New York City officials have frozen the bank accounts of Bronx landlords Karan Singh and Rajmattie Persaud after securing a $31 million settlement over what tenants describe as years of living without reliable heat or hot water, according to ABC7 New York. Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined housing officials to announce the settlement against the owners of Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers, two Bronx apartment complexes where residents say basic services broke down repeatedly while rent kept coming due.
Tenants at the two buildings reported elevators that were frequently out of service, balconies in visibly crumbling condition, and ongoing vermin problems, on top of the heat and hot water outages, per the report. Residents kept paying rent throughout, even as conditions inside the buildings deteriorated over an extended period. The scale of the settlement, one of the largest of its kind announced by the city, reflects how long officials say the problems went unaddressed.
Of the $31 million, $900,000 sitting in the landlords’ now-frozen accounts has been earmarked specifically for immediate repairs at the two properties, according to the announcement covered by ABC7. A court-ordered chief restructuring officer will oversee that repair work, giving the city a mechanism to make sure the money actually goes toward fixing elevators, balconies, and heating systems rather than sitting tied up in litigation.
The appointment of an outside restructuring officer signals that city officials were not willing to simply take the landlords’ word that repairs would happen on their own timeline. Freezing the accounts also removes the landlords’ ability to move or shield the settlement funds before the repair work is completed, a step that housing advocates have pushed for in past cases where promised fixes never materialized.
For tenants at Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers, the settlement is the most concrete acknowledgment yet that the conditions they lived through were not just isolated maintenance lapses. Years without consistent heat or hot water in New York City apartments can trigger housing code violations and rent-related legal remedies, and cases that reach a nine-figure settlement typically involve a documented pattern rather than a single bad winter.
The case adds to a string of enforcement actions New York City has taken against landlords accused of neglecting basic habitability standards, and it comes as the Mamdani administration has signaled it intends to make aggressive use of legal tools against owners who let buildings fall into disrepair while continuing to collect rent from tenants who have few other housing options in the current market.
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