Trash Piles, Broken Ceilings: Middle Village Tenants Sue Landlord

MIDDLE VILLAGE, QUEENS — You don’t have to enter 84-53 Dana Court to tell that the apartment building is in a state of disarray.

The setback courtyard, which once served as an entryway for the brick building located at the corner of Dana Court and Woodhaven Boulevard, is now a de facto dumping place for tenants’ garbage, attracting flies, mice, and rats to the building’s threshold.

“At any time of night there’s people screaming, tenants but also people that walk by the building, because the rats are just running all over the place,” a tenant — who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — told Patch, describing the conditions they’ve lived in since September of last year when the building’s landlord, Highpoint Associates, a corporation with a history of neglect and mismanagement, fired the superintendent.

Since then, tenants have faced trash chutes that are backed up to the top floor of the building, heat and hot water that cut out repeatedly during the winter months, a front door to the building that won’t properly close, and leaky, broken pipes and drains — amounting to over 215 violations this year from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HBD) and Department of Buildings (DOB), 192 of which have been issued since October.

Now, after appealing to their landlord in court for two months, a group of seven householders in the four-story, 37-unit apartment building are suing their landlord for harassment on Friday.

An ‘immediate change’ in September

The tenant that Patch spoke with said for years the building’s live-in superintendent kept the place in livable condition.

Then, in September, when the superintendent was fired, “there was an immediate change,” they said.

“There were flies and rats throughout the hallways, all the way from the first floor to the fourth floor of the building,” the tenant explained, adding that elderly residents on the third and fourth floors were forced to walk their trash down flights of stairs since the chutes became totally backed up in a matter of weeks.

As the weather got colder, the situation in the building further deteriorated, the occupant said.

Heat and hot water cut out repeatedly, since the boiler was not being maintained, and water leaks occurred throughout the building, they said.

The tenant recalled an instance in January that was reported to the DOB in which a roof drain got clogged, causing part of the ceiling to cave in on two fourth-floor apartments.

“One of those tenants got clipped in the shoulder. He got injured, and the Fire Department had to come here,” they said.

Throughout this time the building’s landlord and management company, Choice Management, were routinely unresponsive, the tenant said.

“Either emails got ignored, or the responses have been rude. The only time they’ve responded is when there’s an absolute emergency, like the leak in the ceiling,” they said, adding that the management company criticized them for reporting hot water and heat outages to HPD. “Legally, that’s harassment,” they said.

A history of mismanagement

This is not the first time that Highpoint Associates — whose owners include Frank Ohebshalom, David Ohebshalom and Dan Shalom, who also goes by Daniel Ohebshalom — has been accused of harassment, mismanagement and neglect.

Highpoint Associates and Daniel Ohebshalom were listed on the New York City Public Advocate’s worst landlords list in 2015 and in 2018, assuming the number one spot in 2015 when the owner neglected multiple Manhattan buildings, harassed tenants to get them to move out, and left the buildings in uninhabitable conditions with hundreds of building code violations, reported 6sqft.

Alex Jacobs, a tenants rights attorney with Queens Legal Services that is representing the seven households at 84-53 Dana Court, believes that a similar situation is taking place in Queens.

“We’re seeing that the landlord is doing all of this to try and make tenants feel powerless, like the only thing they can do is leave their apartment, and that’s illegal,” he said, pointing out that the building’s higher-ups have failed to follow through on the tenants’ demands during the past few months in court — like hiring an exterminator — which is why they’re asking for a trial on harassment.

Additionally, he plans to ask the court to impose fines on all of the HPD violations in the building since December, which by his calculations amount to over $1 million.

“This building has violations and summonses from the Department of Sanitation, from FDNY, from the Department of Buildings, and from HPD. I've seen a lot of things in my career as a tenants rights attorney, but I don't think I've seen a building where all of these city agencies and departments are coming after the landlord like that. That's pretty unusual,” said Jacobs.

Patch reached out to Highpoint Associates, Tom Flannagan — who the tenant and Jacobs named as the Choice Management employee who oversees the Dana Court building — and the attorney representing management on the case, Jessica Nicole Scheiber, but did not hear back from any of them.

Suing for harassment

On Friday, the judge will make a decision about how to move forward with the situation at 84-53 Dana Court, at which point Jacobs hopes a trial date will be scheduled.

“When you pay rent, part of what you're paying for isn't just the opportunity to sleep under a roof, you're also paying to have an apartment that you can be proud of, that you can live in and that your family can live in,” he said, adding that his clients have a right to a safe and habitable home.

As for the tenant we spoke to, they said they’ll feel at ease in their home once the months of filth and mismanagement are dealt with.

“There’s still trash backed up in the chute, just hanging out there,” they said, adding “that trash is combustible, so it’s a fire hazard right now, that’s essentially what I’m still worried about.”