The Troy City Council held a second investigative hearing Thursday into the Harbour Point Gardens apartment complex, which was suddenly evacuated in late June due to sagging brick façades.
Deputy Mayor Chris Nolin opened the hearing by saying owners are making progress on reopening the evacuated apartments. On June 22nd, 58 units were evacuated with no notice by the city’s code enforcement after an engineering report deemed the brick façades unsafe. Tenants have since been living with family or friends or in a motel, which is being paid for by the owners.
Nolin says the city is staffing the complex to supervise remediation efforts following reckless demolition by contractors hired by the owners.
“It’s peeling layers on an onion, you find what the first issue was, the brick façade, then they remove the brick façade and damaged the drywall, putting holes in walls, there's were my understanding of structural damage, right? Which they are there, they're fixing,” Nolin said. “You know, these, it’s the layers of the onion, just keep going, and how far did they go?”
Nolin says Mayor Patrick Madden’s office has been in contact with the state’s attorney general and says they are willing to assist in obtaining the contact information of displaced residents— which the owners have failed to provide to the city over the last two months.
Nearly half of the affected apartments have been cleared for reoccupation, meeting the minimum standards of inhabitation.
“We know in some cases additional work needs to be done,” Nolin said. “The threshold that I was told by the prior, by our engineer, is safe and fit. There might be some things that are subpar.”
On Wednesday, the Rensselaer Supreme Court threw out subpoenas issued by the City Council because of technicalities – witness fees and travel reimbursement for the owners and management of the complex were not paid when the subpoenas were served, according to the City Council.
Council President Carmella Mantello, a Republican candidate for mayor, says she will work on reissuing the subpoenas next week. Mantello says she was at the complex on the day of the evacuations and in hindsight, the city should have handled the evacuation better.
“It was, like I said just not handled appropriately,” Mantello said. “These are human beings and these folks, like I said, many of them didn’t even know they were being evicted. So, it was not a good picture. And from that day to today I just continue shaking my head.”
Two months later, Mantello says she does not see a “light at the end of the tunnel.”
“The folks don’t wanna go back to the unit because it’s, it’s crap. I mean these units, I’m seeing pictures, and I wouldn’t live in them, nobody should, you know, be it’s just this inhumane treatment disgusts me.”
A looming question among councilors is why only 12 tickets have been issued to the owners of the complex. According to code enforcement officer Jesse Ordansky, tickets are issued as a blanket fine rather than individually. Corporation Counsel Richard Morrisey says while the department cannot focus all of its efforts on the complex, minor violations will not disappear.
“We are laser-focused on returning units to occupancy standards,” Morrissey said. “The other violations, which do not implicate occupancy, can await further enforcement action. We’re not waiving anything.”
The council probed code enforcement and the mayor’s administration about what could have been done differently to avoid the lengthy displacement and prevent a similar situation in the future.
Dave Sheeran, the city’s Principal Code Inspector, says it’s more complicated than that.
“I didn't call for the evacuation. That was based on an engineer. I'm not an engineer. Based on an engineering report, we did what we were asked to do. And we got, and we got to hold as many tenants as we possibly could. We knocked on doors. We did give unfit notices to the tenants.”
The lack of an up-to-date landlord registry has been a point of contention between the city, council, and tenants. Without the registry, the city found it difficult to track down the owner of the complex — 182 Delaware LLC which is owned by Lexington Property Group. Sheeran says a housing compliance clerk was just hired to manage the registry.
