‘All we ask, we want you to hear us’
Bay Ridge tenants demand discounted rent for months with no gas
Been Told You Have to “Live with the Pain?”
COURIER LIFE, MAY 14-20, 2021 3
BY JESSICA PARKS
Residents of a Bay Ridge
apartment building are demanding
their landlord discount
their rent for the nearly
half a year they lived without
cooking gas — but the landlord
is insisting the tenants
pay up.
“All we ask, we want an
abatement, we want you to
hear us,” said a resident
named Jasmine. “We want
you to know it wasn’t easy for
us to go on without gas and
other problems that have been
going on with the building. “
A handful of tenants protested
outside of 303 99th St. on
April 30 calling for a 30 percent
discount for the fi ve months
they lived without cooking gas
— an inconvenience which
forced many of the residents
to rack up bills ordering takeout
and live off of unhealthy
microwave meals.
“I have a microwave and
toaster oven but not being able
to throw pans on the stove and
cook food was a lot of money
spent on takeout,” said Nolan
Roberts, an eight-year resident
of the building, “and a lot of
eating frozen dinners, which
are convenient but they are
not really that good for you.”
Revlyn Apartments, the
management company for the
building, named ‘The Dorset,”
counter-offered a $30 discount
for rent from October through
February, when there was no
cooking gas — a proposition the
residents said was laughable.
“He returned back with an
offer of $30 per month which
is signifi cantly less than what
we asked for,” Roberts told
Brooklyn Paper. “$30 is one or
two days of takeout.”
Shortly after turning the
gas back on, residents say the
landlord, Alen Polen, left notices
for tenants who didn’t
pay their rent — urging them
to pay up or face eviction.
‘We have to beg for
something to be fi xed’
The months without cooking
gas were just the tip of the
iceberg for some tenants.
Coupled with the inability
to cook, fi rst-fl oor residents
like Roberts were faced with
on-again, off-again construction
inside of their apartments
for nearly two months before
the building was hit with stopwork
orders from the city.
“It was on and off. They
were here for a few weeks, did
all of the demo work, then they
would come and they would
go,” Roberts told Brooklyn Paper.
“And then the stop-work
orders got put up, and then
it was paused for a month or
two, and then they came back
and started working again. “
Since then, Roberts said he’s
been left with exposed pipes
that weren’t there prior to the
outage, and large patches on
his ceiling from when workers
had to get through to the gas
lines. To top it off, the building’s
laundry room dryers are
still not working — leaving tenants
with yet another expense.
“It doesn’t make any sense
to me,” he said. “If everybody’s
got gas in their apartment then
why don’t the dryers work?”
But this isn’t the fi rst time
tenants have been inconvenienced
by construction in the
building. During his fi rst fi ve
years in the building, Roberts
said, hot water pipes exploded
underneath his ground fl oor
unit three times.
“It is not the fi rst time that
I’ve had construction done at
my apartment where I have had
steam pipes that burst under the
fl oors, then a construction site
for four to fi ve days,” he said,
adding that never once was he
offered a hotel during the work
— which would typically last as
long as four days. He was only
put up once after “begging” the
landlord for reprieve.
“They never offered to put
us up in a hotel,” Roberts said.
“One time I had to beg, borrow
and plead to get them to put us
Tenants protested outside of 303 99th St. on April 30.
Photo by Jessica Parks
Continued on page 22
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