Afraid for Life and Safety

Village Tenants Demand Action Against Landlord

By Phyllis Eckhaus

With the support of banks and private equity, Sonny Tran, a notorious slumlord, has been acquiring apartment buildings and trashing them, according to tenants, elected officials and others. They demanded action at a June 18 rally in front of 543 East 6th Street, one of at least 31 New York City apartment buildings—seven in the Village—that Tran owns with his wife Ahn (Anna) Do.

“I’m afraid for the life and safety of all of us,” a 25-year tenant at 543 East 6th Street, told The Village View, asking to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. She and her neighbor Merideth Genin described their alarm after Tran bought the 95-year old building two years ago and began illegally excavating the basement and foundation until the Department of Buildings stopped him.

“Our first experience with Tran was nearly having the building brought down around our ears,” Genin recalled. At a meeting with tenants, “he claimed they were replacing a sewer line…[yet] we never had our water shut off. We know that he was just lying and he lies as easily as he breathes.”

Further illegal construction followed as Tran replaced two apartments on one floor, one of them rent stabilized, with “five tiny bedrooms” illegally listed with Airbnb, Genin reported. The transient tenants got keys to the building. Construction dust, tested and found to contain lead, lingered for months.

Dina Dillon, a tenant and 34-year resident at 219 East 5th Street, said, “Sonny Tran got a loan from Dime Bank, then sat at our family’s dining room table and cried that he was claiming bankruptcy because the city…demanded he demolish our 1862 historic landmark building. When we vacated, he immediately came with an architect to figure out how to add a floor, all the while threatening to have us arrested for returning to our apartment.” She added “He made us homeless for six months…while the work took only one and a half days. He built a luxury duplex above us in what was previously a rent stabilized apartment.”

“Rats jumped on me and ran up my arm,” reported Claude Isbell, a tenant at 218 Thompson Street. “If I hadn’t been wearing a construction jacket, I might have ended up in the ER.” His building, purchased by Tran in 2021 with a mortgage from Signature Bank, is now in foreclosure.

“There are more rats here than people,” said tenant Milan Moore, describing the deteriorating conditions in her Tran-owned building at 73 Second Avenue. “It’s terrifying to see the garbage bags moving.” She noted that many tenants now throw their garbage down the stairs rather than confront rats in the basement where the garbage cans are.

Tenant Brian Austin at 14 First Avenue condemned the illegal hotel operating for a year and a half in his Tran building, resulting in “partying, screaming, slamming doors, and coming and going at all times of the day and night.” With tenants also experiencing “rats, mice, and prehistoric-sized cockroaches” and leaks that go unrepaired for years, he characterized Tran and funder Dime Bank as treating his building “like a financial play toy” for generating return on investment regardless of tenant rights.

Jodie Leidecker, a tenant organizer with the Cooper Square Committee, told The Village View that in the past few months, in just a few of Tran’s East Village buildings, the Department of Buildings issued nearly $100,000 in fines and penalties, “a crazy high amount as fines tend to be pretty low.”

Speaking at the rally, Assemblymember Harvey Epstein and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal decried not only Tran, but the banks and private equity firms that continue to bankroll him. Among the institutions lending millions to Tran are state-chartered banks including Dime Bank, Signature Bank (before it failed), Cross County Savings, M.Y. Safra Bank, Sterling National Bank as well as nonbank and private equity lenders such as Brick Capital Group, Stormfield Capital and Computershare Trust.

Epstein declared, “Our communities and tenants are suffering because private equity doesn’t care. They care about profits over people and we need to fight for people over profits.” He and Hoylman-Sigal had succeeded in passing a measure in this year’s state budget to make private equity wait 75 days before being allowed to purchase properties, in order to give non-private equity buyers first dibs, including the time to secure a mortgage.

Hoylman-Sigal noted that he and Epstein have pending state legislation “to prevent lenders from loaning to bad landlords like Tran. We need to get that passed.” He also encouraged tenants to talk to the Office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is investigating Tran.

Leidecker noted that lenders may be more than just indifferent to tenants; they may actively be relying on bad landlords to be bad, forcing rent stabilized tenants out and profiteering off illegal schemes. “Both the landlord and the banks have access to the rent rolls when they buy a building, so they know the current income,” she observed, asking “How do they plan to make profits when the loans are often much higher than the current rents can support?”

Tousif Ahsan with the New Economy Project (NEP) put it more bluntly, “Landlords say to the banks, ‘Hey, we want to buy this building so we can terrorize the tenants and destabilize units. And that’s how we’re gonna make profits together’ and the big banks are happy to sign off on this.”

Ahsan, an organizer with NEP’s public banking project, reminded the rally crowd that “not only are the big banks working with landlords to make our lives worse, but our public money is supporting them.” New York City deposits “over $100 billion” of public funds each year into banks including Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America. He urged support of public banking legislation in the state legislature and city council, contending that a public bank would redeploy public money away from investments “in private prisons…and weapons manufacturing” and towards projects benefiting ordinary New Yorkers.