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Worst Landlords 2014: Who Lends to Them?
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Earlier this week, ANHD member groups stood with Public Advocate Letitia James as she unveiled the 2014 version of the Worst Landlord Watchlist, giving tenants and advocates a powerful tool to hold landlords accountable for providing decent and safe conditions in their apartments. The list reveals the addresses and violation counts for buildings owned by some of the cities’ worst landlords. This year’s list has been expanded to include more buildings than ever before with more than 6,800 citywide. Since its creation in 2010 by then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, the Worst Landlord List has become a useful tool in helping organizers, advocates, and tenant leaders across the city bring pressure against negligent owners & landlords, while exposing some of the worst building conditions. ANHD members and tenant leaders routinely use the list to organize locally-based campaigns to call out a particular landlord and shine a light on some of the worst offenders.
While ANHD has supported the work of the Public Advocate’s office in creating the Worst Landlord List, there is another conversation to be had about the bank and non-bank lenders that make loans to building owners that appear on the Worst Landlord List. Robin Shimoff – the daughter of notorious Bronx landlord Jake “The Snake” Selechnik – is a prime example. As reported in the Daily News on 10/8, Ms. Shimoff “has a whopping 3,352 violations on her 13 properties, a dubious distinction that earned her the top spot on the bad landlords list.” A little extra research by ANHD reveals that Signature Bank recently financed 11 of her 13 buildings in the list. Below is a list of the top banks who have recently made loans to over 4,000 multifamily buildings appearing on the Worst Landlords Watchlist in 2014.
Of course, institutions that make a high volume of loans are going to have some bad ones on their books and may therefore be more present as a lender on this list. ANHD has long held that a healthy lending market is crucial to a healthy housing market, and that good lending is as necessary as bad lending is destructive.
However, to insure the health and stability of our communities, banks across the city must to do a better job of vetting the Robin Shimoff’s of the world and tighten lending practices for the sake of neighborhood stabilization and long-term affordability. Banks should underwrite based on the actual income of the building with legally-feasible growth projections, not the speculative income, which leads landlords to bad practices and destabilizes the building. In light of this banks must do due-diligence to weed out the known bad actors, such as Selechnick and his family. In the instances where a loan or building does become distressed, the bank should use their leverage to help the tenants gain repairs or work to transfer the building to a preservation-minded owner through City programs such as HPD’s Preserving City Neighborhoods.
We applaud the Public Advocate for updating and expanding upon this important resource for tenants, advocates, and government officials.