(HorizonPost.com) – Public Advocate Jumaane Williams on Wednesday released the report of New York City’s worst landlords of 2023 which shows that infamous slumlord Johnathan Santana remains the city’s worst landlord, the New York Post reported.
According to Williams’ Landlord Watchlist report, Santana racked up a record 3,293 open violations on 306 units in 15 buildings in Manhattan and Queens, surpassing the 2,980 open violations that placed Santana at the top of the watchlist in 2022.
Williams presented this year’s landlord watchlist at a news conference outside of one of Santana’s buildings on West 46th Street, which several weeks ago was placed under the control of an outside administrator after a years-long court battle waged by tenants seeking to remedy the building’s unsafe conditions.
John Reeds, a tenant in a dilapidated Midtown building owned by Santana, told the New York Post that the building has been home to drug addict squatters for years and has been plagued by heating outages and flooding. He said during one winter, the building was without heat or hot water for more than 20 days.
In another incident, a fire caused by electrical issues destroyed parts of the building’s roof seven years ago, forcing top-floor tenants to install tarps that had to be kept in place for more than a year. Many of the apartments became uninhabitable, with entire ceilings left in rubble on the floors, Reeds said.
Reeds told the New York Post that many of Santana’s buildings were once beautiful but have since been allowed to “deteriorate into squalor.”
The annual landlord watchlist spotlights the city’s most negligent property owners and is compiled using data from the Department of Housing Prevention and Development which tracks the average number of code violations opened each month.
In the 2023 watchlist, over a dozen landlords listed had an average of well over a thousand open violations each, Jumaane Williams said.
Copyright 2023, HorizonPost.com
