SRO tenants win landlord harassment suit

By Ed Hamilton

A powerful landlord who tried to remove tenants from a Chelsea single-room occupancy building and convert it to luxury condos has been slapped with a harassment verdict by a city judge, who ruled in favor of the SRO’s remaining occupants recently.

Larry Tauber, of Chelsea Partners, owner with his family of 41 buildings in Manhattan, was found guilty of harassing the tenants at 246 West 21st Street. Judge Faye Lewis of the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings ruled that, through interruption and discontinuation of essential services and at least one instance of verbal harassment, Tauber intended to provoke the tenants into vacating their apartments.

Lewis recommended that Tauber’s Certificate of Non-Harassment (CONH), necessary for any construction on the premises to proceed, be revoked, and the Department of Housing and Preservation (HPD) carried out that recommendation.

“People said we were crazy,” said Lanny Hill, a 12-year resident of the building. “And I admit, it does sound nuts, saying the landlord is intentionally causing leaks all around the building. But now it’s official. The judge said we were right.”

Tauber has been on the receiving end of judgments in the past, most recently in a case involving tenant Daniel Peckham, which received widespread media attention back in May, including in the Village Voice and Chelsea Now. Peckham, who lives next door to the SRO at 244 West 21st Street, is the lone holdout in a building that Tauber otherwise emptied through tenant buyouts. In December 2004, taking advantage of a loophole in the Housing Code known as “phony demolition,” which allows a landlord to empty the building of rent-stabilized tenants in order to carry out a gut renovation of the building, Tauber began demolishing Peckham’s building around him.

Because Tauber obtained his demolition permit under false pretenses, however (Tauber claimed the building had already been emptied and was fined $250 by the Department of Buildings (DOB) for making this claim), Peckham was able to obtain a stop-work order against him, and they have been at a stalemate ever since, with Tauber unable to proceed with his destruction and renovation, the legitimacy of which Peckham has also challenged in a case that may set a precedent. In the process, Peckham battled Tauber in housing court for reduction of services and harassment, alleging that Tauber has failed to provide heat, left the building open and caused the pipes to freeze, and failed to fix a leaking roof, which has caused periodic collapses of Peckham’s ceiling.

Deja-vu

The SRO in question in Tauber’s current case, a nondescript, five-story white brick building, contains mostly working-class tenants who are predominately Latino. Some of them are elderly and disabled. Lanny Hill, a waiter, is a tall man of 47, fit and trim, with a tussled mane of salt-and-pepper hair. As he brought Chelsea Now around the building last week, he talked about how the problem had emerged: “It began the moment the Tauber family bought the building in 2001. Leaks appeared throughout the building, coming from the roof, and when anyone called to complain, Larry was unresponsive,” said Hill. “He was never friendly, and often his tone was threatening. In order to get anything in your room fixed, you had to stay home from work for three days, and sometimes nobody would show up at all. Since they’ve taken over, I’ve missed 36 days of work.”

Tauber did not return repeated calls by press time.

As revealed in court papers, problems at the building were widespread, and included a leaking roof that caused plaster to fall from the ceiling, broken window frames, leaky faucets, broken light switches and intercoms, and a broken door that allowed strangers to enter the building; Judge Lewis also believed the tenants’ testimony that Tauber failed to keep some of the hallway bathrooms clean.

When asked if he thought Tauber planned a “phony demolition,” or a demolition through neglect, Hill agreed. “The idea is to show that the building is run down and falling apart and attempt to get a demolition order,” he said, adding that Tauber was seeking to increase the size of the building by adding two stories and deepening it, according to papers filed with the Department of Buildings (DOB).

Deciding to fight back against what they perceived to be unlivable conditions, Lanny and the other nine remaining tenants of the 26-unit building (16 tenants had taken buyouts at one time or another) banded together in August 2004 to form a tenants association and began to diligently note and report all building violations to the HPD. They sued for repairs in Civil Court in January 2005, and though they won that case and Tauber did make some of the repairs the judge ordered, many violations remained.

In court papers, Tauber responded that he had not made all repairs because he had prioritized them, dealing with the worst violations first. As for the leaking roof, he stated that roof repairs are tricky, “and sometimes, it’s a hit-or-miss process because the leak could be 20 feet away from where the actual moisture is showing in an area.”

Increased scrutiny

State Senator Tom Duane helped draw attention to the SRO residents’ case when he held a press conference in front of their building, deploring the living conditions at the building and stating bluntly in a televised interview for New York’s WWOR Channel 9, “We are going to put a stop to the horrible tactics of the evil Tauber family landlord syndicate.”

In the case just decided, Housing and Preservation v. Tauber, initiated on September 25, 2006, by HPD in response to Tauber’s failure to make repairs, Judge Lewis stated that because Tauber had a long history of violations with agency—35 open violations at the time of the trial, some of them dating back as far as 1979—the burden was on him to rebut the charges that he was withholding necessary repairs as a form of harassment designed to force out his lawful tenants. Tauber failed to counter those charges.

Lewis also put particular emphasis on remarks made by Larry Tauber’s brother and business partner, Michael, who visited Hill in his room back in 2005 to inspect for repairs and told Hill: “You people are animals. There will be no more due process. . . It is my pleasure if you use this toilet... It is my pleasure if you sleep here... I am the law now... I am the landlord.”

In her ruling, Lewis said that Michael Tauber “appeared to refer, derisively, to the ongoing housing court litigation...and to reassert his own authority over the tenants notwithstanding any mandates arising out of the litigation.” She finished by saying his words also constituted harassment.

The result of the ruling is that Larry Tauber must wait three years to apply for a new CONH, said HPD Spokesperson Neill Coleman. Without the CONH, Tauber cannot do any construction on the building.

The ruling has had some effect on conditions at the SRO.

When Chelsea Now visited the building, the previously broken intercom worked and the door was secure, though Hill maintained that someone could still probably get in without a key. Conditions inside the building, however, were squalid, with huge cockroaches lying belly-up in the hallways and piles of filth built up in the hallway bathrooms, and there was evidence of extensive leakage on all floors. Some repairs also looked haphazard: For instance, some of the hallway linoleum had been fixed by nailing tiles to the floor. A huge section of falling plaster over another resident’s bed had been repaired, though water had bubbled-up the plaster in the interim. Half of the roof had been repaired, though Hill said that the water simply ran off that half and leaked into the building through the unfixed half. One spot repair on the roof appeared to have been carried out by simply slopping out a portion of sealant from a bucket.

Still, Hill thinks the Building is improving, as do the other three tenants consulted for this article, although all agreed that there is much room for improvement.

Joey Rivera, a 34-year-old home care worker, said that since the ruling, “Larry and Michael [Tauber] have been a little bit more respectful. At least there hasn’t been any more name-calling.” Though Rivera said he has had to call HPD 61 times since the case was decided, “now HPD gets on their case and at least the building is getting better, going in the right direction.”