The first thing you notice upon walking into Alfred Jones’ apartment is that his hallway ceiling is on the floor. Pieces of plaster litter the pathway from the front door to the living room of his one-bedroom, first-floor residence at 1055 University Avenue, and things only get worse from there.

His living room ceiling has similarly disintegrated into a pile of white and brown rubble on the ground. Jones’ bathtub is overflowing due to a leaking faucet, and filled with pieces of collapsed bathroom ceiling that are several-feet wide in some cases. In the kitchen, not only the ceiling but an entire panel of the wall has caved in, exposing bricks, wood, and metal beams.  Mold scours his bedroom walls like black stars on a white sky.

One level above Jones’ apartment, 75-year-old John Brown lives with two granddaughters and two great-granddaughters. Though the damages to his home are not as dramatic as those in Jones’ unit, there are still plenty to go around: Cracked floors and walls, peeling paint, a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. Brown’s bathtub faucet produces only scalding-hot water; he says he has to visit a neighbor’s home whenever he needs to shower.

Next door to Brown, Howard Nash’s home looks very similar to Jones’. Water leaks through a gaping hole in the kitchen ceiling and floods the floor. Mold covers the walls. The bathtub and toilet are unusable because they are filled with chunks of plaster.  

On the other side of Jones is  one of several open, abandoned units observed during recent visits to 1055 University Avenue. As with the Jones and Nash residences, the bathtub is overflowing with water and filled with the wreckage of the bathroom ceiling; other ceilings in the unit have collapsed as well, and water trickles through the resulting holes.

In a third-floor apartment, a woman who wished to remain anonymous cautioned that her toilet was a particularly disgusting sight. She then lifted the seat, to reveal that the bowl was filled to the brim with feces covered over with mold; the toilet, she said, had not been working in more than two months. Like Nash, she said that she goes to a friend’s apartment when she needs to use the bathroom. If her friend isn’t home, she sometimes must defecate in a bag. 

As of April 11, 1055 University Avenue had accumulated 2,128 open violations from the city department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), according to department spokesperson Amanda Pitman. Pitman noted that, since January, the building had been issued 299 class “C” violations, conditions classified as “immediately hazardous.”
While its exceedingly high number of violations sets 1055 University Avenue apart from many other buildings in the area, it is hardly alone in Highbridge in terms of problematic living conditions. The West Bronx corridor—which includes the neighborhoods of Highbridge/South Concourse, University Heights/Fordham, and Morrisania/Belmont —has the highest rates of housing maintenance problems in the city, according to a March 2007 study released by the University Neighborhood Housing Program, a non-profit group that advocates for affordable housing in the northwest Bronx.

“There’s been a culture of non-accountability on the part of owners to do repairs, and code enforcement has declined severely,” said Jackie Delvalle, a lead housing organizer for the Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) program at New Settlement Houses. “The number of inspectors and the thoroughness of the inspection declined under Guiliani, and hasn’t improved much since.”

HPD had filed a lawsuit against Khan in Bronx County Housing Court, but the litigation was withdrawn on April 13. Pitman said she could not yet comment on the reason for the withdrawal. Pitman also said, as of April 11, that Khan owed the city more than $104,000 for emergency repairs performed by her department.

Khan said that HPD sometimes performed repairs that his staff had already done, and then billed him for the duplicate work, and added he sometimes was late to file paperwork indicating he had fixed damages.

Property records from the city Department of Finance show that Khan’s business, Highbridge Apartments LLC, purchased 1055 University Avenue from Eastchester Heights LLC in early 2005. He has since acquired an unfavorable reputation among housing advocates.

“In the organizing circles, where you learn about other troublesome landlords by putting together the lists of the worst landlords,” Delvalle said, “or when you meet with lenders to get them to pay attention to problem buildings, his name came up a lot.”

Khan suggested comments such as these were coming from a  biased source.  “The tenant [advocates] can always say that,” Khan said, “because they are only listening to one side of the story.”

Khan’s side of the story is that he and the building’s other managers are constantly spending time and money repairing damages caused by trespassers who break-into the property and illegally occupy empty units; by tenants who either act irresponsibly, deliberately create damages in the hopes that the building will fail inspection and their rent will be suspended by Section 8, or put strain on their apartments by sharing units with more people than their leases allow. 

Rafi Siddiqi, a manager of the property, produced a typed document that listed $72,350 in total renovations costs and a net income of negative  $267,960.86 for 2006.

Siddiqi also said Highbridge Apartments LLC is receiving Con Edison bills from vacant units, because of squatters who break into these units and use the electricity.  A recent Con Ed bill showed $1097.45 due as of March 23, 2007 from Apartment 4S, a unit which is empty and padlocked.

“Where do we get the money [to do repairs] from?” Siddiqi asked.

The building’s managers said drug users and prostitutes often broke into the building as well. Manuel Alduey, a contractor for the property, displayed a letter addressed to the 44th Precinct of the NYPD, notifying the department that the building was “experiencing unauthorized people hanging out in the lobby doing illegal activities and violating all the building codes, breaking ceiling lights in the lobby, breaking the front door, breaking mailboxes, and harassing tenants.”

Inspector James Essig, commanding officer of the 44th Precinct, did not return phone messages seeking comment.

But squatters cannot account for damages at the seven occupied apartments observed by the Horizon in the past few weeks: management confirmed that tenants in each of these buildings—including the Jones, Brown, and Nash residences — had a lease with Highbridge Apartments LLC, and therefore were legal residents of the units.

Management said the leaks and subsequent collapsed ceilings had been caused by frozen pipes, and also by tenants in units above the damaged apartments who flooded their floors by using washing machines or bathing pets in their bathtubs. But tenants said these damages have remained unfixed for months. 

 One April afternoon, management indicated Brown’s apartment had been repaired over the previous weekend.  A visit to Brown’s home later that day said otherwise. Holes in the floor and cracks in the walls remained, as did the dangling lightbulb. There was, however, one difference: The water in the bathtub was no longer scalding hot: it was now freezing cold.

Jones said he gave an apartment  key to his building’s super, Raymon Coste, not long after broken ceilings forced him to evacuate his unit in February. Coste was on vacation and could not be reached for comment, but Siddiqi said Coste informed him that he was unable to access the apartment because Jones had changed the cylinder on his front door lock. Jones calls Coste’s account of events “an absolute lie.”

“Why wouldn’t I allow you to come in and repair this place?” Jones asks.

 Other tenants said their decision to live at 1055 University Avenue hadn’t been a matter of choice.

“The only reason I took this apartment is cause they was closing down my shelter,” said Charmaine Walter, a fifth-floor resident.  The scene at her home is familiar: Peeling paint, cracked walls, missing tiles.
Walter, said she lived at the City Homes Shelter on Ogden Avenue before moving to 1055 University Avenue 15 months ago.

“ I’d have rather stayed in my shelter than come here,” Walter said.

Tawana Prunty contributed to this report.