Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood inside Robert Fulton Terrace on Wednesday alongside Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg and Department of Housing and Preservation Commissioner Dina Levy to announce a historic penalty against the owners of two troubled Bronx apartment complexes, securing $31 million in penalties and new oversight of long-delayed repairs.
The penalty —the largest ever obtained by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development— targets the owners of Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers, where tenants have reported years of unsafe conditions, including broken elevators, vermin infestations and chronic outages of heat and hot water.
“For years, tenants at Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers have been forced to live with vermin infestations, chronic elevator outages and a lack of heat and hot water – while their landlords met their suffering with silence,” said Mayor Mamdani. “Today, that neglect is finally met with consequences.”
“This administration secured the largest penalty in HPD’s history because no landlord is above the law. But penalties alone are not enough. We are taking control of the situation to make sure repairs are made and conditions are permanently improved. Every New Yorker deserves safe, dignified housing.”
As part of the court judgment, an independent Chief Restructuring Officer will take control of the buildings’ finances and oversee urgently needed repairs. More than $900,000 has already been frozen from the owners’ accounts and released to fund critical repairs across 500 apartments, according to city officials.
The administration said the intervention is also aimed at stabilizing the buildings long term. The administration is calling on Fannie Mae, which has initiated foreclosure proceedings, to work with HPD and tenants to identify a responsible preservation buyer for the properties.
At Robert Fulton Terrace alone, tenants have filed more than 2,300 housing complaints over the past two years, resulting in over 1,100 violations, according to HPD data. Fordham Towers has logged nearly 1,800 complaints and more than 500 violations in the same period.
Both buildings were originally developed as middle-income housing under the Mitchell-Lama program but were sold to private investors in the mid-2000s. According to Fordham Towers tenants who spoke to the Bronx Times in 2024, conditions began to deteriorate after the buildings exited the program.
Tenants in both buildings have spent years organizing against what they describe as persistent neglect. The owners, Karan Singh and Rajmattie Persaud, have previously appeared on the Public Advocate’s Worst Landlords List.
The litigation, first filed in 2024, was brought by HPD’s Anti-Harassment Unit within its Housing Litigation Division.
“This is a story I know well: I organized tenants here back in 2009, when they were first coming out of Mitchell-Lama,” said Levy.
“Since then, tenants have been subject to decades of mistreatment, but that comes to an end today: Thanks to aggressive litigation by HPD’s Anti-Harassment Unit, we now have a record $31m judgement against the owners,” she added. “That gives us leverage in bankruptcy proceedings, which we’ll use to deliver better outcomes for residents.”
Reach Marina Samuel at msamuel@schnepsmedia.com. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
