Jared Kushner’s company under fire as rental tenants in New York apartment block claim they were pushed out to make way for luxury condo buyers
More than a dozen current and former tenants of a New York apartment block claim Kushner Cos., a company controlled by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, deliberately employed pressure tactics in the form of loud construction noise and other nuisances
The hammering and drilling began just months after Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm bought a converted warehouse flat building in the hip, Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Tenants say it started early in the morning and went on until nightfall, so loud that it drowned out normal conversation, so violent it rattled pictures off the walls. So much dust wafted through ducts and under doorways that it coated beds and clothes in closets. Rats crawled through holes in the walls. Workers with passkeys barged in unannounced. Residents who begged for relief got a standard reply, “We have permits.”
More than a dozen current and former residents of the building told Associated Press that they believe the Kushner Cos.’ relentless construction, along with rent hikes of US$500 a month or more, was part of a campaign to push tenants out of rent-stabilised apartments and bring high-paying condo buyers in.
If so, it was a remarkably successful campaign. An AP investigation found that over the past three years, more than 250 rent-stabilised apartments – 75 per cent of the building – were either emptied or sold as the Kushner Cos. was converting the building to luxury condos. Those sales so far have totalled more than US$155 million, an average of US$1.2 million per flat.
“They won, they succeeded,” says Barth Bazyluk, who left flat C606 with his wife and baby daughter in December. “You have to be ignorant or dumb to think this wasn’t deliberate.”
This up-close look at one of the Kushner Cos.’ largest residential buildings in New York illustrates what critics describe as the firm’s sharp-elbowed business practices while it was run by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and eventual White House adviser Jared Kushner.
The Kushner Cos. told the AP that it didn’t harass any tenants to get them out. But the data suggest turnover at the building known as the Austin Nichols House was significantly higher than city averages for coveted rent-stabilised buildings, leaving behind a trail of anger, disrupted lives and a lawsuit to be filed Monday in which tenants say they were harassed and exposed to high levels of cancer-causing dust.