

Bellinder explained that residents with “really terrible conditions,” such as having no heat or running water, active leaks, mold, electrical issues, broken security systems or rodent infestation, have few places to turn for help. She said of most residents, “They don’t have a lot of options to just move when the building deteriorates. They need to hold the homeowner accountable to be able to stay in affordable housing, so they need every tool available to force landlords to step up and take responsibility for their building.”

According to Bellinder the new law also covers harassment by the landlord, illegal evictions and the withholding of services.

 

Greg Baltz of Take Root Justice added, “This law can really make a meaningful difference for tenants living with dangerous conditions. The law, as written, says that a judge can take control of a building away from a landlord who has failed or refused to address conditions that are dangerous to the health, life and safety of the tenants in that building, and those conditions just need to have existed for five days, which is already too long.”

 

Meanwhile, Josh Stevenson of the West Bronx and Neighborhood Resource Center recalled how former director, Sally Dumford, had spent two years petitioning the court to take over the DeKalb Avenue building where Jashawn lived, but the landlord kept requesting, and was granted, numerous extensions until Jashawn’s tragic death occurred.

 

Norwood News reported in 2004 how the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NBCCC) began to help the tenants get an outside administrator appointed to run the building. At that stage, they learned that another troubled building, 15-19 West Mosholu Parkway, was connected to the same landlord, as well as to nearly 100 other Bronx buildings.

 

They began to organize tenants in those buildings, meet with Washington Mutual Bank, the mortgage provider for many of the properties, and to work with the City’s Housing & Preservation Development (HPD) to address the issue. As a result, NBCCC, and another Bronx nonprofit, the Highbridge Community Life Center, were subsequently sued, and a restraining order was taken out against the groups.

 

The purpose of the suit appears to have been to frighten community organizations from doing their work, and it had the desired chilling effect. The restraining order was subsequently lifted, but before then, the group had been unable to talk to the bank about any building, even those not part of the lawsuit.

 

Norwood News reported at the time that the judge involved in the case eventually saw for herself the conditions in the affected buildings, and subsequently urged those responsible to take action, saying, “What this court saw has not been forgotten. I will go back [to the buildings]. They better be fixed.”

 

In 2012, journalists and housing activists were still trying to establish how the City should enforce housing code violations and hold landlords accountable for conditions that put tenants at risk.

A panel discussion was held that year at Manhattan College, organized by the school’s Urban Affairs department, City Limits magazine and Jordan Moss, former Norwood News editor.

 

The event followed the investigation into landlord practices and regulations that had been published at the time, in City Limits. It comprised a series of stories written by Moss, investigative journalist, Tom Robbins, and a team of students at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism which focused on wealthy real estate operative, Frank Palazzolo, who had been tied to dozens of dilapidated Bronx buildings over the years, including 3569 DeKalb Avenue. Moss covered the fire story for the Norwood News at the time.

 

The New York Times reported in 2004 how there had been problems ascertaining the ownership of the impacted [dilapidated] properties, citing one source who said Palazzolo had carefully covered the methods by which he controlled the properties. Norwood News was unable to reach Palazzolo for comment.

 

The murky intricacies of property dealings continue today among landlords. LLC companies are often registered at the same business address. Some even require tenants to pay their rent through an online portal, rather than via regular wire transfer with their bank, making it more difficult for tenants to see who the final beneficiary of the payment is.

 

The purpose of financial services regulation, including laws covering tax avoidance and anti-money laundering, which are now commonplace across the world, is to increase transparency, and oblige beneficiaries of payments to identify themselves. The fact that many LLC companies are registered at the same business location, often with similar names, as well as the use of online payment portals, would appear to go against the spirit and intent of such regulation.

 

When the Norwood News began looking at other buildings linked to Palazzolo at that time, it found some 19,000 violations. In another of his buildings, a 7-year-old boy suffered brain damage from lead paint. “Landlords like this somehow never see the inside of a criminal court,” Moss said, at the time. “Apartments shouldn’t make people sick or scared.”

 

The issue of substandard housing has come up again and again in the Bronx, making headlines over the years with incidents like those at the Milbank and Ocelet buildings, where developers looking to turn a profit, paid too much for properties they couldn’t afford, or didn’t know how to properly manage.

 

“It’s pretty easy, if you don’t know what you’re doing, to run a crappy building,” said Gregory Lobo Jost, of the University Neighborhood Housing Program at the event in 2012.

 

Meanwhile, Harold Shultz, a former official with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) who later worked for the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, said at the same event that the problem was not with housing laws, but with how they were enforced or not – through housing court. The system is so cumbersome and overburdened with cases, he said, that most housing violations are never brought before a judge, and the majority of landlords don’t actually face penalties for breaking the rules.

 

“You have a system in which the vast bulk of landlords believe, correctly, that there is a very low chance of having to pay a fine, that there really is no one looking over their shoulder making sure they’re doing the right thing,” he said.

 

Robbins, who led the City Limits investigation and who covered housing for years for the Village Voice, agreed. “It’s a pretty useless mechanism, in terms of getting housing justice,” he said of the court system. “It’s where good cases go to die.”

 

Meanwhile, Bronx property owner, Sandra Erickson, was the one member of the 2012 panel who represented the landlords’ perspective. While bad landlords do exist, she told the crowd, the majority of property owners maintain their buildings, and any reforms to the City’s housing laws should keep them in mind.

 

“We do provide a very important service in the city of New York,” she said at the time. “I think it’s important that you don’t hurt the good landlords, overly burdening the ones that are doing the right thing.”

 

Norwood News also reported at that time that the City has tried other tactics to get bad landlords to act, like HPD’s Alternative Enforcement Program, which cuts through some of the bureaucratic red tape by allowing the agency to make emergency repairs on the most distressed buildings, and then bill the landlord for the work.

However, the program only targets the worst property owners, and some housing advocates, like Kerri White, a tenant organizer with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), said at the time that there needed to be a more comprehensive way to monitor the rest.

 

One idea was to require landlords to hold a license before they could purchase new properties, which White said could help the City track which owners were buying up distressed buildings, or who had a bad track record when it came to repair violations.

 

Shultz was skeptical. “Isn’t the real issue: is the building being managed well?” he said at the time. “If the building is not well-managed, they should go after you, whether or not you have a permit.

 

Now, in 2020, despite the new “Jashaw’s Law,” it seems concerns still exist when it comes to enforcement. Stevenson said at the recent virtual discussion, “One of the things we’re worried about is the potential for property owners to outright refuse to make repairs, citing the economic conditions from the COVID pandemic.”

 

Nonetheless, those who participated in the panel discussion acknowledged that some progress has been made. Dinowitz thanked Sen. Jackson for his support on the bill and said, “And all our advocates here, the work you do really makes a difference in the lives of countless people and it’s much appreciated.” In conclusion, Dinowitz said, “I just want to point out that if Jashawn Parker had lived, he would be 26 years old today, and perhaps even raising his own family. It’s really a tragic loss.”

 

 

Former and current Norwood News employees contributed reporting to this story.