Maintenance budget reallocated to ‘strategic depreciation initiatives’
The Improvements You Cannot See
NEW YORK — A Manhattan landlord has notified tenants of a 22 percent rent increase to fund what the notice describes as “building enhancement and capital investment,” a phrase that tenants of 847 West 143rd Street say refers to a lobby that still has the same broken intercom from 2017 and a boiler that operates on what one resident calls “hope and ambient anger.”
Property manager Todd Increment declined a request for comment and then sent a four-paragraph email explaining why the comment was not possible.
The Enhancement, Itemized
An itemized breakdown of the capital investment, obtained by a tenant who photographed it through Increment’s car window, lists: “lobby aesthetic consultation” ($12,000), “HVAC strategic review” ($8,500), “roof assessment” ($6,000), and “management fee for managing the fee for managing the building” ($14,000). The total comes to $40,500, which the building’s twelve units will collectively fund at a cost of roughly $3,375 per unit per year, or approximately what it would cost to fix the intercom.
“The intercom works fine,” said Increment, contradicting himself slightly, as he had previously listed it under “legacy infrastructure pending modernization.”
Tenant Response
Tenant organizer Yolanda Rent-Strike called the increase “creative non-maintenance billing.” She noted that the building’s HPD violation record lists forty-one open complaints, of which three involve the heating system and one involves “an odor the landlord has classified as ‘historic character.’”
Increment said the violations were “in process.” He has said this since 2020. The odor, tenants confirm, has not gotten more historic. It has just gotten more present.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com