Roosevelt Ansley, 84, has lived at Robert Fulton Terrace in the Bronx since 1978. In recent winters, when the heat went out, sometimes for days at a time, he bought himself space heaters to keep warm. When he needed a new refrigerator, he bought that, to
On Wednesday morning, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in the community room of Ansley’s building and announced that the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) had secured a $31 million penalty against the owners of Robert Fulton Terrace and its sister building, Fordham Towers—the largest civil penalty in HPD’s history.
“For years, tenants at Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers have been forced to live with vermin infestations, chronic elevator outages and a lack of heat and hot water—while their landlords met their suffering with silence,” Mamdani said in his remarks. “Today, that neglect is finally met with consequences.”
The landlords, Karan Singh and Rajmattie Persaud, both fixtures on the Public Advocate’s Worst Landlords List, accumulated more than 1,600 code violations across the two buildings while continuing to collect rent. The litigation was first filed in 2024 by HPD’s Anti-Harassment Unit.
As part of the court judgment, the city secured the appointment of an independent chief restructuring officer, a first for the city, who has already hired a property manager and frozen $900,000 from the landlords’ bank accounts to fund immediate repairs across nearly 500 apartments.
“We are announcing not just the largest civil settlement, but also $900,000 being frozen from these landlords’ bank accounts,” Mamdani told Courier New York. “That money is going towards a chief restructuring officer on the condition that it be used only for repairs of these buildings.”
The penalty brings the Mamdani administration to just under $100 million in total restitution won against negligent landlords since the mayor took office in January.
Tenants described conditions that deteriorated sharply after the buildings changed hands. Ansley, who worked as a custodian and supervisor at Hunter College before retiring in 2002, remembers when Robert Fulton Terrace was a different place. Opened in 1967 under the Mitchell-Lama program as stable middle-income housing, the complex once offered responsive maintenance, union workers, and apartments that came with whatever you needed.
“Anything you wanted in your apartment, they brought it,” he told Courier New York.
That changed when Singh took over and removed the building’s 32BJ SEIU (Service Employees International Union) workers. Since then, Ansley said, broken elevators have gone unrepaired for years—one hasn’t worked in five years, he said—forcing elderly residents to cross the roof to reach a working elevator in the adjacent building. He’s dealt with rat infestations, intermittent hot water, and a management team he described as unresponsive at best, hostile at worst.
“They should have [gotten] rid of them a long time ago,” he said.
Ashaki Long, president of the tenant association at the sister building at 480 East 188th Street, offered a similar account. A 25-year resident, she described broken elevators, roach and rat infestations, aging appliances that are never replaced, and what she called constant harassment and intimidation from Singh and his management team.
“At a certain point, it becomes clear: Mr. Singh does not deserve these properties,” Long said at the press conference. “And now, after years of fighting, the city is finally fighting to get a more responsible owner.”
The city is not compelling a sale, but is calling on Fannie Mae—which holds the mortgage on both buildings and has foreclosed on them—to intervene.
HPD Commissioner Dina Levy, who said she worked as a tenant organizer in these very buildings nearly 20 years ago, called the judgment the beginning of “a new chapter” and said the city has made its demands to Fannie Mae clear: direct a receiver to begin repairs immediately, facilitate the sale of the buildings to a responsible preservation buyer with tenant and city endorsement, and account for the full cost of renovation in any future sale.
When asked how his administration planned to win back the trust of tenants who have been failed by the city for decades, Mamdani was direct.
“There’s only so much you can say to someone who’s been let down time and again,” he said. “They need to see something to believe in it.”
Wednesday’s announcement is the latest in a string of tenant-focused initiatives from the Mamdani administration. Earlier this year, the mayor launched “Rental Ripoff” hearings, a series of public forums across all five boroughs, established by Executive Order 08, where tenants could confront city agencies directly about unsafe conditions, illegal fees, and landlord neglect. Over 1,600 testimonies were collected across all five boroughs, and the administration has 90 days from the conclusion of the hearings to produce an enforcement and policy plan.
For Ansley, the announcement was long overdue. Asked what he thought of a mayor who finally showed up, he didn’t hesitate.
“He’s good,” he said. “He came back and found out the problem.”
