Harry, a broker at Senator Realty, was horrified when he walked into the two-story house occupied by Queens resident, Anne Perez and two other families
“Nothing was up to code when we got the apartment,” Harry said. “The previous owner had divided a one-family house into three apartments. They’d taken the boiler out of the basement and put three of them in the kitchens, next to the stoves. They could have blown up the whole block.”
Foreclosures on multi-family homes have risen in Queens. Without landlords, renters have been forced to live without basic utilities for weeks.
Washington Mutual, the mortgage owner, foreclosed on the property August 23rd. Senator Realty bought the building three weeks later, but during the transaction, Perez and the other family had gone without gas, electricity or water.
Perez’ situation has become a common one in Jamaica, Queens. A survey compiled by New York State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein has shown that property owners have filed foreclosures on more than 800 properties from July 2006 to July 2007. More than half of these properties had been designed for multi-family use.
Florence Fisher, co-op president and chairman of Queens Community Board 8’s Building and Housing Committee said that builders had not prepared for a plateau in the housing market.
“They came in to make a profit,” she said. “They hacked these apartments out of single-family homes thinking that they could make a profit on the side.”
“They weren’t in this to be landlords,” Fisher said.
Foreclosed properties, sold below market rate, have been acquired by companies like Senator Realty. But brokers have discovered that tenants are unwilling to move despite the lack of services.
“This is New York and prices keep going up,” said Fisher. “ People stay in the apartments because they can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
But concerns among real estate investors have centered on the need to make a profit.
Harry, who refused to give his name due to the sensitivity of this topic, has tried to bring Perez’s building up to code but she and her neighbors have to move first.
They have not made any attempts to leave their apartments.
“It’s a nightmare,” Harry said. “This has nothing to do with sub-prime: we’re trying to do right by these people.”
Though Fisher has fielded calls from angry renters anxious for services usually taken for granted, city housing spokesman, Seth Donlin, downplayed the foreclosures’ effect on renters.
“We’re sensitive to how this affects homeowners,” he said. “But the truth is that renters don’t really lose anything.”
Donlin has not met Perez, a woman who has lived in an unsafe apartment and may ultimately be evicted in order to bring the property up to code. He has never met the woman who may lose her home.
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