COLLECTIVELY PENNED BY OHTU’s: Chelsea Spencer, Sylvie Wise, Richard Maguire, Kelsey Fairhurst, & Bryant Wells

We are tenants of the Opera House Lofts building at 27 Arion Place in Bushwick. The building is owned by the Karpen family, who own many loft buildings in Brooklyn. In 2004, the Karpens bought our building, a historic choir hall that at the time had a commercial certificate of occupancy, and began converting it into a rental apartment building. For this project they hired the architect Henry Radusky, who has a notorious history with the Department of Buildings for failing to comply with building codes. In 2002, for example, the DOB confronted Radusky after inspectors identified “55 separate projects where he allegedly failed to follow required codes” and sanctioned him with a one-year “voluntary surrender” of his right to certify his own plans as meeting code.

/_\_ Architect Arthur Atlas: analysis of Opera House Lofts Constructional Integrity

Three years later, in 2005, the same year that construction on the conversion of our building was taking place, a member of the New York State Assembly demanded a review of all of his firm’s projects and also accused the DOB of “regularly overlook[ing] allegedly illegal plans submitted by Radusky.” It is unclear whether the DOB took action against Radusky following the assemblyman’s request. But in 2011, a building designed by Radusky’s firm in Brighton Beach collapsed during construction, injuring five workers, one of whom later tragically died. There are countless other Radusky incidents we could mention, a great many dating to years of the Brooklyn loft-conversion building boom in the mid-aughts, when Radusky was at work with the Karpens on our building; if you type “Henry Radusky” into Google’s news search, you will find no good news.

But we’d like to cite one more recent example, because it involves Radusky’s work on another building owned by our landlords, 255 18th Street, and because the tenants there continue to live in hazardous conditions. In 2003 Radusky filed plans for converting this building that drew cut-outs along its entire rear wall, which was directly on the lot line. The DOB revoked the certificate of occupancy for that building because the work was not done in accordance with the plans, and this allowed the tenants to apply for Loft Law coverage. Despite this, the Karpens, our landlords, have done nothing to fix the horrible conditions at 255 18th Street, leaving tenants without essential services, including five years without cooking gas or heat.

Given their egregious history, how can our landlords be trusted to address, on their own, the safety and condition issues at our building?

Building Safety and Conditions at 27 Arion Place

First, fire safety is our number one concern. We have been feeling particularly fearful about these issues in our building following the horrifying news of the Bronx apartment fire earlier this year, in which—as you know—forty-four people were injured and seventeen people killed. This deadly tragedy was the result of two building-maintenance issues—cold indoor temperatures and a broken self-closing door mechanism—that had probably appeared negligible before they caused seventeen people to die of smoke inhalation.

Our building is full of similar issues, including lack of fire protection, illegal heating units, illegal mezzanines, lack of proper egress, and indeed, many doors that do not self-close. Not only would these conditions in combination prove deadly in the event of a fire, they also make a fire more likely. In March and April of this year, the DOB and FDNY confirmed our fears by issuing several Class 1 (“immediately hazardous”) fire code violations for noncompliant sprinklers, heaters vented with illegal PVC piping through exterior walls, and other issues related to heater venting and valves.

21 Open Environmental Control Board Violations

In addition to the building’s failure to comply with fire codes, our landlords have neglected to maintain it in ways that impact our daily lives.

These issues have been left to fester for many years. But in recent months, our landlord has performatively responded to the violations issued by the DOB and FDNY by rushing to fix cosmetic issues throughout the building. Meanwhile, the more serious fire-safety issues remain unaddressed. This is perhaps not surprising, given that in court our landlords have claimed that the building—as originally drawn in the plans filed with the DOB—is “safe” and “code compliant.” Recently, however, the landlord asked for access to our units to prepare “new plans.” Why would they need new plans if the as-built plans are “safe” and “code compliant”? They have refused to explain.

Loft Law Application/DOB Cooperation with the Landlord

In 2020, a group of tenants in our building came together to figure out how we could keep our homes and make them safe and habitable. We hoped that involving city oversight agencies would ensure that the fire-safety issues would be addressed. Because the building did not have a valid residential certificate of occupancy, we applied for Loft Law protection. We were not surprised when the landlord opposed our efforts. What was surprising, and extremely disheartening, was that the DOB worked against us, choosing instead to cooperate with our landlord in an attempt to invalidate our right to seek Loft Law protection by taking advantage of the DOB’s confusing and inconsistent record for our building. (At one of our court dates, the DOB representative present even “accidentally” referred to our landlords as “her client.”)

When we began preparing our Loft Law application, the DOB had no residential certificate of occupancy on file for our building, located at 11–25 Arion Place. Next door to our building, there is a small vacant lot, 9 Arion Place. It was for the address of this vacant lot that the DOB, in 2005, granted a certificate of occupancy for 70 “apartment/hotels.” Even if we assume—and we do not—that the issuance of this CO for the wrong address, the wrong lot number, and the wrong BIN was simply, as our landlords have claimed, an innocent “clerical error,” there are other inconsistencies in the descriptions in the CO and alteration filings that can be reconciled neither with the characteristics of the building that was built in 1886 as a choir hall nor with the building that stands today as our home.

These concern not only the height of the building and the number of stories but also, far more worrying, the construction classification, which is based on fire-resistance ratings of materials. As Arthur Atlas, the architect we hired in 2020 to inspect our building and review its DOB records, wrote in a report to us, which we have shared with the DOB, “The very issuance of this Certificate of Occupancy”—originally for 9 Arion Place, the vacant lot—“betrays its fraudulent nature.”

Nevertheless, when our landlords asked the DOB to transfer this 2005 CO for the vacant lot to our building, the DOB abruptly issued a new CO for our building instead, without asking for any new plans reflecting the existing conditions.

The DOB Borough Commissioner signed off on this and told our attorney, Michael Kozek, that the DOB did not have to inspect the interiors of our units to issue this CO.

Our attorney has sent multiple letters to the DOB providing substantial details about the building’s non–code compliance. The DOB has completely ignored all of them. As tenants, we too have made several attempts to communicate directly with the DOB about the issues at our building, requesting inspections and meetings. These have been ignored. In February of this year, we organized a walk-through of our building and units. We invited elected officials and their staff, community groups, and the DOB. The DOB declined to attend. We have only once received an official response from the DOB regarding our complaints about our building’s conditions and their relevance to the validity of the CO. It was a cryptic letter from someone at the DOB saying that our complaints had been “administratively closed” prior to inspection. We suspect this was to avoid oversight.

The DOB has thus received many communications from us as a team directly and from our attorney that detail our building’s failure to comply with code.

In spite of the evidence presented in our communications of our building’s non–code compliance and in the DOB’s own records, the DOB went to the Kings County Supreme Court and asked Justice Debra Silber for the 2005 CO to be “transferred” from the neighboring vacant lot to our building. The DOB claimed that the address on the 2005 CO was a “typo,” even though the filings for the CO were specifically for the neighboring property. The DOB submitted one cherry-picked document to support this argument, and its attorney expressed deep anti-tenant views throughout proceedings. Again, the DOB requested that this transfer of the 2005 CO occur without any inspection of the existing conditions at the building to ensure that they comply with code.

If an inspection had been performed, there is no legal way the CO could have been transferred. Instead, a new CO was issued for our building, thereby, in one stroke, legitimating the landlords’ claim that this is a safe and code-compliant building—when it patently is not—and blocking our right to Loft Law protection.

We have every reason to believe that the Loft Law is the only recourse we have to protect our right to safe and stable housing.

In court, to distract from the actual issues at play, our landlords have repeatedly accused us of trying to take advantage of what they say is nothing more nefarious than a “typo.” Given the Karpens’ documented history of finding remarkably inventive ways to skirt laws that were designed to protect New Yorkers, and the DOB’s documented history of being willing to look the other way, we find this excuse preposterous. We also know, from our own lived experience, that our landlords cannot be trusted to address the issues in our building. Again, these are issues that threaten our lives, our homes, and our community.

The so-called typo is

a red herring.

The real issues we are here to speak out about are our right—as loft tenants, community members, New Yorkers, and human beings—to safe, stable housing, our landlord’s desire to continue to profit from the neglect of tenants throughout Brooklyn, and the DOB’s willingness to aid them in pursuing this desire. If the DOB had not gone out of its way to cooperate with our landlords while refusing to even acknowledge our concerns about the safety and habitability of our building, we would now have Loft Law protection.

Professor

Thank You Kind Sir: Your demonstration of the power of humanity has realized it in our hearts, minds, & futures. To the wisdom of your empathy, the strength of your empowering teaching, to the boldness of your kindness— much love to a man we will never forget…