‘I Put in White Tenants’: The Grim, Racist (and Likely Illegal) Methods of One Brooklyn Landlord

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from New York magazine:


‘I Put in White Tenants’: The Grim, Racist (and Likely Illegal) Methods of One Brooklyn Landlord
By DW Gibson


For the past three years, I've traveled around the city, talking with New Yorkers as they experience gentrification. There is little consensus on the topic — even the word itself is defined differently by each of us. I've spoken with tenants, activists, lawyers, investors, architects, construction workers, real-estate agents, drug dealers, business owners. Many people occupy several of these spaces at once, a fact that underscores just how quickly this conversation becomes complicated.

Ephraim is both developer and landlord. His thick beard and heavyset frame make him look much older than his 26 years. He is a Hasid, and he started buying buildings a few years ago, in the wake of the housing crash.

A real-estate agent introduced us. "Anything for that guy," Ephraim told me when I asked if I could interview him. We met in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens where I found him sitting in his parked car with the engine running. I hopped into the passenger seat and went for an afternoon ride-along through the neighborhoods where he does most of his business: Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights.

.....(snip).....

If there’s a black tenant in the house—in every building we have, I put in white tenants. They want to know if black people are going to be living there. So sometimes we have ten apartments and everything is white, and then all of the sudden one tenant comes in with one black roommate, and they don’t like it. They see black people and get all riled up, they call me: “We’re not paying that much money to have black people live in the building.” If it’s white tenants only, it’s clean. I know it’s a little bit racist but it’s not. They’re the ones that are paying and I have to give them what they want. Or I’m not going to get the tenants and the money is not going to be what it is.

The scary part about doing this is, if the black guys start to realize how much the property will sell for. This is a new thing now, the past year. A million, two million dollars—it’s crazy, crazy numbers. None of them realize yet—some of them do—the amount of money you can get. The scary part is they’re going to realize they can get the same exact house in East New York for $400,000, $500,000 and they can get paid $1.5 million for their home in Bed-Stuy, they’re going to start dumping houses on the market and the market’s going to be flooded and it’s going to cool down. It’s already cooling down. ..................(more)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/grim-racist-methods-of-one-brooklyn-landlord.html#

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