NYC Landlord Slapped With Vacate/Stop Work Order For Allegedly Making Unpermitted Subdivisions Of Apartments In 42-Unit Residential Brooklyn Building

In Brooklyn, New York, DNAinfo New York reports:

• The landlord of a 1920s-era Eastern Parkway building has been illegally subdividing a number of units, then turning around and listing them as rental properties, tenants say, prompting the city to slap the building with a series of stop work orders.
  
  The Department of Buildings ordered construction to cease at 85 Eastern Parkway last month, after tenants — many of them rent-stabilized — complained that work had been underway for more than a year to split some of the building’s larger apartments into a pair of smaller units.
  
  Listings still appeared online [] advertising residences at “The Martha Washington” (the name of the the 42-unit building, etched above its doorway) on the Ideal Properties Group realty company website. The Prospect Heights building was touted as the “newest example of great Brooklyn living” with residences that have “undergone a loving, beautiful renovation.”
  
  The site includes floor plans for two two-bedroom apartments, 2CA and 2CB. Those apartments were priced starting at $2,750, according to a Nov. 9 press release from the realty company announcing the rentals.
  
  But the Department of Buildings had slapped a vacate order on unit 2C on Nov. 4 due to a lack of “secondary egress,” or, a second exit in or out of the unit, records show.
  
  And according to blueprints for the original building shared with DNAinfo, the second floor units were originally part of a four-bedroom apartment, unit 2C.
  
  Similarly, unit 1D — which appears to correspond with rentals 1DA and 1DB on Ideal's website — was hit with a stop work order by the DOB for similar egress issues on Nov. 3.

For more, see Landlord Illegally Subdividing Units at Prospect Heights Building: Tenants.