The heat is on, but not for thousands of apartments owned by the city’s worst landlords, NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said on Wednesday.
Williams unveiled the 2024 list of the city’s worst landlords, all of whom had multiple violations from the city ranging from heat and hot water outages, rodents, infrastructure issues and other serious infractions. The list was determined based on widespread and repeated violations during the period of Nov. 2023 to Oct. 2024.
Nearly 400 buildings with a total of 4,877 units made the list. Each building averaged 146 open Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) violations, among them being no heat, which hit home for many New York tenants during the city’s ongoing freezing temperatures.
The top 10 worst landlords in NYC in order of most violations are:
Barry Singer
Alfred Thompson
Karen Geer
Melanie Martin
Claudette Henry
David Tennenbaum
Sam Klein
Robert Kaszovitz
Yonatan Bahumi
Joseph Emile
The shameful list’s chart-topper, Singer, owns seven buildings in the city with more than 1,800 HPD violations.
“While this is his first time topping the list–congratulations Barry–he has a long documented history of egregious neglect and misconduct dating back decades,” Williams said.
The public advocate said that Singer’s buildings have also been the subject of numerous heat complaints. Over the eight months of NYC’s heat season—Oct. 1 to May 31 when landlords must maintain specific indoor temperatures—Singer received 121 heat and hot water complaints throughout his seven buildings on the list.
amNew York Metro was unable to reach Singer for comment.
Singer is far from the only one keeping tenants in the cold. In the same period, there was a total of 832 heat and hot water complaints spread out among the buildings owned by the other top 10 landlords in the city.
“The people on this list are at best dangerously negligent, and at worst, actively choosing to profit off the pain of New Yorkers living in unsafe, deplorable conditions,” Williams said. “Last year’s worst landlord has been to jail twice since the list was published, a clear message to owners of what their tenants deserve, and the consequences of their inaction. This list is a way to turn up the heat on bad actors so that we can get real accountability and change.”
Williams, who is working on a bill that would require HPD to more quickly respond to and perform inspections based on violations, said the worst landlords are not limited to private buildings. NYCHA, he said, had approximately 611,000 open work orders by the end of Dec. 2024—an increase of over 35,000 from the previous year.
And in December, amNew York Metro reported on a federally subsidized housing complex on Staten Island where families were living without heat and hot water for over a week. After reaching out to the company that manages the property, the outage was improved–at least partly.
“We had the contractors there, we’ve been in all the apartments,” Robert Vaccarello of R/Y Management said during the outage. “We’re still having a problem in some of the apartments. We got most of them up and running now and we’ve been testing the heat.”
New Yorkers can see the full worst-landlords list on line at landlordwatchlist.com.
Kcassman