Ballantyne apartments rake in $100k of taxpayer-funded rent amid protests over living conditions
By Patrick Lohmann
This article was originally published on Syracuse.com.
Syracuse, N.Y. —The owner of Ballantyne Garden Apartments received nearly $100,000 in taxpayer money for rental assistance despite multiple open code violations and a string of protests by tenants and activists about poor living conditions.
Ballantyne Garden Apartments, which is near South Salina Street and Ballantyne Road, is a 140-unit building that owner Benjamin Marks bought in 2009. Recently, activists have protested over health and safety issues and what they describe as an atmosphere of fear and disrespect for tenants.
During the pandemic, property manager Jackie Kowaleski posted lists of tenants who owed back rent, which appalled many long-time tenant activists as an unprecedented act of “tenant shaming.”
Kowaleski wrote in another memo that tenants “live like pigs.” The owners have promised to evict at least 60 tenants from the building the moment the eviction moratorium is lifted, saying they are exploiting the eviction ban and choosing not to pay rent.
The rental assistance money comes from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a county fund of $24 million to help renters and landlords who lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The rental assistance comes with strings attached, including one that states that rent assistance won’t be given if a building has an outstanding “health and safety violation,” and that the rent assistance will be cut in half if such violations aren’t cleared for four or more months.
County officials say Ballantyne is eligible for the money because the open code violations are in apartments other than the ones for which tenants are seeking rent relief.
Tenants complain that maintenance staff is slow to respond to emergencies, like the smell of gas in apartments or lack of heat. There are roach and mice infestations, they say, plus water leaks that trickle through ceilings. Common areas aren’t cleaned often enough, they say.
The property averaged about 18 code complaints a year since 2012 and has already received 18 complaints in 2021. It has 10 open code violations, and it was three months overdue for its three-year inspection until the protests started.
But the county still paid Marks $97,177 on behalf of 14 tenants, according to Marks and comptroller records. Marks also said 16 other tenants there have applied but have yet to be approved, and that one tenant was denied.
The sum makes him one of the biggest recipients of rent assistance in the county, even while thousands of other applicants wait for funding. Onondaga County officials told syracuse.com they’ve spent about $4.7 million of the $24 million it received from the federal government in mid-April. The county received just over 4,000 applications. New York state’s program isn’t faring much better, having spent just about $100 million of the $2 billion available.
Ballantyne was the biggest recipient of rental assistance in the month of July, according to comptroller records, when Marks received nearly $80,000. In the same month, protesters gathered at the building at least four times to protest conditions and try to organize tenants against the owners.
The reason county and city officials say Marks was eligible for the money is that the cash is tied to individual apartments, not to the whole building. There were no code violations in the apartments where the tenants who qualified for the rental assistance, officials said.
“In other words, an open code violation on Apartment 1 does not mean we can then withhold payment for Apartment 2,” county spokesman Justin Sayles said in an email. “We obviously check city codes, as noted earlier, to ensure there are no open violations but again we are legally required to go by apartment.”
The only way the county can withhold rent money is if an entire building is deemed unfit, which happened recently at the 365-unit Skyline apartment complex on the North Side, Sayles said.
Palmer Harvey, founder of the Syracuse Tenants Union, has been a leader in the fight against Ballantyne’s owners. She said the city and county need to be stricter with the money if they want to force owners to invest in their buildings and improve the quality of life for tenants.
She also noted that common areas in the building – like stairwells and hallways – are often in bad shape, but the county’s policy doesn’t address that.
“To me, (the county) should set a standard. Raise your standard and be very strict about it,” she said. “If (landlords) knew you were going to be very strict about things, they wouldn’t do certain things.”
Mike Collins, director of the city’s Neighborhood and Business Development department, said the city gave the OK to the county to release money to Ballantyne, but only after getting what he said was an important concession from the owner.
He said the city required Marks to commit to applying for what is called a Certificate of Compliance, which is an inspection in which code inspectors visit every apartment in the building to search for issues. At that point, Marks was about three months past the deadline.
“At Ballantyne, where there’s… challenges around management, we suspect there’s been a suppression of people that have been willing to call codes and let us know of problems,” Collins said. “Now we can get in and see.”
Marks, in an email, said he’s been frustrated with the slow release of rental funds, which he said is the bigger problem than his complex receiving the money he qualifies for. He noted that none of the open code violations are past the date the city gave the landlord to fix them.
He accused tenants of deliberately breaking items in their apartment, calling code enforcement to report the issue and then refusing to pay rent. He owns dozens of other properties in seven states, including several around Ballantyne’s size, he has said.
“Perhaps you should spend more time focusing on the fact that NY has billions of dollars in unpaid funds that have been set aside to relieve landlords of the tremendous financial burden that these eviction moratoriums have caused,” he said.
Reporter Patrick Lohmann covers housing and other issues for Syracuse.com. He can be reached at (315)766-6670 or PLohmann@Syracuse.com.