By KASIA ROMANOWSKA and DAVID CRUZ

Shanequa Charles, a single mother, lives in an apartment at 2543 Decatur Ave., a six story walk-up just off 193^rd Street by Fordham Road. Her 4-year-old daughter, Miracle, remains scared to enter the bathroom because of the bugs squeezing out of the tub.

On the first floor, Sonia Ortiz has endured leaks of water dripping from her wrinkled ceiling, which soon caved, forcing a call to management. When the company finally arrived, she recalled the repair job was “a joke.” Another leaky roof incident caused an elderly man to slip and fall down the stairs.

At the building next door, another tenant, whose identity is being withheld for privacy reasons, suffers from HIV and lives in squalor. On top of a bedbug infestation, the tenant also has dealt with an archaic dumbwaiter ripped from her kitchen, its inner walls exposed with a portion covered with expandable foam to prevent vermin from entering.

Her bathroom’s no better. Loose plumbing insulation is no match for rats that worm their way into her apartment. The tenant is a client of the city’s HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA), which covers a part of her rent. Charles, recently appointed a member of Community Board 7, has been living in her two-bedroom apartment since 1988.

According to her, the place “is not given the proper care and people are not getting enough guidance.” All three tenants agreed that throughout their time of living here, now has been the most problematic time so far. As the Norwood News learned, this is life at 2543, 2549, 2553, 2559, 2563, and 2567 Decatur Ave., a set of buildings where many tenants, mostly minorities, have felt abandoned, often left on their own to sort out their building’s troubles. It’s in those same buildings where hundreds of tenants were deprived of heat during early winter, until a local news outlet intervened.

It’s there where working poor Bronxites have dealt with conditions that are too much to bear, with claims the management company has impeded their right to organize.

Who’s in Charge?
Although Charles pays her rent regularly every month, she’s repaired most of her apartment’s squalid conditions with her “own hands and resources.” In one instance,

workers were supposed to paint her apartment, though they stopped halfway through. The directive came from the management–Fortress CD LLC–who’ve now set their sights on Charles. The contact is limited to a phone and a P.O. Box, with little knowledge of the building’s owner, given its limited liability company status.

The company’s managing agent is Meir Lieblich, who maintains tenants are living in high quality housing. When interviewed for the story, Lieblich denied the buildings are in bad shape. He also brushed off claims that tenants were deprived of their right to organize meetings.

“We try as much as we can and we do a lot of work over there,” he added. “All the tenants have my office number, my cell number and my address,” he said responding to the accusations concerning the communication problem between residents and Fortress CD LLC.

However, he declined to discuss the specifics when it comes to the tenants’ claims about poor customer service on the part of the company. According to Charles, “There’s no peace of mind about anything. There’s no quality of life.”

“It’s happening,” she added, “because the manager is not cooperating.”

Problems with Fortress surged after Charles’ mother’s death, a long time resident of the building whose rent was subsidized by Section 8. Although the deed to the rentstabilized

unit had been transferred to Charles to assure Section 8 continues, inspectors with the federal program didn’t return to Charles’ home until after her mother’s death, claiming no updating was made. This raised her rent an additional $300.00.

When it comes to personal confrontation with management, it’s even worse. Charles now has a case against Lieblich, alleged to have turned up one late winter night with an unidentified man to check the heat. Charles no longer allows Lieblich to enter the apartment.

Political Intervention

Councilman Ritchie Torres, who represents the area where the buildings are located, countered Leiblich’s take on building conditions, saying the homes “might have [had] the highest standard of the quality in the early 20^th century New York City, but not today.”

Torres, a proponent of quality housing, met with Leiblich early this year during a one-on-one meeting over the building’s state. He said that after the manager refused to cooperate, the city sent inspectors from Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). Fortress has been charged with 489 violations of the housing code so far. The majority of that number, 397 in all, are considered B and C violations.

They include improper fire exits, rodents, lead-based paint, lack of heat, hot water, electricity, or gas. Because of the long pending violations and at times the inability to identify the name of the building owner, Torres has crafted a package of bills called the Housing Quality Act. The bill pushes for more accountability for building owners to make repairs following a notice of violation by HPD.

As it stands, getting owners to make repairs can be a repetitive process “until the tenant is caught in the cycle of submitting complaints but never actually getting repairs.” Torres wants to issue the attachment of the re-inspection fees to the Notice of Violation, which would be tacked on to the owner until the action is corrected.

Problems Organizing

Another lingering problem is the ability to organize, an issue that’s slowed any progress for tenants. Much of that is driven by tenants who would rather look the other way than to jeopardize their leases, which are month to month, according to Charles.

Some keep quiet since their rent is covered by social service agencies, believing their right to be vocal suspended, said Charles. Although Charles repeatedly asked to have an actual meeting with the owner, she didn’t succeed. She failed also to organize the meeting among the tenants, because, “the manager always finds out when the meetings are and gets rid of the ads” posted throughout the buildings.

“I saw Lieblich ripping down the sign myself,” said Ortiz, speaking specifically about one winter meeting to discuss the lack of heat and hot water. Many had to move elsewhere and those who stayed wore sweaters and blankets to get by. Throughout their ordeal, tenants realized that a “real investment into these apartments” is what’s required to raise the standard of living, according to Charles. “Especially for the elder people who are having a hard enough time as it is getting up and down the stairs or either going to the doctor’s appointment or work,” Charles added.

Charles simply wants to forget about those moments when Miracle hurt herself several times running into things, when their apartment was full of lead and she was left to make repairs herself. It was a moment when she said: enough is enough and has no intention of quitting until the situation gets better.

“More people should look up to Shanequa as a role model,” said Torres.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.