Elevators are one of the core reasons behind New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s historic $2.1 million settlement involving A&E Realty that will likely force the company to address hazardous conditions and tenant harassment across 14 buildings.
Last Friday, Mayor Mamdani along with incoming Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Dina Levy and Jackson Heights Council Member Shekar Krishnan, announced at a press conference regarding housing that “A&E has operated with callous disregard for those residing in its properties, racking up over 140,000 total violations” and the settlement will not only require them to pay up for their mistakes but also mandate fair treatment towards their tenants and correct more than 4,000 building code violations across the buildings
Elevators fell under such violations, Mayor Mamdani said.
“We are aware of issues across the entirety of A&E Realty’s portfolio and we will continue to monitor their conduct. 4,000 building code violations is hard to put into perspective. It is a big number and frankly a bureaucratic term,” Mamdani said. “But if you understand it as thousands of children unable to sleep because the heat is off and they’re shivering too hard, if you understand it as dozens of elevators out of order. Then you understand that the action we are taking today is not only one of good governance, it’s one of a moral imperative.”
The Queens neighborhood Jackson Heights, where the real estate landlord owns most of its buildings, has more than 2,000 code violations and to Council Member Krishnan, this is both a civil rights and basic rights violation of tenants.
“We have rallied together with the tenants, with organizations for months and years over basic conditions, a lack of heat and hot water, termites eating through the walls, bathroom floors collapsing, no heat or hot water, and on top of that, an elevator that still does not work at 81st Street where Diana lives,” he said.
Diana de la Pava, who the council member refers to, is a 13-year rent-stabilized tenant who was invited by the mayor to speak about her experience at the 81st Street apartment building location that A&E owns. She related to members of the press that the elevator in her building went out of service in July of 2024 and was “magically” fixed just six months ago. As a result, one of her neighbors, who uses a wheelchair, was stuck on the second floor for months while another living on the fourth floor passed away due to the outage during a heat wave.
“These failures effectively imprison elderly and disabled tenants in their own homes. People are not inconvenienced, they are trapped,” de la Pava said.
Newly appointed HPD Commissioner Levy emphasized that “safe, livable housing is not a luxury. It is not a favor. It is an absolute right.”
A&E Realty did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
Mamdani joined Able News for an exclusive one-on-one interview prior to his January swearing in where he discussed employment, housing and transportation in a three-part series as it relates to the disabled, pledging to transform the mayor’s office to “protect tenants” and freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, not market-rate, unregulated apartments, a small caveat that the community is still concerned about as some have fixed incomes.