Don not live here or in any "Highpoint Associates LLC" buildings
Pros
The heat works
Cons
Do not live in any buildings owned by Highpoint Associates LLC or managed by Keystone Management. They are operated by a family of known slumlords whose main motivation is to make the buildings unlivable so as to kick out the rent-controlled tenants (see links below for more on this). Landlord is barely responsive and takes weeks or more to address simple issues. Front door on this building routinely breaks, locking tenants in the building with no other exit route - this is an obvious fire hazard and also a major inconvenience. The lock also frequently breaks altogether and homeless people immediately begin sleeping and shooting up in the vestibule overnight. Rodents and roaches are an issue. The landlord was recently (2023) rated the worst in all of New York City, the articles below will back all of this up. https://therealdeal.com/2023/01/09/city-accuses-landlord-fred-ohebshalom-of-shoddy-maintenance/ https://hellgatenyc.com/life-under-nyc-bad-landlord https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/inside-story-building-unsafe-fixing-kicking-out-landlord-7A-administrator-nyc
Advice to the owners
Stop being a slumlord. Fulfill basic obligations to your tenants.
Unit/location is good, landlords are horrible.
Pros
The actual unit I lived in was nice. And the location was great. But I cannot under-emphasize that the cons substantially outweighed the pros.
Cons
Highpoint Associates X/Mashcole Property Management/Keystone Property Management, whatever the landlords call themselves are absolute criminals. In the wintertime the heat would frequently go out in this building and it would often take as much as a week, sometimes more, to get it repaired. Communication to the landlords (who are based in California) about this, if it was addressed at all, was often met with disrespect and gave the impression that we were bothering them with trivial issues. The same was true of the hot water, which frequently went out and took at minimum several days, once as long as two weeks, to repair. The same was true of pest control - without going into detail, after numerous attempts to get the landlord to send an exterminator, and a landlord's broken promise to do so, eventually we gave up and stopped asking when the landlord stopped responding to our emails on the subject and just went AWOL for several weeks. After moving out of the building, chiefly due to our horrible experience with this landlord, the landlord did everything they could to avoid returning our security deposit, delaying for months and making arbitrary deductions when they did finally return the deposit, presumably on the too-often correct assumption that the tenants don't have the time or resources to take them to court (the same is true for all other issues with the building - I'm confident that this landlord believes that if they do nothing for long enough, tenants will simply stop asking them to fulfill their obligations in the lease and will try to find a way to handle it themselves). The upshot: the landlord corporation (whatever they call themselves) does everything they can to exploit their tenants while simultaneously doing as little as possible to actually make the building livable, including in areas related to fundamental tenants' rights (e.g. heat and hot water). This is not an extensive account of the cons of this building - an extensive account would take too long. Additionally, I'm omitting some significant problems that are specific to me because I'm worried about retaliation of some form or another. But I should mention two other things to be aware of, briefly stated: the elevator was frequently broken and often took a very long time to repair, and the buzzer didn't work for the entire time we lived there. The latter issue was repeatedly raised to the landlord and to my knowledge no effort was ever made to fix it.
Advice to the owners
Treat your tenants with respect. I understand that you have financial motivations to do what you do, and I'd imagine that your behavior is frequently profitable, but what you're doing is actually hurting real people and you should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.
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