Flushing landlord cheated tenants, city

From the Village Voice:

One stormy evening last summer, in a corner of a playground on Union Street in Flushing, a small crowd gathered. They were residents of 140-35 Franklin Avenue one block to the south, and they were there to hear Aaron Carr, a former state legislative aide who now runs the nonprofit Housing Rights Initiative, explain how their landlord had been swindling them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent money.

Their building, a six-story apartment complex typical of this low-rise immigrant neighborhood, had turned up during a trawl by HRI staffers through city tax records, Carr explained. The building’s owner, Hewlett Associates, had filed with the state in July 2007 for a J-51 tax abatement, a rebate available to landlords who upgrade their buildings. By law, anyone getting J-51 money for a building must agree to keep it rent-regulated as long as it receives the tax break; Hewlett, however, had recently filed a property tax form with the New York City Department of Finance that casually listed its J-51 benefits while listing only 14 rent-stabilized units — in a building of 113 apartments.