After continuously ignoring both the law and court orders, Daniel Ohebshalom — NYC’s worst landlord, as determined by the public advocate’s annual list — has started serving a 60-day sentence on Rikers Island and was soon assaulted, learning the hard way that there is an upper bound to how much a landlord can get away with.
The landlord had first been asked to correct deficiencies in his Washington Heights buildings back in 2021. The next year, tenants sued, but Ohebshalom did not make significant progress on the repairs, leaving them in the lurch.
It would obviously be better for everyone if Ohebshalom had simply fixed the issues promptly; we’re loath to cheer anyone going to jail, particularly the perilous and crumbling Rikers Island. But perhaps as he’s recovering from his beating amid the decaying infrastructure, the landlord can give some thought to the fact his innocent tenants are being subjected to much the same crumbling conditions as have been deemed a constitutional violation on Rikers.
Some might argue that this type of criminal penalty for a residential landlord out of compliance with their obligations under the housing code is too heavy-handed, or unnecessarily punitive. Yet if we’re going to accept the threat of arrest for someone who, for example, swipes a few packs of socks from a Target, it’s absurd to think we’d exempt people who spend years condemning their tenants to substandard and dangerous conditions in open contempt of the law.
Tenants are dependent on the landlord’s compliance to have livable spaces with heat and hot water; they cannot and should not be expected to fix the issues on their own, and these are issues that can compound in ways that are directly threatening to health.
The capacity and tools exist to address each of these problems; none are novel, nor unforeseeable for the landlord. What is lacking is the will to do so, or more crassly put, the volition to do away with a little bit of the profits generated from these buildings in order to make them safe for the tenants.
Ohebshalom did not inadvertently miss a deadline or take too long to repair a single elevator. For years, his tenants have breathed in toxic lead paint and fungus, had their ceilings crumbling in, faced heat outages and had mice and roaches taking over their homes.
The landlord was given enormous runway to fix the issues, but in the end he didn’t care enough to even show up for dozens of appointments to address the problems. He was busying himself continuing to cash tenant checks out at his own home in California, when not running illegal hotels out of rent-stabilized apartments.
Perhaps it shouldn’t take such incredibly flagrant, repeated and defiant violations of the law and court orders for a landlord to face such consequences. Allowing excessive slack when it comes to consequences of housing violations is a de facto signal that we think negligence in rental properties is at the very least not a particularly significant issue.
Let’s change that calculus. We imagine that if more property owners faced the credible threat of some time in the slammer, they might be a little less cavalier about the prospect of letting conditions deteriorate for years.
