Hate your landlord? 7 examples of how it could be worse

By Brette Sember

Do you hate your landlord? Or love them? Some people have nothing but good things to say about the folks they lease property from, but the sailing is not always smooth. The term “slumlord” exists for a reason, after all. But no matter how bad your own experience with landlords may have been, the following 7 examples show it could have been much, much worse:

1) Orazio Petito so outraged the tenants of three buildings he owned in Sunset Park, NY, that they created an art show exhibiting photos of the mold, garbage, cracked windows, and dangerous fire escapes that had resulted in 684 housing violations against Petito.

2) Daniel Melamed became the landlord of a 14-unit building in Crown Heights, NY, in 2012 and promptly turned the heat off in the winter and refused to clean up toxic lead paint that was flaking off in the common areas. He faced 251 housing violations and was eventually indicted for child endangerment and unlawful eviction.

3) Kip and Nicole Macy bought a building in San Francisco and tried to oust their tenants by cutting the phone lines, turning off the power, changing locks, and boarding up the windows. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they went the extra mile and entered the units to soak beds and clothing with ammonia. They also sawed a hole in the floor of one apartment (while the tenant was home) and cut beams in the building to destabilize it. Kip went to prison for four years in 2008 for their misdeeds.

4) Terrance Hill might be the worst landlord who wasn’t actually a landlord. He allegedly advertised property for rent in Queens using Craigslist; he then rented out the homes and collected money from tenants. It turned out he didn’t actually own the properties at all.

5) Raizel Weiser of J&A 1007 Trust allegedly owns a building in New York where, in 2014, tenants said there was no running water and no heat. Tenants reportedly used bottled water to flush toilets and heated their apartments with their gas stoves.

6) 3525 Decatur Avenue LLC, a New York property management company, was hit with 3,352 housing violations for the 13 properties it owns. Six hundred sixty of the violations took place in one building alone, where it was reported that garbage overflowed, ceilings leaked, and rats had taken over.

7) Adib Khouri, co-owns a San Francisco building whose tenants have sued over a host of complaints: sinks that fill up with sewage, a hallway that has never been cleaned of blood stains from a fatal stabbing, and ceilings that drip water, not to mention mold infestations, broken smoke detectors, nests of bedbugs, and busted windows. Tenants are asking for a whopping $10 million in damages.

If you’re a tenant dealing with landlord issues, be sure to know your legal rights, and if you’re a landlord yourself, avoid finding yourself on a list like this by making sure your leases and other documents are in proper legal shape.

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