Dishonest, penny-pinching, and heartless human. Operates just this side of legality. Avoid at all costs.

Posted 3 years ago

This landlord was one of the most immoral, vicious, and nefarious individuals I have ever come across in my entire life. My roommate and I moved into one of the two functional units this individual had for rent in a newly renovated brownstone in Crown Heights (798 Lincoln Place) Immoral/dishonest: When we signed the lease, the landlord was well-aware that the gas connection to the building had not been made, nor had his application to the city for such a connection been approved. The landlord went out of his way to keep us in the dark about this fact until we had signed the lease. AFTER we had signed the lease he brought up the topic mentioning "one little thing...", not giving us any estimate for how long it was going to take for the connection to be made etc. Not that the estimate would've made a big difference as--due to his tactics--we were locked into the lease already and there was nothing we could do to get out short of paying a large amount of money (one month rent, plus rent for additional months until a different tenant was signed on). The heat, hot water, and cooking range in this apartment ran on the gas. We first occupied the unit in November. We had no gas connection till the end of March (Read: the entire winter). In the interim, the landlord had provided space heaters but they barely kept the unit legally warm on the coldest days. The temp water heater he had provided barely held enough water for one tenant to shower (there were three total tenants in the building). We could not cook properly for the entire duration as he provided a single-surface induction coil in place of a four-surface stove so we could either, for example, have hot pasta or hot sauce. The day after we moved into the unit, the main breaker for the entire building underwent a mechanical failure. We had no electricity (and therefore heat, or hot water). We would've happily reported this via 311 if we had known this person was evil through and through but instead we chose to not take action as it was the beginning of our occupancy and we took it as goodwill to not. We had to stay the night in a hotel instead of our illegal tenement... our landlord never reimbursed us for this. Never so much as apologized for the hassle Other incidents reflecting landlord's dishonesty include (but are not limited to): - not taking care of a rodent problem in a timely fashion, - not fixing a leak in the kitchen sink in a timely fashion (read: 10 months), - treating us with incredulity when we reported a major leak (like, buckets of water) coming from the ceiling the day the building got its gas connection and our heat was turned on (the moron contractors had driven a nail through one of the steam pipes while doing the flooring of the upstairs unit), - not telling us and the upstairs tenant when we signed the lease that there was asbestos in the roof and that it would have to be changed half way through our tenancy, ... - not installing a set of functional mailboxes for the building so that all our mail would get wet, dirty, and unreadable from the elements Nefarious: Finally fed up by this individual's immorality and our consequent suffering, we decided to approach him about a lease break. At first, he agreed to a lease break with typical conditions (one month full rent). He then proceeded (unprompted) to send us (much worse) updated conditions knowing we were about to sign the paperwork for the initial fair conditions. The updated conditions included two months rent, and continuing to pay rent until he had secured other tenants Vicious: Finally, this landlord had the nerve to keep a significant portion of our rent, claiming repairs to a peephole cover and a toilet seat, receipts for which he never provided despite us requesting them. The need to repair may have been valid (though it is interesting that it was not captured in the checklist he made with us during the moving-out walk-through), but what is particularly vicious and dishonest is that we were way overcharged for this purported repair Conclusion: Evil individuals actually exist. You have been warned about one of them; please avoid dealing with him at all costs.

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