Exclusive | Its NYCs priciest slum an apt. building with nearly $4G rents, mold, rats in trendy nabe
A rat-poop-filled Brooklyn apartment building has become the priciest slum in New York, residents claim.Multiple residents of the battered Bushwick site on Starr Street say they are paying nearly $4,000 a month to live with rat feces on the countertops, moldy ceilings and leaky roofs in the trendy area — causing them to form a tenant union to fight the alleged slumlord who owns the place.
Hunter Boone, 34, started the Starr St.Union a month ago after repeatedly calling 311 over the disrepair and occasionally “unlivable” building conditions in his two-bedroom apartment, priced at $3,500 a month.
Boone said he and his dog even both acquired a parasitic infection from the nasty conditions.In May, the two suffered from prolonged digestive issues and were unable to keep food down because of exposure to rat feces, medical records provided by Boone show.
“After that, that’s when I was like, OK, I really need to get the city involved in this rat problem.… If someone is charging this much, why does the building look like this? Wouldn’t that mean that they are quote-unquote a slumlord?” he said.
During a tour of the eight-unit building with The Post, Boone showed the shocking conditions — including rat dropping on his countertops, a condemned backyard water-damaged ceilings and exposed holes in his bathroom floor.“This a fire hazard right here, these doors can’t close properly on their own at the entrance.
I actually printed out my own ‘fire hazard’ signs for this,” Boone said, pointing to one of the building’s emergency violations.The Starr St.
Union is taking organized tenant and legal action against the owner of Cayuga Capital Management Ventures, Jacob Sacks, who has at least 21 buildings in the area.His properties have an average of two open city violations per residential unit, worse than the citywide average of 0.8 per unit, according to data from JustFix.
The Starr Street building alone has 49 open building violations.When reache...