MANSION THAT MISERY BUILT
Tenants suffer in hell as landord laps up luxury She has pool & cars, they have rats and mold
THE CITY’S worst landlord lives in a $1.2 million suburban mansion with an in-ground pool, a sweeping front lawn and a circular driveway — about 30 miles north and a world away from a rat-infested building she owns in the Bronx.
Robin Shimoff’s brick home has seven bedrooms and spans 7,000 square feet. The Rockland County home features four full baths and a multicar garage.
But Shimoff also owns 13 buildings and has amassed 3,352 violations through the end of August — earning her the shameful crown of the city’s worst slumlord, according to Public Advocate Letitia James, who released the “Worst Landlord” list last week.
The Daily News visited one of the worst buildings in Shimoff’s portfolio. It’s an 86-unit building on Decatur Ave. near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The News spied a basement play area for kids that featured a brightly colored alphabet stenciled into the filthy floor.
Just inches away sat a trap for rats.
“It looks like a dungeon here,” said tenant Jasmine Rodriguez, 31, pointing at a gaping hole in the wall where she says menacing rodents roam freely near the children’s play spot.
Above the play area hang electrical wires and gas meters. The walls are pocked and peeling. “Day Care” is scrawled in fluorescent pink on a doorway.
As of Friday, Shimoff’s building on Decatur Ave. where the basement day care center is located had amassed 275 open code violations, including 26 considered most serious, city records show. Open violations include plaster in danger of collapse and scalding water “throughout” an apartment.
In two apartments the city has denied Shimoff’s recent request to
Shimoff’s company still has 2,490 open violations, including 458 deemed ‘most serious’
postpone cleaning up toxic lead paint.
Shimoff’s company, 3525 Decatur Avenue LLC, has reduced the numberof violations since Aug. 31 — the cut-off point for data to be included on the worst landlord list. But as of Friday, there were still 2,490 open violations, including 458 deemed by the city Department of Housing Preservation & Development as most serious.
In some of Shimoff’s buildings, tenants have gone to court again and again to force repairs. The city has been forced to obtain war- rants to gain entry to properties to clean up lead paint or turn on heat in the depths of winter.
The issues in these buildings go back years, mostly because they were owned previously by her slumlord father, Jacob Selechnik, who also managed to rack up hundreds of violations in the years he ran things, records show.
This father-daughter duo exemplifies the incredible obstacles the city faces in trying to force bad landlords to clean up their sordid acts.
The public advocate’s list singled out an amazing 6,800 buildings across the city that have accumulated significant numbers of code violations per unit.The list presents a catalog of miseries — collapsing ceilings, busted boilers, rodent infestation and toxic lead paint.
Many of these landlords have been on this list since James’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio, started it four years ago when he was public advocate. Some of the landlords on this list live in the city, but others live far away from their properties, relying on building managers, porters and superintendents to deal with what some tenants say is a never-ending list of repairs.
“Some of these landlords are absent landlords,” said James.
“They don’t see (the conditions) and we visited some of these units and it breaks your heart. A lot of the these residents are seniors, immigrants and there’s a lot of children.”
Shimoff, for one, lives far away in the leafy Rockland County suburb of Monsey. She and her husband bought their mansion in an upscale neighborhood in the early 1990s with a $260,000 mortgage.
Shimoff did not return numerous calls seeking comment. But the building manager assigned to oversee her properties, Jose Peña, agreed to answer questions.
On Friday he said the number of violations listed by James has been reduced dramatically in the last few weeks. He emphasized that Shimoff is on top of the situation, aggressively assigning workers to fix what’s broken.
“She does visit the buildings and she knows what’s going on and what she’s inherited,” Peña said. “We have tons of work crews doing work every day.”
Over on Decatur Ave., however, tenant Rosemary Cabrera, 58, says Shimoff may as well be a ghost — like an urban legend.
“Nobody’s ever seen her,” she said.
Cabrera says her two-bedroom apartment has been in need of repairs for years with persistent water leaks that cause the ceiling to collapse repeatedly. On Friday she burst into tears as she pointed out mold creeping into the corner of her bathroom ceiling — an indication that the leak had returned yet again.
And there are other persistent problems. The bathroom sink ran continuously, the spigots unable to stop the flow. And she said Con Ed cut off her gas for two months after the used stove the landlord provided shot flames up to the ceiling.
Recently she said the building manager told her she’d have to move out if she wanted the $995-a-month apartment to be properly repaired.
“Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go,” she said, shaking her head and spreading out a pile of carefully assembled documents on her coffee table. “My rent is always up to date. I have the receipts and everything.”
Cabrera’s daughter, Jasmine Rodriguez, is particularly upset about the basement where the day care center and the building’s laundry room is located.
One entrance to the day care center requires children to enter through an alley where on Friday garbage bags were stacked waist high. Tenants said it had been there for three days.
And in the basement near the day care center’s entry door, Rodriguez recalled seeing a group of rats scurry out of a gaping hole near the elevator and sprint across the floor.
“And the play area is right there,” Rodriguez said, pointing at the rainbow colored letters spraypainted on the floor during a visit to the basement.
Rodriguez said tenants have seen the children playing in the basement, though a woman who said she worked for the day care center insisted, “there is no play area in the basement.”
Tenants in the Decatur Ave. building have fought in court for years for repairs, but Public Advocate James says more ammunition is needed to turn things around.
James has proposed expanding the number of distressed buildings with excessive code violations that currently are targeted for upgrade under the city’s “alternative enforcement program.” The program targets the 200 most distressed buildings in the city, forcing landlords to remedy all code violations or face steep fines.