Above photo: Five-alarm fire burns in a Bronx apartment building early on Friday morning. Screenshot via FDNY.
Apartment fire displaces over 200 residents.
The five-alarm fire in the Bronx sheds light on how landlords are extracting profit by maximizing the suffering of their tenants, and how New York City is doing little to stop it.
A massive, five-alarm fire broke out in the Bronx on Friday morning, displacing over 200 people out in the below freezing temperatures, and injuring seven people. At the time of publication, New York City firefighters are still battling the massive blaze that engulfed the top floor of a six-story residential building. Over 81 displaced families are sheltering in a nearby school, and all the apartments on the top floor have been destroyed.
For the short term, displaced residents will be placed in hotels, then will meet with caseworkers who will help move them into one of the city’s shelters.
This fire broke out nearly three years to the day of the Twin Parks fires of 2022, a fire which killed 17 tenants after ripping through a neglected building with inadequate fire safety. The landlord of Twin Parks North West, Rick Gropper, had also failed to provide adequate heat to his tenants, and the fire originated from a faulty space heater, a solution which many residents had been resorting to in order to stay warm in the freezing cold temperatures.
Neighbors and residents suspect that the fire in Allerton was also caused by a faulty space heater. Peoples Dispatch spoke to Allerton resident Ilise, who on Friday morning was on the way to bring groceries to her friend who lives in the building. According to Ilise, the building was often cold when she visited her friend, as the heat was rarely turned on. Residents reported to CBS News New York that the building had been without heat for a while this winter, and they had resorted to using space heaters to stay warm.
Building resident Nicole Novoa claimed that for three years, there has been little to no heat in the apartment. “There’s days that you wake up and there’s no hot water or there’s no heating. I work from home and I work with a coat on, it’s freezing,” she told CBS News New York. “We have a lot of electricity problems and we also don’t have no heating. So a lot of us do have space heaters on, so I’m sure that’s part of the reason that it triggered it.”
“There’s no heat always, all the time,” one resident told CBS News. “For years.”
“I called today and I spoke to them at the office, and they hung up on me. So you know what I do? I called 311, and they gave me a confirmation number,” another resident told CBS News.
Much like Twin Parks North West, the top complaint of tenants of 2910 Wallace Avenue, where the fire broke out, was a lack of heat and hot water. The building is owned by Ved Parkash, who is “not only the worst landlord in New York City, but in the whole world,” according to one of his Bronx tenants. Indeed, in 2015 Parkash was labeled one of the worst landlords in New York City after racking up over 2,000 open housing violations. As reported by The Real Deal, in 2016 Parkash was sued by some of his tenants in a building he owned in the Bronx. The following year, one tenant in that Bronx building died of a rodent-borne illness. Two of Parkash’s buildings in the Bronx have also been heavily damaged by fire before.
In 2023, Housing Justice Unit of the Legal Aid Society secured a restraining order against Parkash for circumventing rent-stabilization laws, which provide limits to how much landlords can charge for apartments in New York City. According to LAS, Parkash, alongside room rental business operator, Luis Bello, was involved in a scheme to charge tenants more rent than permitted by NYC’s rent-stabilization laws.
LAS wrote that, “To further maximize profits and prevent tenants from asserting their rights, Bello and his agents engaged in egregious behavior, regularly intimidating and harassing some tenants by destroying their property, making physical and verbal threats, and illegally locking them out of their homes. Parkash also commenced dozens of sham eviction proceedings, leaving Bello free to replace old tenants with new occupants and continue the scheme.”
In 2023, Parkash was also sued by tenants of one of his buildings in Queens for ignoring requests to remove mold, roaches, and mice, as well as failing to provide adequate heat in the winter.
Lack of heat due to greedy and negligent landlords is a persistent problem in the Bronx, leading many to resort to space heaters which can pose a fire hazard. According to a 2023 report from the New York City comptroller’s office, an outsized share of heating complaints came from buildings concentrated in the Northwest and South Bronx, northern Manhattan and central Brooklyn, some of the poorest areas in New York City and the country overall.
Although New York City has laws on the books to enforce adequate heat, data shows that these laws often go unenforced. According to the comptroller’s report, of the 1,077 buildings that registered at least five complaints per heat season, the city government failed to take any action to enforce existing laws in over 25% of these buildings.
Following the deadly Twin Parks fire, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation that targeted not the negligent landlords that fail to adequately heat their buildings, but instead the sale of space heaters themselves.