For close to a decade, tenants inside three Crown Heights apartment buildings lived with uncapped radiator valves, vermin, and heat that came and went on its own schedule. This month those same tenants got something that almost never happens in a landlord-tenant fight: an actual ownership stake in the roofs over their heads.
A landlord who made the worst-of lists twice
The buildings at 1018 Eastern Parkway, 1074 Eastern Parkway, and 1392 Sterling Place were controlled for years by landlord Rubin Dukler, whose properties racked up nearly 1,000 open housing code violations under his ownership, according to Hoodline’s reporting. Dukler landed on the NYC Public Advocate’s annual Worst Landlords Watchlist twice, ranking 11th in 2017 and 17th in 2019. Tenants organized formally starting in 2018, the same year management company Iris Holdings Group took over day-to-day operations.
The organizing produced paper trails as fast as it produced frustration. In February 2019, 18 tenants filed a lawsuit citing 561 open housing code violations across the three buildings. Less than a year later, in January 2020, 22 tenants filed a separate suit alleging $2 million in illegal rent overcharges. Dukler died in February 2021, but the disrepair and the legal fights over his estate dragged on for years afterward, with tenants eventually forming the Dukler Tenant Union in 2025 to keep pressure on whoever ended up controlling the properties.
A city-brokered handoff, not just a new owner
What makes this month’s transfer different from an ordinary change of ownership is the structure the city attached to it. On September 4, 2026, the three buildings changed hands to Mark Schwartz, a real estate investor who also serves as mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey. The deal was brokered with involvement from New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, according to a press release from the Mayor’s Office. The agreement commits the new owner to rehabilitating all 88 units across the three buildings with tenant oversight built into the process, and to moving toward eventual resident ownership rather than simply flipping the properties to another investor with no strings attached.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office framed the deal as proof that years of organizing can force a different outcome than the usual sale-to-another-landlord cycle. “The tenants of the Dukler Tenant Union have suffered from neglect and investment in this city’s most fundamental promise: safe, stable housing,” Mamdani said in the release. HPD Commissioner Dina Levy added that “these tenants have suffered long enough living under the Duklers,” while Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, said the office’s job is “fighting for tenants means fighting for safe, high-quality housing.”
Tenant leaders got their own say in the announcement, which is not always how these things go. Desra Lawrence, who lives at 1018 Eastern Parkway, said she was “feeling relieved and hopeful,” adding that “it’s been a long fight.” Michelle Stamp, of 1392 Sterling Place, was more pointed about what comes next: “There will be progress because now we’re moving toward getting most of what” the union had been asking for all along, according to the city’s release.
What “resident ownership” actually means here
Neither the city’s announcement nor Hoodline’s reporting spells out the exact legal vehicle the resident-ownership path will take — whether that ends up looking like a cooperative, a community land trust, or some other structure hasn’t been finalized publicly, and the new deeds had not even been recorded as of the most recent reporting. But the framework itself leans on tools New York has been building for a few years now, including the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, known as Intro 905, and the SAFER Homes Act, both of which give tenants and the city more leverage to intervene before a distressed building gets passed to another neglectful owner. That matters because the far more common ending to a story like this one is a sale to another investor who inherits the violations, drags out repairs, and leaves tenants organizing all over again a few years later. Bisnow’s coverage of the same transfer noted that housing advocates see the deal as a template the city hopes to repeat with other chronically distressed, rent-stabilized buildings rather than a one-off.
It’s worth being honest about the limits here, too. A rehab commitment and a stated path toward ownership are not the same as tenants holding deeds in hand today, and buildings with this much deferred maintenance take real money and time to fix regardless of who signs the paperwork. Some outlets covering the announcement, including VIN News, have raised questions about how much credit the current administration deserves versus groundwork laid earlier. Still, for a tenant population that spent years documenting radiator valves and vermin one violation report at a time, getting a named path toward ownership, with a specific new owner and a specific city agency on record backing it, counts as a rare outcome in a housing landscape where most long-running disputes end in a sale, an eviction, or nothing at all.
For renters elsewhere watching their own buildings deteriorate under an absentee or negligent owner, the Crown Heights case offers a rough blueprint: sustained legal filings, a formal tenant union, and enough documented violations that a city government has political cover to broker something more ambitious than a routine change of ownership.
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