When Michelle Stamp was a child, she used to spend hours playing at her grandmother's place—a rent-stabilized apartment in a pre-war building at 1392 Sterling Place, in Crown Heights.
It was the 1970s, and her grandmother, Louise Reid, was at the time one of the only Black women to live in the building, after immigrating to Brooklyn from Jamaica. Back then, Stamp said, the landlord often neglected basic maintenance issues, from floors to paintjobs, to mold and broken sinks. So her grandfather would pick up his tools to fix the issues, rather than bother trying to get landlord Rubin Dukler to fix anything—it was a lost cause.
Almost seven decades since her grandmother first moved in, Stamp herself, now 63, lives in the unit—and not much has changed. At 1392 Sterling Place, as well as two sister buildings owned by the Dukler family's Rikud Realty on Eastern Parkway, City records show that rats, mice and roach infestations haunt the tenants of the three buildings; lead paint flakes off the walls; and leaks plague families from the top floor to the basement. Cumulatively, the buildings have more than 1,000 open violations, 400 of them deemed "immediately hazardous," and are all in the Housing Preservation and Development's Alternative Enforcement Program, the City's increased-oversight program for severely distressed properties.
Stamp and her neighbors started organizing about a decade ago, and had gotten used to being in a prolonged fight for basic living conditions. They say it got even worse when an additional operator, Iris Holdings Group, came in, leading to a complicated ownership tangle that left them with no idea who to complain to.
But, in an extraordinary turn of events, the tenants' fates changed this week. After a judge ordered that the three buildings go to a New York City Sheriff's sale, a public auction where the sheriff sells a property to settle an unpaid debt, they were sold Wednesday. The portfolio was bought by a company that will clear the debt and transfer ownership to a City-vetted buyer, Mark Schwartz, who has promised to rehab the buildings and convert them into affordable co-ops that residents will be able to buy for as little as $10,000, the tenants said. For Stamp, it would mean finally owning the apartment her family has now lived in for generations, and potentially passing it down to her own grandchildren.
"I'm sure she's smiling," Stamp told Hell Gate outside a municipal auction room in Downtown Brooklyn Wednesday, referring to her grandmother. "She'll be so happy because, you know, this is not something that she could have gotten done."