Slumlord who owns NY apt. building that burned on Adams' transition team for HOUSING ISSUES

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Lindsay Beyerstein
@beyerstein
The slumlord who owned the building that burned in the deadliest residential blaze in New York City’s recent history is on Eric Adams‘ transition team for HOUSING ISSUES.

Roshan Abraham Or Current Resident
@roshantone
owner of building where today's bronx fire happened is on the mayor's transition team for housing
Image
6:06 PM · Jan 10, 2022

[CatWoman]

1. ?????????????????

Damn!!!

I have a really bad feeling about this mayor; I really question his integrity and lack of ethics.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. I have no good feelings about Mayor Adams.

[dchill]

4. Hell. Where would you go to get them?

[SheltieLover]

6. Same here

[NYFlip]

26. Me too!

Me too! I live in New York and I can’t believe we elected. I can’t believe he’s a democrat. There wasn’t much choice. Adams or guardian angel endosed by Giuliani

[obamanut2012]

35. ......

I had a post hidden this past weekend for expressing this very thing, and it was as mild as your post.

Just an FYI.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. The trouble with slumlords is they are so big and provide so much housing

that you have to deal with them.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

27. Slumlords need to have a voice too!

[aeromanKC]

5. Homicide charges

[former9thward]

18. Fire department says its was a space heater.

Either faulty or misused.

[dalton99a]

7. Rick Gropper:

[demmiblue]

8. ...

[XanaDUer2]

9. Uh-oh nt

[Skittles]

10. there will be a red flag shortage soon

Adams just seems, well, you know

[secondwind]

11. Something's not right here. This is not good at all.

[Beastly Boy]

12. If that tweet was an attempt to tie Adams to the Bronx fire,

that was pretty clumsy.

Let's see if anyone can do better tying the manufacturer of the faulty heater that caused the fire to Adams. A member of Adams' mother-in-law's book club, perchance?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

13. The building has had dozens of complaints, many about heat; 18 complaints are currently

open. People wouldn't have needed heaters if the heat was working in the building.

[demmiblue]

15. Yep.

NYC Tenants Complained of Lack of Heat Ahead of Deadly Fire

Tenants of the Bronx apartment building where a deadly fire broke out Sunday had complained about lack of heat, a broken radiator and a door that didn’t close properly in the months before the blaze, city records show.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-10/nyc-tenants-complained-of-lack-of-heat-ahead-of-deadly-fire

Also:

Safety doors failed in NYC high-rise fire that killed 17

NEW YORK (AP) — Investigators sought answers Monday for why safety doors failed to close when fire broke out in a New York high-rise, allowing thick smoke to rise through the tower and kill 17 people, including eight children, in the city’s deadliest blaze in more than three decades.

A malfunctioning electric space heater apparently started the fire Sunday in the 19-story building in the Bronx, fire officials said. The flames damaged only a small part of the building, but smoke poured through the apartment’s open door and turned stairwells into dark, ash-choked death traps. The stairs were the only method of escape in a tower too tall for fire escapes.

Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the apartment’s front door and a door on the 15th floor should have been self-closing and blunted the spread of smoke, but the doors stayed fully open. It was not clear if the doors failed mechanically or if they had been manually disabled. Nigro said the apartment door was not obstructed.

The heavy smoke blocked some residents from escaping and incapacitated others as they tried to flee, fire officials said. Firefighters carried out limp children and gave them oxygen and continued making rescues even after their air supplies ran out.

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2022/01/10/safety-doors-failed-in-nyc-high-rise-fire-that-killed-17/

Dude-bro was just trying to be cute.

[former9thward]

17. Not quite that simple.

The city code in NYC for rental units is 68 degrees in the daytime and 62 at night. Many people get space heaters because they want to be warmer than those temperatures. But that is all the city requires the landlord to provide.

[Beastly Boy]

19. Did any complaints involve Adams?

The tweet implies that Adams has something to do with the fire because a member of his transition team, Rick Groper, is the founder of Camber Associates, one of three companies, along with LIHC Investment Group and Belveron Partners, that own the building that burned down.

So far, I am counting five degrees of separation between Adams and the fire. There is no indication that Groper was the sole manager of the building, or had any role in managing the building at all, or that Adams had any awareness that the convoluted line of relations between one of the members of his transition and the complaints about the building may exist. That makes Adams' connection to the fire pretty lame, and it makes me question the reasons for the tweet.

Likewise, if you start digging the dirt on all other principal officers, associates and employees of the three companies that own the building, there is no telling what you may find. Perhaps one of them may be connected to AOC or Hillary, or DeBlazio, or the King of Belgium, in a very similar manner.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

20. .

The tweet implies that Adams has something to do with the fire because a member of his transition team, Rick Groper, is the founder of Camber Associates, one of three companies, along with LIHC Investment Group and Belveron Partners, that own the building that burned down.

It doesn't imply Adams had something to do with the fire; it says straight out that Adams has someone on his transition team who has ownership in the building that burned and where people died.

So far, I am counting five degrees of separation between Adams and the fire.

Right, Adams had nothing to do with the fire. He does, however, look for guidance about housing issues from someone who isn't great on housing.

Likewise, if you start digging the dirt on all other principal officers, associates and employees of the three companies that own the building, there is no telling what you may find. Perhaps one of them may be connected to AOC or Hillary, or DeBlazio, or the King of Belgium, in a very similar manner.

Transparency is a good thing!

[Beastly Boy]

28. ..

- Saying straight out that Adams had someone on his transition team who has ownership (WTF? Groper doesn't have ownership of the building!) does exactly what I claimed: it implies Adams has something to do with the fire. That's what "implies" means. Guilt by association.

-Adams, who by your own admission, has nothing to do with the fire, is nevertheless prominently figured in the tweet. Far more so than any other principal officers of any of the three large companies involved in ownership of the building, all of whom, as well as their political connections, escape scrutiny by the virtue of all the attention Adams is receiving from the author of the tweet. Curiously, Adams' association with "someone who is not great on housing" was not great before the fire either, but somehow it only came up in the context of the fire. If this curious coincidence does not imply Adams' connection to the fire, I don't know what does.

- I have nothing against transparency. I even have nothing against transparency being applied to a single individual. However, I have a problem with arbitrarily and capriciously invoking transparency while digging dirt on a specific target.

[smirkymonkey]

22. Well, here's what Adams said about the fire...

"“This tragedy is not going to define us,” Adams said. “It is going to show our resiliency.”

I don't know, is that supposed to demonstrate his "Swagger"? Sounds pretty cold to me so soon after such a tragic event.

[Beastly Boy]

29. OK... so you think he is being cold. I accept your sentiment for what it is.

What does it have to do with Rick Gropper being on Adams' transition team?

[smirkymonkey]

30. I suppose it was partially a response to some of the comments above about

posters who weren't so sure Adams was the best person for this job.

[Beastly Boy]

31. I am not so sure he is the best person for the job either.

I am kind of positive, though, that he was the best choice we the voters were faced with.

And anyway, I was responding to those people who go out of their way to portray him as being the worst, just two weeks into his administration.

[druidity33]

14. So the building was a slum?

Because the guy was an affordable housing developer? I got news for you... Habitat for Humanity is an affordable housing developer. Calling a building a slum because poor people live there is bullshit. Obviously the fire was a tragedy. It may or may not have been preventible by the building owners. Either way it likely has nothing to do with this Gropper guy or Adams. I smell an agenda being pursued here... at the expense of 17 people who died in that fire.

[Nevilledog]

16. Here ya go

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

City Nolan (get your 💉!!!)
@ndhapple
SCOOP: City inspectors previously repeatedly cited The Bronx high-rise where 17 people died in a fire for failing to maintain its self-closing apartment doors — a key defense against rapidly spreading blazes —

City repeatedly flagged busted fire doors before Bronx tower inferno
City inspectors repeatedly cited The Bronx apartment where 17 residents died in a fire for not fixing its self-closing apartment doors.
nypost.com
6:39 PM · Jan 10, 2022

[druidity33]

21. i read the article linked...

and it says in the article that all of the doors cited were fixed (though some after a lengthy period of time) and that all of the issues cited were with the previous landlord/owner who sold it in Dec 2019.

[Me.]

24. On The Local News IT Said...

after, fireman tested a number of doors and they did work but then they found a number that didn't including the burn apt.

[druidity33]

33. So it's a slum then? The owner is a slumlord?

I'm sure it's quite possible the 'self-closing' doors break all the time in an older building. I bet it takes awhile to fix them sometimes. I'd also be willing to bet residents sometimes don't report broken things. How does this have anything at all to do with Eric Adams or the guy on his housing council? None of this would've gotten under my skin if it wasn't just ASSUMED that this affordable housing apartment building was a slum. Maybe we should be working on rehabbing Section 8 housing as part of BBB. Maybe we should just fucking help poor people have better circumstances. And if we're going to play the blame game, maybe people shouldn't use space heaters next to blankets. I recognize people have a need to blame someone... but i thought DU was better than this. AGAIN, just because poor people live there, does not make it a slum!

[lapucelle]

25. Do slum buildings generally have duplex apartments?

From the link in the tweet you posted.:

The fire initially erupted in a duplex apartment that spans the second and third floor — and the damage from the flames was confined to that part of the building, according to Nigro.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Bronx Building That Burned Was Supposed to Be Affordable Housing Done Right
What went wrong?

The Twin Parks project—an archipelago of 1,900 income-restricted units on sites scattered around the neighborhood, named for nearby Bronx and Crotona parks—was a collaboration between Mayor John Lindsay’s Public Design Committee and an assembly of neighborhood faith groups. It was funded and built by New York’s Urban Development Corporation, headed by the crusading planner Ed Logue. Its architects included Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Richard Meier, The Architects Collaborative, and Giovanni Pasanella, an unusually talented group for an affordable housing project.

snip=================================================================

In short, for many years Twin Parks North West remained a symbol of success—a symbol of New York’s commitment to rebuilding the Bronx at its lowest point, of sticking to project-based affordable housing as Washington gave up, of thoughtful design in public work. And of getting people out of the borough’s fire-trap, overcrowded row houses.

In time we will learn more about what allowed a malfunctioning appliance to turn into the city’s deadliest fire in three decades. For now we can think of Twin Parks North West as a symbol of something else: the vulnerability of a building, however celebrated by architects and occupants, to a door that didn’t close right when it mattered most.

https://slate.com/business/2022/01/bronx-building-fire-twin-parks-affordable-housing-icon.html

Are people assuming that the building is slum because it's in the Bronx?
smh

[Me.]

23. THank You For POsting This

[UTUSN]

32. Politicians/office-holders/whatever who are inept/criminal/stupid *lose* the *D* identity for ME

[Renew Deal]

34. Why is he being called a slumlord?

[sir pball]

36. "And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum...

...for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got
you invited to the very best social occasions."

— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay