A Bronx apartment building Mayor Mamdani showcased to highlight the talents of his new housing commissioner, Dina Levy, has racked up nearly 200 unresolved violations, The Post has learned.
The 102-unit building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in Morris Heights as of Saturday had a staggering 194 open housing-code violations dating back to 2016 — including 88 “Class C” violations considered “immediately hazardous.”
They included rat and roach infestation; broken doors and refrigerators; and mold, records show.
Mamdani visited the affordable-housing complex best known for being the birthplace of hip-hopon Jan. 4 to introduce Levy, 54, a longtime tenants’ rights advocate and former state housing honcho, as his new Housing Preservation and Development commissioner.
He gushed how Levy — who grew up the silver-spooned daughter of two high-powered DC lawyers – has non-profit experience in building and overseeing affordable housing, a perfect fit for his leftist housing agenda that seeks to replace private landlords wherever possible.
Levy, who will make $277,605 a year as HPD commissioner, helped facilitate a 2011 deal for nonprofit Workforce Housing Advisors to buy and rehab the Sedgwick Avenue complex from private landlords.
Levy did this with help from a $5.6 million HPD loan she and her own nonprofit, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, brokered to stabilize the building’s finances and maintain its “affordable” rental status, recalled Mamdani.
“Dina will no longer be petitioning HPD from the outside,” the mayor touted. “She will now be leading it from the inside, delivering the kind of change that can transform lives.”
However, the 59-year-old building isn’t the success story Mamdani and Levy claim it to be, The Post found.
It has more than double the dangerous “Class C” violations racked up at 85 Clarkson Ave., a dilapidated, privately owned 71-unit complex in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, Mamdani showcased three days earlier as a poster child for everything he believes is wrong with the city’s publicly-subsidized housing stock.
Tenants told The Post conditions were better under the old, private landlord.
“I have been here over 20 years, and I preferred it when it was under private management because they used to screen people in and out of the building,” said Mordistine Alexander, among the dozens of tenants at 1520 Sedgwick whose homes have open HPD violations.
Alexander, 49, who has rented her three-bedroom apartment since 1999, said the unit routinely lacks heat and hot water, its bathroom and kitchen facades are crumbling and windows need to be replaced
She said she’s been without a kitchen light for months — despite asking for fluorescent light bulbs to be replaced since October.
And she said she had to take care of fixing a major rodent problem in the unit herself because she “couldn’t wait any longer” for Workforce Housing Group to respond.
“Since [the nonprofit] took over, the building has deteriorated. They lack porters. No one is maintaining it, and the complaints fall on deaf ears – especially if you complain a lot,” said Alexander, adding she wishes Levy never won her fight to turn the building over to the nonprofit.
Yet Mamdani wants more complexes like the Sedgewick Avenue building. He supports Stalinesque legislation designed to control how private property is sold so that more nonprofits can oversee rent-stabilized apartments.
“You have to laugh at the hypocrisy,” said Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens). “These nonprofits are proving themselves to be little more than taxpayer-funded slumlords, and this blatant double-standard is all part of the administration’s planned attack on private ownership in New York City.”
Like Cea Weaver, the much-maligned lefty boss of Mamdani’s newly created Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, HPD Commissioner Levy grew up in privilege.
She is the twin daughter of lawyer Ed Levy and his late civil-rights attorney wife Mary, who owned multiple properties, including a townhouse in historic Georgetown they sold in 2023 that is currently worth $1.4 million. She has said she is a native of affluent Maplewood, NJ.
Levy, a Delaware University graduate, has been a rebel-rousing, radical tenant advocate for decades, even spending time in the slammer as a young organizer.
“It was cool,” Levy once told Crain’s New York Business of her 1997 Dallas arrest for criminal trespassing at a run-down affordable-housing complex. “I got really hooked.”
Levy boasted in the 2011 interview that her “rough, caustic style” irks landlords.
The Sedgwick Avenue site has more open HPD violations than roughly three-quarters of the privately owned, rent-stabilized buildings in NYC — but Mamdani is “too focused” on pushing the abolition of private property, said Kenny Burgos, a former Bronx assemblyman who heads the New York Apartment Association that represents landlords of rent-stabilized units.
Nonprofit-managed housing “consistently run higher violation counts despite having government-backed loans and [being eligible to avoid] paying property taxes, so they should have a lot more freed-up cash to make these buildings run efficiently, and yet are unable to do so — even with good intentions and no goal of profit,” added Burgos.
Workforce Housing Group did not return messages, but the HPD defended Levy’s involvement in the sale of the Sedgwick Avenue building to the nonprofit group.
“When the building was at risk of being purchased by a predatory buyer, Dina Levy organized alongside the tenants and kept the building affordable,” said agency spokesman Matt Rauschenbach.
“And now the building is undergoing an $8 million preservation renovation to improve conditions and make sure it is a safe, affordable place for the tenants who live there to call home.”
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