Daniel Goldstein, managing partner of E&M Management,
the owners of local residential properties like 217-unit Sunset Garden, said
his company has been painted in an inaccurate and unfavorable light by some
residents and Town of Ulster officials.
“I know me, per se, not just our team,” said Goldstein in an
interview. “We’re the type of landlords that care very, very much.”
E&M Management purchased Sunset Garden at 45 Birch
Street and Lakeshore Villas, a 151-unit property in Port Ewen, from Morgan
Communities in March of this year for $44 million, expanding a local portfolio
which also includes Kingston Waterfront and 30 Black Creek Road in Highland.
According to its website, most of their other properties are in Nassau County
and Far Rockaway, a Queens neighborhood not far from their headquarters in
Lawrence.
Residents from some of those properties, including Sunset
Garden, met at the Russell Brott Senior Center last month, a gathering attended
by municipal leaders and local legislators. They described a property falling
into disrepair and a property owner unwilling to do anything about it. They
said tenants were not having their leases renewed to put them in a more
precarious position of being subject to eviction on a whim as retaliation for
speaking up, and at least two tenants said that was exactly what had happened
to both of them. They said intimidation was used as means to an end, the dismissal
of residents who might be home during the day, older tenants, and those who
challenged E&M with the hopes of replacing them with potentially
deep-pocketed millennials.
Goldstein and Yitzhak “Yitz” Horowitz, E&M’s director of
property management, said the claims against them are categorically untrue, and
say both their behavior and paperwork prove it.
“When we first took over the building, of course the
building was [in] neglect,” said Goldstein. “The first thing that we did is, we
installed smoke detectors in the hallways, with emergency lighting, we changed
all the lighting to LED lighting, and we started painting the hallways. That
was over $100,000 right there. We’re still not done with the hallways, we’re
painting them. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of buildings, and to do that kind
of work it’s a big undertaking.”
Goldstein described other work E&M has undertaken at
Sunset Garden, including replacing sewer mains in three buildings (between
$35,000-40,000 for each), the replacement of numerous terraces with rotten wood
($30,000), apartment renovations (over $150,000), fixing concrete in exterior
stairways ($25,000), and pool repairs ($30,000).
“Then we went ahead and we installed a playground,” said
Goldstein, which he said came with a $120,000 price tag and was the result of
an informal survey of tenants during a community barbecue in the spring.
Goldstein added that the playground will not be complete until the spring,
because while the structure has already been installed, work to complete the
safety foam surfacing surrounding the playground cannot be undertaken until the
threat of snowfall has passed.
“And I can promise you this, you can go to any county, any
town, any village, any city, you won’t find any municipal park as nice as
hours,” said Horowitz. “The school district should bus their kids in to play on
our playground. That’s how nice it is. I’m not kidding. If I had this park in
my backyard as a child, it’s like a dream come true.”
Goldstein said that the claim that most tenants have not
been offered new leases is inaccurate, adding that it wouldn’t make financial
sense as a property owner to lose tenants.
“We need to pay the mortgage,” he said. “Because if we can’t
pay the mortgage then we can just go to bankruptcy. We need the tenants, we
want them to be happy, we don’t want the turnover. Why in the world would we
want to go there and upset the wheel? That is not our intention.”
Horowitz also disputed claims that he opposed the idea of a
tenants’ association, saying that he’d attended their first meeting, but that
he hadn’t been invited back, something he said may be contributing to the
perceived disconnect between tenants and management.
“It’s unfortunate, because the whole idea of a tenants’
association is that you do want to get things done, and you do want solutions,
and you do want answers,” he said. “I don’t understand what else is the reason
for it.”
There was also a claim by tenants that E&M has been
arbitrarily charging tenants water and sewer fees without having the means to
determine usage. Horowitz said that tenants were being billed for water and
sewer by Morgan Communities before E&M bought the property, and that the
practice is encouraged by the New York State Energy Research and Development
Authority (NYSERDA) to give consumers a sense of the impact their choices have.
Furthermore, Goldstein added, E&M isn’t coming up with the figures they
charge tenants, it’s done by American Utility Management, an Illinois-based
company that coordinates billing for multifamily properties.
“They have sensors on each riser that goes to the
apartments, and they measure somehow the water,” said Goldstein. “We don’t do
it. They bill us for each tenant, we pay the master bill and then we bill the
tenant. They show us what they charge. We have no way of doing it. This is an
outside company that does it for everyone.”
But it’s not just tenants who are seeing issues at Sunset
Garden, it’s also Town of Ulster Building Inspector Kathryn Moniz, who said she
spends one day each week dealing with problems on the property.
“I have matters of infestation, both rats and roaches,” said
Moniz last month. “I have floors that are lifting. We’ve had sewer backups that
were not taken care of like they’re supposed to be, which led to an issue of
sanitation. We have handrails in common halls that serve no purpose because one
is attached at the top but not at the return. I have big, gaping holes in the
hallways that I’ve asked to be fixed because it’s a fire issue. They’ve taken
out a laundry facility, and now I think there’s one for the whole complex. We
have lighting issues.”
E&M acknowledges that some of the issues raised by Moniz
are true, but they added that they’re problems the company inherited due to a
poor maintenance record by the previous owner and that they’re still trying to
work their way through them.
“And it’s going to take time, of course, to bring it back up
to where it should be,” said Goldstein. “Obviously it can’t happen overnight.
But one thing I can tell you is that by the spring most of these issues are
going to be fixed. Because it takes about a year once you take over to do all
the repairs.”
E&M said tenants may still be getting used to how they
maintain a property, preferring to have an on-site superintendent rather than
an office that’s only open during regular business hours. They added that the
super, Richard Thompson, is a licensed plumber who can deal with numerous
issues that might arise, narrowing the response time because they don’t always
have to seek assistance from elsewhere.
Goldstein said that there’s a reason people are wary of
landlords, though that necessarily doesn’t mean all landlords are bad.
“There are a lot of landlords out there that are not good,
that give a bad name to landlords,” he said. “And I personally don’t like them
myself, and I don’t want to even be associated with those people. Yet on the
other hand, we are not those kind of people. We care in everything that we do.
We are large landlords, yes we are. But we care. But obviously there’s always
going to be some complaints somewhere, especially when we’re the size of
landlords that we are, of certain tenants.”
Horowitz said that the impression people may be getting of
E&M from disgruntled tenants is incorrect.
“We’re all about transparency, we’re all about just, you
know, getting the truth out and working together with everyone,” he said.
“That’s all we’re trying to do.”
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