It’s Thursday. We’ll look at a building in Brooklyn where tenants stopped paying the rent. We’ll also look at a new art installation that projects images onto a huge “shoreline” of oyster shells.
The four-story apartment building at 1616 President Street in Brooklyn is notable for the tall letters spelling out “Ultra Court” that are etched over the front door and flanked by elaborate columns. The building is also notable for the anger percolating among the tenants — anger that has boiled over into a rent strike by about half the residents.
Plagued by problems like cockroach infestations and leaky ceilings, they maintain that repairs have been neglected for too long by a landlord who is described by city officials as one of the most negligent in New York. The city has even gone to housing court, accusing the landlord of falsely claiming that dozens of violations had been addressed and of filing “baseless” eviction papers against tenants.
The landlord maintains that the building has been properly maintained and that tenants have sometimes blocked access to their apartments, preventing maintenance people from doing repairs.
Simmering tensions between landlords and renters are not uncommon in New York, but the rent strike on President Street in Crown Heights has a pandemic-related twist. The outbreak has mobilized tenants to take on their landlords. As my colleague Mihir Zaveri explains, the protest on President Street began in May 2020 when a nationwide protest with the rallying cry “cancel rent” demanded housing relief.
It’s not clear how many other protests that were inaugurated then have lasted. Some landlords — also coping with the financial pain of the pandemic — have struck deals with tenants for reduced payments on back rent. But there’s no question that in…
On Wednesday, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tweeted his opposition to planned affordable housing development in Flatbush said to sit atop a centuries-old African burial ground. 
