Coming Home

My Journey Out of Homelessness (2024)

(The author outside the Renaissance Shelter in Brooklyn, 2019)

After spending a year and a half in New York City’s Renaissance homeless shelter — an experience I wrote about for Yahoo News in 2019 (https://news.yahoo.com/what-my-journey-into- homelessness-taught-me-150045180.html) and again in 2020 (https://news.yahoo.com/how-to-make- homeless-shelters-safer-120047585.html ) — I moved into a Brooklyn studio apartment in a twenty-story, full service building, thanks to a public housing voucher that covers sixty percent of my rent. The eighteen month period between entering a city shelter and finding subsidized housing is fairly typical, and in my case, the system worked as planned. My lease began in January 2021, and for this happy outcome I’m grateful to the expert and dedicated staff at Renaissance, who shepherded me and many others through the arduous way home.

Unfortunately, the security of my present housing has been interrupted by a new challenge that threatens to put me back on the streets. The problem is due to actions taken by the building landlord (1 FBBK Owner LLC) and their in-house representative, known as a “community manager,” a position that’s employed four different people in the past three years.

These managers — Joshua Marx, Bree Tacket, Natalia Arias and Brandon Castro — were supplied by the Greystar company to act as the landlord’s agent by collecting rent and contracting repairs. However, beginning six months after I moved in, each manager — as if reading from the same playbook — began assessing extra fees, charges that led me to overpay my account by more than $1200 in the ensuing two years.

These illegitimate charges were accompanied by flurries of eviction threats sent by mail, email and warning notices taped to my door. When I asked Mr. Castro about the alleged rent arrears in early 2022, he blithely replied that those charges actually represented the city’s portion of the rent, not mine. That is, he and his predecessors had been billing me for money I didn’t owe, in an attempt to extort extra funds. I asked Castro to kindly stop carpet-bombing me with misleading invoices and eviction notices, which he agreed to do.

Castro didn’t keep his promise. In the Summer of 2022, fistfuls of ominous eviction notices began to appear again in my postal mail and email inbox, at roughly three month intervals, along with documents shoved underneath my door, demanding payment for the city’s part of the rent. Yet, the building manager’s own ledger shows that the city has never missed or underpaid a single month’s rent since I became a tenant. At the same time, similar notices were posted on the doors of other public housing tenants on my floor.

In January of 2023, Castro actually forged a letter purporting to be from the city’s housing office, which claimed that my rent subsidy had been abruptly cancelled because the post office mailed my annual renewal form to the wrong address. This fake letter, which was clumsily photoshopped, was not credible for several reasons. For one thing, I had just renewed the city’s housing subsidy for the coming year. Furthermore, New York City’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) always renews my participation in its public housing program online, not through postal mail. Obviously HRA knows exactly where I live, as you might expect from a housing agency, and they would never cancel a tenant’s eligibility without due process, even supposing that a single postal communication had mysteriously bounced.

Castro insisted that I was henceforth responsible for the full amount of my apartment’s rent, and that I was facing thousands of dollars in new charges. In order to pressure me into paying the false invoices, Castro deactivated my apartment’s magnetic key fob for several weeks, a device that every tenant needs to enter the building after midnight. This key fob is also necessary to access the roof and a community room with free Wi-Fi. At the same time, Castro also prohibited me from visiting the building’s basement, which contains a laundry room, storage lockers and space for oversized recycling items and refuse. After I emailed Castro in May of 2023 to ask for his supervisor’s contact information so I could report his abuses, he stopped answering my messages.

When the landlord hauled me into Housing Court in the summer of 2023, I learned that Castro’s denial of my key access is an illegal form of income discrimination, according to my court-appointed attorney. There were three court dates over the next six months, a period during which I couldn’t afford further rent payments since I’d already overpaid my account by more than $1200, as I mentioned, and I had to skip some meals that summer to get by. Finally the case was settled in November.

The most outrageous part of the entire fiasco is that I’m not the only tenant in the building who is being targeted by management with fraudulent claims and harassment. I have spoken to three of my building’s fellow public housing residents in the past year — including “Manuel,” one of my Renaissance shelter roommates, who moved into the building at the same time I did through the same housing program. He told me he’d experienced a similar deluge of dire letters and invoices for sudden rent increases of hundreds of dollars per month.

Another public housing tenant I spoke with told me her key fob was deactivated, and yet another neighbor said that the building’s management had engaged in illegal proceedings against them in previous years as well. As a counter-example, I talked to two tenants who do not have housing subsidies and who pay the full market rent for their apartments — significantly, they told me they have never experienced similar mistreatment by building management.

These discussions raise the disturbing possibility that my building’s owners are targeting low revenue-producing tenants (at least two of whom are 63 years of age or older, including myself) with unjustified eviction tactics, in a cynical effort to replace us with higher-paying customers. Indeed, my conversations with other residents suggest a longstanding pattern of predatory actions against a vulnerable class of renters.

In early 2023, I notified HRA’s Fraud Investigation Department about the landlord’s unlawful actions, including multiple counts of fraud, forgery and intimidation, dating back to 2021. I look forward to this inquiry’s conclusion, which should put a stop to this behavior.

Stable housing helped improve my health — I’ve been on disability since 2010 — enough so that in 2022 I discontinued ECT therapy (also known as electroshock, for severe depression) after twelve years of monthly treatments. I would prefer not to be stressed by my building’s criminality to the point where I need to resume this hospital procedure, since it necessitates the risks of general anesthesia on a regular basis and causes permanent amnesia.

I used to run into Manuel, my former shelter roommate — who is a couple years older than me — every few months. The last time I saw him, in early 2023, he seemed anxious not to make trouble, and he assured me that the city housing office was helping him deal with the building’s persecution. But he wouldn’t give me details, and now, a year later, he’s disappeared without a word. The shelter where we met wasn’t meant to be home, but it certainly protected us from land sharks like those infesting our building. I hope Manuel’s okay.