Kushner Cos. accused of pushing out tenants
NEW YORK — The hammering and drilling began just months after Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm bought a converted warehouse apartment building in the hip Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Tenants say it started early in the morning and went on until nightfall, so loud that it drowned out normal conversation, so violent it rattled pictures off the walls. So much dust wafted through ducts and under doorways that it coated beds and clothes in closets. Rats crawled through holes in the walls. Workers with passkeys barged in unannounced. Residents who begged for relief got a standard reply: “We have permits.”
More than a dozen current and former residents of the building told The Associated Press that they believe the Kushner Cos.’ relentless construction, along with rent hikes of $500 a month or more, was part of a campaign to push tenants out of rentstabilized apartments and bring high-paying condo buyers in.
If so, it was a remarkably successful campaign. An AP investigation found that over the past three years, more than 250 rent-stabilized apartments — 75 percent of the building — were either emptied or sold as the Kushner Cos. was converting the building to luxury condos. Those sales so far have totaled more than $155 million, an average of $1.2 million per apartment.
“They won, they succeeded,” says Barth Bazyluk, who left apartment C606 with his wife and baby daughter in December. “You have to be ignorant or dumb to think this wasn’t deliberate.”
‘Predatory’ strategy
This up-close look at one of the Kushner Cos.’ largest residential buildings in New York illustrates what critics describe as the firm’s sharpelbowed business practices while it was run by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and eventual White House adviser Jared Kushner.
The Kushner Cos. told the AP that it didn’t harass any tenants to get them out. But the data suggest turnover at the building known as the Austin Nichols House at 184 Kent Ave. was significantly higher than city averages for coveted rentstabilized buildings, leaving behind a trail of anger, disrupted lives and a $10 million lawsuit filed late Sunday in which 20 tenants say they were harassed and exposed to high levels of cancer-causing dust.
On Monday, a New York state agency announced it was launching an investigation into whether Kushner Cos. violated state housing laws and regulations meant to prevent landlords from disturbing tenants’ peace and privacy.
“We’ve looked into hundreds of rent-stabilized buildings and this is one of the worst we’ve ever seen,” says Aaron Carr, head of tenant watchdog Housing Rights Initiative, whose investigation led to the lawsuit. “The scale and speed of tenants leaving, the conditions to which they were exposed, provides a window into the Kushner Cos.’ predatory business model.”
In a statement, the Kushner Cos. acknowledged it received some complaints about construction during major renovations, which ended in December 2017, but said that it responded to them immediately and that “tremendous care was taken to prevent dust and inconvenience to tenants.”
‘Get people out’
At the height of the construction, tenants fought back with three dozen complaints to the city’s 311 hotline about work after hours, banging and pounding, falling debris and rodents.
Ronan Conroy says he complained to the Kushners several times, walking down to the sales office once to confront management in person.
“Your strategy is to get people out, right?” Conroy recalled asking a staffer at the desk. He says the man basically shrugged, offered no dispute, then said, “We can let you out of your lease.”