Sun streams in through the skylight on the sixth-floor hallway of 2201-05 Davidson Avenue in the Bronx.
Arturo Miranda, president of the tenants association at Davidson, points up the stairs at the door to the roof. This is where water used to stream in, he explains in Spanish. It would reach down to the third floor.
The building at Davidson Avenue was in some ways an experiment. About a year and a half ago, the city foreclosed on the property and transferred it to a nonprofit, which will eventually transfer it to an affordable housing developer.
That’s the idea behind New York’s Third Party Transfer program, which was shuttered in 2019. But officials found one last ticket to ride for Davidson in 2025.
The trip since then has been bumpy. Some major issues, like the rainwater, have been mitigated. But the building has just as many housing-code violations as it did when the city took it over. And the fact that some tenants aren’t paying rent isn’t helping. The plan to form an ownership cooperative in the building may be in jeopardy.
As city politicians move to bring back the Third Party Transfer, and more broadly to turn decrepit, distressed apartments into affordable housing, the building at Davidson Avenue illustrates what that looks like in the immediate term, and the challenges that lie in that path: Older buildings with decades of past-due maintenance meet tenants with severely restricted incomes, just as building expenses in New York are shooting up.
To the joists
Down the stairs at Davidson Avenue, Miranda points out the landings where squatters used to sleep. Piles of garbage would accumulate in those nooks, but now the hallways are clear.
Two apartments on the fifth floor are still vacant, with numbers written on their doors in Sharpie — evidence of a past fire.
Compared to before, things are better, Miranda says. The elevator is working. People are no longer trapped in their homes. But there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The building has more than 700 housing-code violations, according to the city’s website, more than 15 per unit.
The condition of the building is striking, considering the positive vision that tenants and politicians projected 18 months ago when it was transferred. But the focus now, during the stabilization period, is on Band-Aid solutions and emergency repairs. For a fix that makes the apartments truly liveable, tenants will have to wait, potentially years, for a new owner and a real renovation.
“We’re taking a building that has been in distress, and has been ignored and abandoned by its landlord for decades at this point,” said Salvatore D’Avola, executive director of interim owner Neighborhood Restore.
The building on Davidson Avenue was was first swept up in municipal foreclosure in the 1980s. Because of competing claims to the title, the state eventually transferred ownership to landlord Romad Realty.
The city tried to foreclose again in 2015 but was stymied when the owner filed for bankruptcy, although the case was dismissed.
By 2025, the landlord owed more than $27 million to the city and state, according to city officials. The city foreclosed on the property, wiped out that debt and transferred the building to the nonprofit Neighborhood Restore.
Neighborhood Restore will eventually transfer the property to for-profit affordable housing developer Lemle & Wolff, which is also serving as the property manager. Tenants would like to form a housing cooperative so they can own their units.
The level of disrepair at Davidson means the building is literally falling apart. The floor frames aren’t level. Scaffolding surrounds the exterior. It needs a gut rehabilitation, said Patrick Logan, principal at Lemle & Wolff.
“We have to go down in some cases to the floor joists and build back up from there,” he said.
The developer will get financing support from the city, but will also need a private construction loan, one it’s still working to secure.
Making the numbers work
In order to complete the renovation, tenants will need to move, at least in stages, but they’ll be allowed to come back, and maintain their current rents. Some of them didn’t have leases, so Lemle & Wolff is working to sort that out.
When The Real Deal asked tenants what kept them in the building during the bad years, the years when they had to clean piles of trash themselves, when anyone off the street could walk in and sleep in their hallways, it all comes down to money. All of the units are rent-stabilized and prices are very low.
Keithley Barthley, who has been living on the third floor since 2009, said he pays $1,050 for his apartment.
“I want to live quiet, peacefully. No danger,” he said. “Now, it’s better than before. It’s not the best, but it’s better than before.”
A retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus driver, Barthley immigrated to the Bronx from Antigua, where he says you can go to a different beach every day of the year.
Miranda is an immigrant from another beachy locale: Veracruz, Mexico. He used to work installing security cameras but recently had surgery. He holds out his arm to show his scars.
“If you decide not to pay your rent, conditions will only worsen. This is how we need to show up.”
During the really bad times, tenants weren’t paying rent at all. Some have continued not paying, even though the building is now in the hands of a nonprofit.
Organizers with Our Bronx, who have been working with tenants at Davidson for 10 years now, have now been trying to mobilize tenants into paying their rent, especially if they’re serious about a co-op.
“If you decide not to pay your rent, conditions will only worsen,” said Edward Garcia, co-organizing director at Our Bronx. “This is how we need to show up.”
Organizers are trying to connect those who qualify with city resources, like rental assistance or “one-shot” deals. But some are discouraged by the slow pace of progress.
“It’s tough to really keep people motivated and excited about a long-term possibility of control and ownership when they have to go through some suffering for such a long time,” Garcia said. “People are tired and expect things to look completely different.”
Across the city, rent collections in affordable housing are down several percentage points, according to available data from lenders. Units are occupied but tenants aren’t paying their rent. Collections fell sharply during the pandemic and have never quite recovered.
Tenants in some buildings may have realized that failing to pay didn’t immediately lead to eviction. Others may simply not have the money.
“Even for the residents to withstand what they withstood for years, before the building was transferred to Neighborhood Restore, tells you a little bit about their means or lack of means,” Logan said of Davidson.
At the same time, affordable housing is getting squeezed by rising expenses, specifically big jumps in insurance and utility prices. For residents who make very little money, their rents in affordable housing may not cover the cost of operating their units.
“It’s hard to figure out how to make the numbers work these days,” Logan said, “even on properties that don’t have some of the issues that Davidson has.”
Last resort
Over 11 years, the city foreclosed on more than 500 properties through the Third Party Transfer program, totaling more than 7,000 housing units.
It has since weathered criticism from every angle. Foreclosures were more likely to affect Black property owners. An odd provision, called “block pickup,” allowed the city to foreclose on some properties just because they were near a targeted building, even if they weren’t as distressed. In fact, many of the buildings picked up by Third Party Transfer were not distressed at all, according to court records.
In 2019, property owners affected by the program brought a class action lawsuit. The city took their buildings for debt that was sometimes less than the value of the properties, and didn’t offer to make up the difference.
“The government has the ability to take private property for a public purpose, but it has to pay just compensation. And the TPT program didn’t do that,” said Matthew Berman, one of the attorneys representing property owners.
This fall, the city came to a settlement proposal with those affected by just the final round of the program, totaling $60 million.
Council member Pierina Ana Sanchez, whose district includes Davidson and pushed for its transfer, is spearheading the effort to bring back the Third Party Transfer program. Her effort has a wide base of support in the City Council.
This time, things will be different, she said.
“We’re writing in a lot of steps during which an owner can engage with the city and pursue a different outcome,” Sanchez said. “It’s a stabilization tool of the absolute last resort.”
Her bill, called the SAFER Homes Act, dovetails with the visions of the Zohran Mamdani administration. The mayor has made transferring properties from the hands of “bad” landlords to the care of affordable housing developers and “high-road” landlords a key part of his housing plan.
It’s a plan that landlords say demonizes property owners and pounces on buildings that are simply suffering from financial stress exacerbated by city and state policy.
But even setting aside those objections, it’s a big lift to do what the city wants to with these buildings. It takes a lot of money, and a lot of time. As the days pass, tenants suffer.
The building at 1968 Marmion Avenue, elsewhere in the Bronx, is hopefully what the building on Davidson Avenue looks like in the future.
When for-profit affordable developer Bronx Pro Group arrived, there were bathrooms where half of the floor frame was rotted out. Behind the plaster were massive cracks in the walls.
Now the building has new joists, new electric, new walls and all new plumbing. The interior looks like a new build.
In one of the bathrooms on the fourth floor, white tile is gleaming. Through the window, the building across the street reflects the sun, and the sky is cloudless. Blurred by the glass, the view looks like a beach.
It’s beautiful. It took eight years.
Back at Davidson, Barthley said he wants things to work.
“Pay my rent, fix my place. Pay my rent, fix my place,” he said. “That’s all.”
