Believing she couldn’t afford Manhattan, Ayana Green was house hunting in Queens when she saw a StreetEasy listing for an East Harlem co-op. At $450,000, it was one-third of Manhattan’s median home price.
Better yet, it was a two-bedroom with maintenance charges of only $585 a month. She saw the apartment and made an offer.
One thing seemed odd, though. The seller’s broker urged her to use Midtown-based mortgage provider GuardHill Financial.
“I was told during the showing that they had a heavy preference for GuardHill,” she said. “If I didn’t go through GuardHill, there was another process and it would take a lot longer, and you would forfeit a portion of the down payment if the loan didn’t come through.”
Green went with GuardHill.
She closed on the apartment last year, at 123-25 East 102nd Street, but the experience gave her pause. Green and other new shareholders grew suspicious when the co-op board was unable to immediately provide documents they requested to file tax returns and were rebuffed upon asking when the annual shareholder meeting would be.
The building’s issues, it turned out, ran a lot deeper.
Buyers at the affordable co-op, classified as a Housing Development Fund Corporation, cannot have high incomes and shareholders’ units must be their primary residence, according to city rules.
Yet some shareholders of the 95-year-old East Harlem building owned multiple units or had never lived there. One owned seven of the 31 apartments at the same time — and didn’t reside in any. Another owned four.
Other shareholders seem to have exploited the HDFC co-op for financial gain, and in recent years, $800,000 had been drained from the co-op’s account, bank records show.
Green and other skeptical shareholders requested help from a nonprofit for homeowners, which found red flags about how the co-op operated and referred them to a lawyer.
When the co-op’s leadership kept control of the board in a contested election last December, 13 dissident shareholders sued. Their attorney soon unearthed a convoluted history of insider deals that ran afoul of the building’s rules and its legally mandated mission to provide affordable homeownership.
Good intentions
The story of 123-25 East 102nd Street is, in part, about how lack of oversight and increasing property values in New York City can turn even highly regulated housing into a cash cow.
HDFCs are co-ops legally designated to house low-income people. During New York’s dark years, the city created more than a thousand of them from tax-delinquent rental buildings whose owners had walked away.
They tended to be in areas that were struggling, and their apartments were nearly worthless. Today, though, they are in demand. However, because of affordability rules, shareholders of HDFC co-ops cannot simply rent or sell units to the highest bidder.
“Nobody ever thought that somebody would offer them $500,000 for their apartments,” said Oscar McDonald of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, which monitors and assists HDFCs. “These neighborhoods have changed. It tests people’s honesty and integrity.”
After seizing 123-25 East 102nd Street for unpaid property taxes, the city converted the 1930-built rental to a co-op and sold it to the tenants in 2001 for $250 per unit.
Lately, the apartments have fetched up to $499,000, although sale prices are limited by the fact that buyers cannot earn more than 165 percent of the area median income.
This form of housing and ownership is specifically designed for owner occupancy.
If their incomes increase after buying, they can stay, but the unit must remain their primary residence — occupied by the shareholder at least 183 days a year, or 275 days in newer HDFCs. Sublet rents are capped at 110 percent of the maintenance fee.
The restrictions aim to prevent units from being treated as investment properties. For that reason, HDFCs present a rare opportunity for working-class New Yorkers to buy a quality, affordable home. It’s a goal that elected officials have increasingly endorsed as the city’s housing crisis has worsened.
The vast majority of the city’s approximately 1,300 HDFCs are well run and follow the rules, McDonald said. However, HDFCs lacking regulatory agreements with the city, such as 123-25 East 102nd Street, have no regular oversight. They are essentially self-policing.
It is a responsibility that the East Harlem co-op board, by routinely granting exceptions, appeared to purposefully ignore.
“Liberal subletting”
The broker who sold Green her unit, Scott Kinder, had warned the co-op about its rule-bending when the board asked him in 2017 to handle sales. Kinder even foresaw the shareholder revolt now underway.
“This form of housing and ownership is specifically designed for owner occupancy,” he emailed the board president and her husband at the time.
“In the current market, new shareholders can be expected to demonstrate more control and concern,” he predicted. “Likewise, to satisfy some of those concerns, the coop is going to have to tighten up and/or eliminate its current liberal subletting policy.”
The city’s HDFC website is clear: “In general, short-term subletting with Board of Directors’ permission is acceptable where the shareholder intends to return to the apartment, but long-term sublets are not permissible.”
New shareholders at East 102nd Street were informed of this, yet long-term subletting continued for the insiders, as did apartment hoarding and other curious — and lucrative — arrangements. The mutual backscratching may have been so rampant that for years no shareholders raised a fuss, as they were also benefiting from the permissive policies.
Kinder himself was purportedly an absentee owner when he wrote that 2017 message and remains one today. His five-year contract as exclusive sales broker includes a $100,000 termination clause, and his pay to manage the property was recently doubled to $3,000 a month by a five-member board that included his daughter and her mother.
The board president has a combined unit, yet her husband owned a two-bedroom. One board member, Maxcine Holder, had four units simultaneously. Another, Nettie Elenion, had seven, and never lived in any of them.
Web of relationships
Although the building’s insiders swapped and sold apartments like baseball cards, city property records show not a single transaction between the co-op’s inception in 2001 and 2019, when Marcus Cintron, the board president’s son, sold a unit for $245,000.
Keeping track of the characters and schemes at the six-story co-op requires a whiteboard, like the ones detectives use to chart connections among suspects.
Holder, who sold 2A to Green last year, was one of the hubs. She owns Unit 3D and rents it to Charles Richardson, whose mother, June Richardson, was the loan officer Green was steered to by Kinder.
Holder and Kinder have two children together. Their daughter Courtney Kinder also owns a unit in the co-op, though she, like her parents and Elenion, lives in a condo at 309 East 108th Street.
Michael Zampella, whom Kinder has known for at least 15 years, picked up a unit in 2014 but has never lived in it — though he was on the board from 2022 to 2024. He owns LLCs that do business with the co-op and its shareholders.
Holder formed Maxnettie LLC, combining her first name and Elenion’s, and registered it at their East 108th Street condo. Elenion has an LLC too, named Elendil Mar, which is also the name of the Vermont Airbnb she owns. (A repeat guest named “Nettie” posted three positive reviews.)
The personal and business connections may explain how the various players became shareholders in the HDFC and used it to bolster their financial and property portfolios.
Zampella, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and works at the Pentagon, did not disclose his businesses in an affidavit filed in response to the lawsuit. Rather, he said he was a Navy reservist when he acquired his unit in 2014 and intended to move in upon being discharged, but never was.
“With the [co-op] board’s permission, the resident living in the apartment at that time was permitted to stay and pay monthly rent and maintenance fees to the HDFC,” he said in the statement. “I have not realized any income from apartment 6C since my purchase 11 years ago.”
Zampella failed to mention his income from other units. His MZ Capital Funding LLC received $359,517 from the sale of Unit 2D and $285,000 when Holder sold 2A.
Apartments collected and traded
Unit 2A exemplifies the HDFC’s secretive wheeling and dealing. The apartment was passed around like a blunt at a frat party before being sold to the outsider Green.
Its confusing journey began in 2007 when Ramon Ruiz, also known as Ray Cintron, somehow acquired it from original owner Matilda Reyes. In 2020, the board, led by Ruiz’s wife, Victoria Guzman, exempted Ruiz’s future sale of the unit from the building’s 20 percent flip tax on profits.
By 2023, Unit 2A had mysteriously migrated to Elenion’s collection. She sold it that year for $450,000 to her condo neighbor Holder, whose daughter Courtney Kinder paid the $44,900 deposit. Courtney made out her check to “Nettie Elenion care of Elendil Mar LLC” (the Vermont Airbnb entity) and wrote “gift to Maxcine Holder” in the memo section.
A year later, Holder sold Unit 2A for the same price she had paid Elenion. The flip yielded zero profit for Holder, but records show it got her a $314,000 mortgage from GuardHill.
Kinder (who, remember, has two children with Holder) pocketed an $18,000 commission from the sale, and Holder took home $120,000. They are not presently in a relationship but remain close, Holder said in an affidavit.
She did not explain why Zampella received $285,000. No loan appears in city records. The 2023 sale is also missing.
In all, at least seven HDFC insiders touched Unit 2A: Ruiz, the president’s husband; Elenion, the seven-unit and Airbnb owner; Holder; her ex Scott Kinder; their daughter Courtney; Navy reservist Zampella; and the loan broker Richardson.
Systematic withdrawals
Guzman, the board president who gave her blessing to the co-op’s practices, benefited in a different way. She paid herself and her husband $100,000 over the past few years from the co-op’s account, which saw its balance fall from more than $1.1 million to less than $400,000.
Guzman received at least $70,918, and Ruiz got $29,710. Florida resident Vanessa Ramirez, the mother of their grandchildren, received $14,443, apparently to serve as an officer of the co-op.
Ramirez lives with Marcus Cintron and their kids in a home owned by Guzman and Ruiz, Marcus’ parents, in Kissimmee, a thousand miles south of East Harlem.
Former board member Emma Rodriguez, who until recently owned Unit 2D, also worked for the co-op from her home in Florida, receiving checks totaling at least $21,200. She and Guzman co-signed the checks to themselves and others.
Asked what duties were performed to justify the payments, plaintiff Ayana Green said, “I would love to know. We have no idea.”
The board exempted Rodriguez and Guzman’s apartments, like that of Guzman’s husband, from the flip tax as they got ready to cash out. Nettie Elenion’s five remaining units were also exempted, as was Jaime De La Vega’s Unit 2C.
Holder was not included in the flip tax exemption, yet she was allowed to sell two units without giving the co-op a cut.
“A flip tax is very important for the ongoing successful operation of an HDFC co-op,” the city’s housing agency says on its website. “The HDFC co-op re-invests the flip taxes it collects into capital repairs and other building needs.”
Records missing
Because of the unexplained void in ACRIS, the city’s property transaction database, it is unclear how Marcus Cintron, his father and several other insiders obtained their units.
Affidavits filed by the defendants offer some clues.
Elenion said she received “several units” — seven, it appears — in 2016 as payment for a defaulted loan that she made in 2012 to an unnamed person. She said she immediately gave Scott and Courtney Kinder one unit apiece (5B and 5E).
Elenion said she let the board rent out her remaining five apartments and keep the income. She later sold three and kept two.
In her affidavit, Courtney Kinder did not explain why Elenion gave her an apartment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “At the time that she came into possession of several units in the building, a unit was transferred to me,” she said.
She seemed resentful that the new shareholders’ lawsuit questions her ownership, as it does of 10 other units.
“It seems very late to complain about a transaction that was approved at the time,” Kinder said, “and long before any of the plaintiffs moved into the building.”
The new owners don’t see it that way. If past practices inappropriately enriched individuals at the expense of the co-op, current and future shareholders will have to pay higher fees to maintain the aging building.
They also want the HDFC to fulfill its mission of providing affordable, owner-occupied housing.
To that end, they are demanding 11 units be returned to the co-op to sell, or that the building be paid up to $5.5 million for them.
“We want to be able to take the units, transact them out, provide housing for people and keep middle-income New Yorkers in New York — and refresh the building,” Green said. “We want a safe, clean building where people can enjoy living.”
Ugly confrontation
Tensions have been high since last fall, when several dissidents sought election to the board but lost when the old guard let absentee shareholders vote by email.
Things got so heated that in February, Ruiz warned plaintiff Alex Loule during a profanity-laced diatribe that he would be “carried out of here.” Loule’s young son stood feet away, open-mouthed, as his father recorded the encounter.
In his affidavit, Ruiz admitted making the statement but claimed he meant Loule could be arrested for falsely reporting building conditions.
But Marcus Cintron, Ruiz’s son, was more explicit.
Another video recorded by Loule shows Cintron following him outside the building and yelling, “I am not making a threat. That is a fuckin’ promise, you fuckin’ little piece of shit. You fuck with me, I will fuckin’ kill you, n—–. Straight up. I don’t give a fuck… You want to go to the basement and fight?”
Cintron explained in an affidavit that he was upset because Loule had harassed him and his father.
Digging through documents
The dispute figures to be settled in a law firm conference room, not in the bowels of the East Harlem building.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Gregory Byrnes, has subpoenaed and sorted through thousands of pages of records like a bomb-sniffing dog. They depict, he said, an intricate social network of shareholders, relatives, friends, business partners and lovers who took advantage of the co-op.
Byrnes’ clients have a long list of demands. Three will be fiercely resisted: that a receiver be appointed to run the building; that Elenion, Holder, Zampella and the Kinders give back their 11 “illegally transferred” units or pay the co-op for them; and that the “hundreds of thousands of dollars taken by current and former board members, officers and the ‘property manager’” be repaid.
The suit also calls for:
- an audit of the building’s finances, which by rule is supposed to be done annually
- repeal of the flip tax exemption and other board resolutions passed for “personal benefit”
- enforcement of the residency rules
- payment of the defendants’ maintenance arrears, and
- cancelation of Scott Kinder’s management and broker agreements.
It is unclear how much shareholders owe in maintenance fees, which are low because the building’s annual property tax is only $53,000. Records obtained by Byrnes show collection from 2020 through 2024 ranged from 44 to 65 percent.
According to Guzman’s affidavit, Courtney Kinder is responsible for collecting rent and maintenance and has done so “without issue since 2022.”
Guzman also defended the decision to hire Kinder, a shareholder.
While the board may have engaged in several technical violations of the bylaws, there has been no showing of actual loss or waste.
“We were aware that there was potential for a conflict,” she said, “but the board determined that it was in the HDFC’s best interest to have someone with Mr. Kinder’s knowledge and experience assisting with day-to-day operation of the building.”
Byrnes, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, had requested the board’s files for all closings in the building but was given only those for his clients’ purchases. In legal filings, the co-op said it would take time to produce the rest and claimed the unit transfers were proper.
The co-op’s insurance provider replaced the board’s initial lawyer in the case. The new legal team argues that the plaintiffs have blown minor infractions out of proportion.
Lead attorney Matthew Mehnert wrote to the presiding judge, Paul Goetz, that appointing a receiver would be drastic and unjustified. He wants the whole case dismissed.
“While the board may have engaged in several technical violations of the bylaws, there has been no showing of actual loss or waste,” Mehnert asserted in a court filing. “There has been no showing of self-dealing or impropriety by the board.”
The Real Deal emailed questions to Guzman, Ruiz, Kinder and Kinder’s personal attorney, Daniel Laguardia, but received no responses.
Residency requirements, flip taxes and limits on sublet rents and duration are found in the governing documents of HDFC co-ops, which must also abide by the state’s Business Corporation Law and Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law.
“These are highly regulated buildings,” said UHAB’s McDonald. “They have to be more careful than a market-rate co-op.”
Byrnes has reported his findings to the Manhattan district attorney and state attorney general but does not expect either to bring a case, given their limited resources and large universe of complaints.
He is likely correct. By the standards of New York real estate, the co-op at 123-25 East 102nd Street is small potatoes. It involves ordinary New Yorkers and modest sums, not the kind of villains and dollar figures that make headlines.
But to HDFC experts like McDonald, ethical management by affordable co-ops matters.
Beyond abiding by the law, HDFCs have a responsibility to live up to the promise of the program, he said. They were not created for people to hoard units and cut insider deals every time a unit becomes vacant.
“Conflict is not always a legal conflict,” he said. “It’s all about the appearance of impropriety.”
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