By Gus Saltonstall

At a time when affordable housing is in short supply and the city wants to promote the development of single-room-occupancy (SRO) buildings to fill some of the deficits, there is an SRO on the Upper West Side that many tenants allege has fallen into disrepair since it was acquired by a new owner in September 2022.

Residents of the Riverside Studios building at 342 West 71st Street, some of whom have stoves in their units, have not had working gas for those stoves for the past 14 months.

And that is just one reason 26 tenants of the building have been on a rent strike since last November, fighting what they called, in a lawsuit filed this month, “the dangerous living conditions and serious loss of services within the building.”

Other alleged offenses from residents and the lawsuit include a non-secure front door, non-working security cameras, a broken intercom system, common areas littered with garbage, the loss of their super and front desk attendant, illegal short-term rentals to tourists, unreliable mail delivery, garbage piling up in front of the building, mice and roach infestations, missing fire alarms, and more.

Tran Group, LLC, a real estate developer with a checkered history, is the new owner of Riverside Studios, a seven-story building located between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Tran Group owns more than 30 buildings across New York City, including six on the Upper West Side. Anna Do, an employee of the company, is the landlord of Riverside Studios. Do was named on the New York City Public Advocate’s “100 Worst Landlords of 2023 Watchlist.”

Multiple residents who spoke to West Side Rag said the group has turned the building into a “slum.”

Do has strongly denied these allegations.

To understand the situation at 342 West 71st Street, it is important to understand that SROs operate differently than market-rate properties. SRO landlords have much less leeway to increase rents, and residents don’t need leases to claim that they are tenants. In many cases, an SRO resident does not sign a lease renewal to remain in the building after the initial agreed-upon time frame comes to an end.

Riverside Studios is made up of nearly 125 studio apartments, with shared bathrooms for residents on each floor. Some tenants have leases, some do not. A significant portion of the single rooms are shared by multiple people, according to tenants and the legal experts they have partnered with.

“This building is occupied by at least 80 percent older people who live on welfare or very little money,” said a tenant who, like all those WSR interviewed, declined to give their name for fear of retribution by the landlord. 

Alejandro Coriat, who works as a tenant organizer for the Goddard Riverside Law Project, told West Side Rag that Tran Group’s purchase of the SRO was “peculiar,” as there is far less upside on rent margins compared to market rate buildings, and it did not align with other properties in its portfolio.

While the same rent margins are not available in Riverside Studios, Coriat says more profit is possible.

“Riverside Studios rooms are not cheap for an SRO,” Coriat said. “There are some that go for $1,000 to $1,200 legally, and there is also a lot of vacancy in the building, so there is room to add profit.”

On April 1, Coriat and Goddard Riverside Law Project helped residents of the West 71st Street building file a lawsuit against the Tran Group over what they say are unsafe conditions in the building. It is not the first time residents under Tran Group ownership have taken a stand against the company. Residents of an East Village building in the developer’s portfolio held a rally in 2023 over unsafe construction.

“Whether it is evil or incompetence, they are breaking the law,” Coriat stated. “They are keeping tenants in substandard living conditions.”

A local elected official has also joined the fight by tenants for better conditions within the building.

Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal wrote in a letter to Tran Group in September, 2023, saying she was “deeply concerned” by reports coming from tenants in the building.

“The residents of Riverside Studios deserve better, and their health and safety should not be considered collateral damage in the name of construction,” Rosenthal wrote. “Unfortunately, since Tran Group purchased the property earlier this year, many of my constituents have reported a reduction in services and a severe degradation in their quality of life.”

The developer never responded to Rosenthal’s letter.

More than 150 Open City Violations

Riverside Studios has more than 130 open violations from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), and 27 violations issued by the Department of Buildings (DOB), which include faulty electrical work and failure to maintain the building’s exterior wall.

This is above the average number of open violations for a residential building on the Upper West Side.

“I’ve found myself being in constant survival mode,” a building resident said. “This is the Upper West Side; we came here to have a standard of living, and now the standard of living has dropped.” 

One of the issues most often repeated by residents was the decision to place trash bins outside the building, after the new owners took over the basement for their offices and living space, according to some tenants.

“The garbage used to be downstairs in the basement, but now they put the trash on the street in front of the building in open containers,” another resident said. “You have rats running right in front of the door, and you have to go through garbage just to enter the building.”

Other residents told the Rag that there was a concerted effort by ownership to raise prices within the building.

“They (Tran Group) started issuing late fees on my rent payments, but SRO buildings don’t incur late fees if you pay the rent within the space of that month,” one longtime tenant explained. “It’s like they have a plan on how to exploit people from the beginning.”

Multiple tenants added that ownership had asked them to sign leases with increased rents, even though leases are not needed in SRO buildings, as outlined by city law.

Tran Group Denies the Allegations

Anna Do, the Tran Group employee who serves as landlord of Riverside Studios, strongly denied the majority of claims made by the tenants.

“We are making the place (the building) so that everyone would love to call it a home,” Do told the Rag, in a phone interview. “We truly hope our tenants take a more objective view of our ownership and our goals. We understand there are many things that need to be improved and can be improved, and we are committed to doing so.”

Do said Tran had invested significantly to upgrade such elements as the building’s facade, its water pump and boiler, common area rugs, vacant rooms, and bathrooms. She also denied that new ownership had removed the building’s super or allowed the front door to remain unlocked.

Additionally, Do said that “no increase in rent was implemented since we took over the building.” She said tenants were being issued new leases after theirs expired and that the management’s software system, which it uses for its other non-SRO building “automatically adds late fees to tenant accounts when payments are not [made] by the 10th of the month.” She said that they have since “eliminated all late fees in the building (Riverside Studios.)”

She added that trash in front of buildings was a “common practice” in New York City, but that they were looking at another alternative, if necessary.

Do concluded by saying Tran is working with Con Edison to restore the gas, and that many of the violations from the city agencies stemmed from the building’s previous owner.

Residents Strongly Dispute New Owner’s Claims of Improvements

“If they just came in and left things the same, it would have been fine,” a tenant told the Rag. “The building has never been the Plaza, but everything was fine. Why buy a building and immediately [let it deteriorate]? How is that beneficial for them?”

A different tenant kept their focus on the lack of a sense of safety within the building.

“We don’t feel secure,” the tenant said. “I’ll come home at say midnight and the front door will be open, which means anybody can just walk in from the street and that has happened.”

Riverside Studio tenants who are paticipating in the rent strike, along with representatives from the Goddard Riverside Law Project, are planning a press conference about conditions in the building and what they hope will change, in the near future, about their Upper West Side home.

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here.