Report: Landlords Behaving Badly
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
After a five-year absence, the Village Voice’s list of “New York’s Ten Worst Landlords” has made a comeback. And, as it has been every year that the list has run — for the quarter-century I’ve lived in New York — my first reaction was to scan the roster for Jewish names.
Think of it as the inverse of the Times wedding pages, where scoping out Semites and rating their alma maters and parental occupations provides a weird weekly thrill. Anyway, if the Voice list is any indication, 2010 has proved a banner year for Jewish building owners behaving badly. Among the offenders are Moishe Indig, “a rabbi and developer in the Satmar community” who “acts like something of a Hasidic community spokesman”; Neil Rubler, head of Vantage Properties, who was accused of using aggressive tactics to evict rent-controlled tenants; and Jacob Bernat, who apparently favors Orthodox Jewish tenants while ignoring everyone else. A couple of others — like Iranian refugee brothers Aaron and Suleyman Yashouafar — sound Jewish, but I couldn’t confirm it. I asked Elizabeth Dwoskin, the Voice staff writer who took over the project from the legendary Jack Newfield, if there’s anything that makes Jews especially bad landlords. She demurred. Except for the fact that Jews happen to own a lot of property, “there’s no big picture” around religion, she said. Some of the tenants in her story don’t seem to agree. As Juana Moreno, who has lived in a Bernat-owned building in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section for 17 years, told Dwoskin: “I have nothing against Jews, but the fact that they are religious people and they treat us badly, it’s worse for them. Anyone can see that we are not bad people.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
