In 1998, a city inspector walked into 109 East Ninth Street and found a gas meter and piping in a public entrance — a violation deemed hazardous by the Department of Buildings. Then the agency found an illegally installed kitchen and bathroom on the third floor.
More than two decades would pass before anything came of the violations at the five-story, 1860s-era single-room occupancy. But when they resurfaced, a seemingly manageable problem mushroomed into a horrific mess.
The story that unfolded at 109 East Ninth Street hits all the low notes of multifamily ownership in New York City: aging buildings, intractable bureaucracy, kneejerk politicians, militant activists, conniving tenants, pointless laws, housing court, administrative trials and lawsuits.
Most of these could have been avoided had everyone sat down with the building’s owner, Michael Geylik. He is not hard to find: His office is on the ground floor.
Inherited violations
Geylik bought the 13-unit but mostly vacant SRO for $3.35 million in 2021. With permits from the Department of Buildings, he converted the former pub on the ground floor and removed the longstanding violations: the illegal partitions, kitchen, shower and toilets that tenants shared on the third floor, and a hazardous gas riser.
That work, approved by the city in late 2022, cured the violations from the 1990s, but Geylik still needed to replace the communal kitchen and bathroom.
To do that, he needed a Certificate of No Harassment. The City Council had added that layer of regulation in 2018, back when landlords had a financial incentive to vacate rent-stabilized units and sometimes used construction to harass tenants into leaving.
The state’s rent law reform of 2019 removed the incentive, but the Council kept the anti-harassment law on the books, and in fact expanded it in 2021. Geylik applied for the certificate, known by the acronym CONH, in August 2023.
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development looked back six years to see if Geylik was an unscrupulous landlord. More than six months later, HPD found he was not. It granted the CONH in March 2024.
In April, a 4.8 magnitude earthquake shook the city. Most buildings suffered no damage, but 109 East Ninth Street was already in bad shape — far worse than Geylik realized when he bought it.
Visible structural damage, previously flagged by a tenant named Judy Sabin, now appeared worse than before. Walls were cracking and the top four floors were severely sloped. Walking up the stairs made people nervous.
Geylik hired Steel Core Engineering to do an analysis. Renovations were suspended pending the results — disappointing tenants who were expecting a new communal kitchen and bathroom. Their complaints would come back to haunt the landlord.
But the structural integrity of the building had to be addressed first.
Department of Buildings engineer Philip Ng was so alarmed by Steel Core’s findings that he demanded immediate exploratory openings in the walls to determine if 109 East Ninth Street was sound.
The next month, August 2024, DOB issued two emergency work orders. One required a full structural evaluation and corrective plan. The other demanded temporary shoring from the cellar through the second floor, which Geylik put in immediately.
The columns made it hard to move around his office but helped support the slanted stairwell. But much more work was needed, especially for the SRO portion of the building.
Steel Core opened some walls and ceilings of vacant units and discovered more frightening problems. Load-bearing exterior walls had huge gaps in between the bricks, some of which could be moved by hand. Severely deteriorated masonry walls were transferring their load onto compromised mortar joints.
Many joists had extreme water damage, and some floor joists were unsupported except by the subfloor. They were sending their load onto overloaded joists.
The upper floors were sagging toward the middle of the building and could collapse at any time, Steel Core told DOB in a 45-page report. The engineering firm judged them unsafe for occupancy.
Here come the tenants
Geylik was advised that the structural repairs would be difficult or impossible with tenants in place. Tenants likely realized that as well, and they did not want to move from units that rent for as little as $155 a month. Their housing is less expensive than a storage locker and exceedingly rare, as the city’s few remaining SROs are grandfathered under ancient building codes.
The renters began to turn up the pressure on the landlord.
In November, one complained about the work Geylik was doing to comply with the emergency orders. The Department of Buildings issued a violation.
The agency withdrew it two weeks later, on Dec. 6, writing, “After further review, we have determined that a permit covering the work was approved before the violation was issued.”
But the initial action fed a narrative that Geylik was harassing tenants with unauthorized construction.
Meanwhile, other building drama was playing out.
A fourth-floor renter filed a detailed complaint alleging that across the hall in 4B, fellow tenant James Hicks was renting out his room through a middleman named Bobby Rich. State law requires rent-stabilized units to be a primaryv home.
“The purported tenant, James Hicks, has not used his rent stabilized room as a primary residence or lived here for over 25 years,” the neighbor wrote in December. “He has been subletting the room to various people to generate passive income for himself. I myself once sublet it from him over 10 years ago and I have receipts to prove it.”
The complaint went on to say that a man named Tom Scarlet had rented 4B from Hicks for several years and had acknowledged paying $500 a month — about three times the legal rent, now $177.
Recently, strangers had been using the unit for shorter periods, and given the building’s poor condition and shared bathrooms, the resident across the hall was worried. Once, he called the police to report an unauthorized visitor.
Documenting illegal short-term rentals is difficult. The city’s Special Operations Unit tried, visiting the building twice. The first time it could not get in. The second time it gained access but did not find a short-term renter. It closed the case in January.
Geylik was incredulous. The owner had encountered a man in the building late last year and asked who he was. “I am your tenant, James Hicks,” the man said.
“I have never seen you,” replied the landlord, whose surveillance system captures movement in and out of the building.
“Every time I enter,” Hicks said, “I put on invisibility clothes.”
The Harry Potter reference did not amuse Geylik, who said he recorded the conversation on his phone. “James, you haven’t been residing in the building,” he answered. “You have to live here.”
“Take me to court,” Hicks shot back.
Geylik did.
But housing court in New York City is a notorious slog. Evictions can take a year or more. The case against Hicks, who Geylik believes lives in Washington, D.C., is still pending.
Another of Geylik’s four tenants — the other units are vacant — is a CUNY photography lecturer named Patterson Beckwith. He has rented the room since he was a Cooper Union student.
Geylik is trying to get him out as well, alleging that Beckwith no longer lives there and only uses it for storage and a mail drop. At $214 a month, it’s $36 cheaper than a 24-square-foot, East Village locker that holds “small items like clothes, seasonal decorations, and a few boxes.”
Geylik hired a private investigator who gathered evidence that the professor was living with his wife in her rent-stabilized Greenpoint apartment and their second home in Pittsburgh, where deeds show they own three houses in a row. Geylik’s cameras at 109 East Ninth Street showed the academic spent just 1 percent of his time at his 90-square-foot SRO.
In court, Beckwith, reportedly on the verge of tears, told a judge that the landlord brought the case to harass him. Geylik was infuriated. “What bothers me the most,” the owner said, “is that he knows he doesn’t reside there.”
Beckwith did not return emails seeking comment.
Geylik took two other tenants to court for not paying rent for 18 months and two years, respectively, but the city paid the arrears through its “one-shot” program and the cases were dropped.
The tenants have brought their own housing court case against Geylik, alleging harassment.
Repairs stymied
In February 2025, Geylik filed plans for $75,000 worth of work to support the roof with temporary shoring and replace the rotted framing on the upper floors with steel, paying $1,130 in filing fees for the privilege. The work would cure a violation issued by the Department of Buildings.
While tenants in other buildings beg their landlords for repairs, at Geylik’s property, they tried to stop him. Cooper Square, an affiliate of TakeRoot Justice, advocated for them. The landlord sensed that the group had political connections that he lacked, so he hired a government relations lawyer, former City Council member Ken Fisher.
“They’re not always wrong,” Fisher said of Cooper Square, “but they’re very aggressive and everyone gets painted with the same brush.”
Even before the landlord hauled them into housing court, tenants were upset that a year after HPD issued a certificate of no harassment, he still had not put in the third-floor kitchen and bathroom. They also reported heat outages, although Geylik had replaced the boiler.
Some claimed the exploratory probing ordered by the Department of Buildings was a ruse to create dust and noise. The eviction filings amounted to harassment as well, the tenants charged.
Geylik also refused to accept some rent checks — a standard practice when a landlord does not want to validate a disputed tenancy.
Previously, the city had worked with Geylik to make the building safe and habitable. But, prompted by tenant advocacy groups and local politicians, agencies began to descend on 109 East Ninth Street like a swarm of wasps.
One 311 call triggered a March 13 inspection that found minor violations, including missing firestopping and exposed wiring in unoccupied rooms, which Geylick quickly corrected. Days after that visit, HPD showed up with six building inspectors. An inspector returned that afternoon and issued a violation for the same infraction cited on March 13 — part of a pattern, Geylick says, of “duplicate complaints on resolved technical issues.”
It seemed to him like a mission to revoke the certificate of no harassment, which a Department of Buildings spokesperson told TRD was needed for the upper-floor repairs job filed in February.
Cooper Square was joined in its effort by five politicians, including state Sen. Brian Kavanagh, the powerful Senate Housing Committee chair, and Council member Carlina Rivera. Without asking Geylik for his side of the story, they urged HPD in a March 25 letter to “take all necessary steps to remedy the egregious conditions in this building, including reevaluating the CONH.”
“Tenants were describing a lot of activity that sounded problematic,” Kavanagh said in a phone interview. “So we thought it was reasonable to ask HPD to look at the conditions to make sure it was not uninhabitable.”
Agencies tend to escalate cases when asked by elected officials. On April 22, HPD suspended the certificate of no harassment, and for the past three months has been in the city’s administrative court trying to revoke it. Between that and the five housing court cases, Geylik has run up large legal fees. In May alone, they were $60,000.
HPD insists that Geylik can find a way to shore up the building without a CONH, perhaps by changing the scope of work. But the Department of Buildings makes the call.
Kavanagh told TRD that his office could help Geylik deal with the bureaucracy if asked. “Our goal is to get tenants decent conditions to live in,” the senator said, “not to make life miserable for landlords.”
But until his non-harasser status is restored by HPD, Geylik said, his hands are tied.
“On one side, I’m being pushed by DOB to fix the building,” Geylik said. “On the other side, HPD won’t let me.”
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