Having to get the City to force your landlord to do necessary repairs is an absolute pain. It can take years to play out through the City's arcane housing court system, and landlords themselves find robust legal representation and are often given the benefit of the doubt by housing court judges. But it turns out, there's an even worse outcome than having to get the City to help out, as tenants at the nineteen buildings owned by Daniel Shalom, aka Daniel Ohebshalom, have discovered over the years: Having the City repeatedly fine your landlord only to have your landlord continue not to give a shit about the outcome and still not really fix anything.
On Monday, the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) finally had enough and got a judge to issue a warrant for Ohebshalom, after finding him repeatedly in contempt for refusing to fix issues in his buildings. Ohebshalom can be jailed for up to 60 days unless he corrects the issues in his building.
That the City took the rare step of issuing a warrant to detain Ohebshalom is a sign of just how bad conditions are in the buildings he owns. When reporter Steve Wishnia, on assignment for Hell Gate, went last year to check in with tenants at several of Ohebshalom's properties, they described horrible scenes of landlord neglect, from no heat and hot water, to mushrooms growing from ceilings, to ceilings collapsing from chronic leaks. In 2022, 15 of Ohebshalom's buildings in Manhattan and Queens had a total of almost 3,000 HPD violations between them. Ohebshalom is a member of a family with a reputation as slumlords that dates back more than 20 years in the city. For years, Ohebshalom let conditions in rent-regulated units deteriorate, in an apparent effort to force tenants move out of their homes so they could be deregulated. After legislators closed that loophole in 2019, Ohebshalom began to just let many apartments go vacant. Entire buildings fell into disrepair, even as Ohebshalom still collected rent from the remaining tenants. Many of these buildings are still filled with violations: Currently, according to City records, there are more than 700 open violations at two of his buildings, 705 and 709 170th Street in Manhattan, for conditions ranging from lead paint, to a rodent infestation, to defective tiling. Adolfo Carrión Jr., the city's housing commissioner, said this morning on NY1 that this warrant was part of a larger effort to help tenants fend off bad landlords, saying his department was committed to pursuing “these bums, these clowns, these slumlords.”
Listing the litany of fines already levied on Ohebshalom, Civil Court Judge Jack Stoller wrote in issuing the warrant that "all of the above violations, serious conditions all, and by no means an exhaustive list of the ongoing conditions that the tenants of the subject premises have had to endure, have remained uncorrected since November of 2022, at least sixteen months before this writing, and often longer."
It's up to the New York City Sheriff's Department to find Ohebshalom, who currently is based in California.
"How is it possible that a city, a system, allows landlords to profit from their bad behavior?" longtime tenant Gilbert Butcher asked Hell Gate last year.
Now we'll find out whether this system, which so often favors landlords, will actually hold one of the city's "worst" responsible.
These links were broken, but a court ordered us to fix them:
- "Bling Bishop" Lamor Whitehead was convicted in federal court on Monday of defrauding a parishioner and trying to extort a businessman while bragging about his connections to the mayor. The CITY first broke the story of how Whitehead had taken $90,000 of a parishioner's retirement savings when she trusted him to use that money to help her buy a house. "He was a man of God," Pauline Anderson, the parishioner, said in court during the trial. "I believed him as the leader of his church." Whitehead was close to Mayor Eric Adams for years, and in 2016, the mayor called him his "good friend" and "brother." You can check out Whitehead's entry at the Table of Success.
- The 5G towers everybody hates are probably heading for a makeover.
- The Department of Social Services has sped up processing of food and cash benefits for struggling New Yorkers, but denial rates have also gone up.
- LaGuardia went from worst to first. A dedicated bus lane to the airport remains years away, for some reason.
- The NYPD is sure glad the City built a bike lane for them to park in.
- The State Senate is pushing back on Governor Kathy Hochul's school funding plan while also aiming to increase taxes on high earners in their new budget proposal.
- Major charities have mostly sat out the response to the influx of migrants to the city. Will a new effort get them to step up? Comptroller Brad Lander hopes so.
- Meanwhile the City's youth shelters are turning away migrant youth.
- In New York City, killing someone with a car is pretty much legal.
- And finally, the New York Football Giants badly mistreated running back Saquon Barkley for years. Hope they remember that when he's absolutely burning them with the Eagles next year!
