Residents on West 83rd Street say their building has become a nightmare.
Tenants at an Upper West Side complex say they are “living in fear” after their landlord reached a behind-the-scenes agreement to house homeless people and former inmates in their quiet, working-class building.
Members of the tenants association at 126 W. 86th St. said they were blindsided by the deal with the city, which permits up to 30% of the building’s 72 rent-stabilized apartments to be assigned to hard-to-house adults — including people with active drug addictions and mental illnesses coming directly from the shelter system.
“We don’t want to be a shelter. We don’t want to be program housing,” one frustrated resident told The Post.
The tenants remain shaken by the 2023 murder of their 74-year-old neighbor, Maria Hernandez, who was brutally killed by the complex’s superintendent, a convicted felon who had been hired without a background check.
Now, residents say, they are confronting another crisis as the city places people from Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed programs, including The Fortune Society, into vacant units without on-site social workers or other building-level supervision.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that many tenants are living in fear for their safety,” the Tenant Association said in a statement.
Six tenants who spoke with The Post — all of whom declined to give their names because they feared retaliation or losing their homes — said public drug use, trespassing and suspected prostitution have become part of daily life.
Several tenants also alleged that strong odors from crack cocaine and methamphetamine spread through the ventilation system, while residents they described as unstable regularly shout obscenities throughout the night.
Tenants claimed that one person placed in the building had been arrested three times since moving in during 2024, including two arrests involving alleged stabbings.
“Tenant association officials insist that most, if not all, of the placements require supportive services and supervision, and should not be living independently in a rent-stabilized building filled with children, elderly, and working families,” the group said in a statement.
The property is owned by St. Timothy’s and St. Matthews Housing Corporation, a now-defunct church organization that once operated across the street. The city placed a lien on the building in 2018 after the group failed to pay its property taxes.
In 2023, just six months after Hernandez’s murder, the organization transferred the building’s deed to a Housing Development Fund Corporation, giving the city the ability to use the property for affordable-housing initiatives.
In return, the city canceled more than $2.3 million in property-tax debt. That same day, the HDFC signed a supportive-housing agreement with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, without informing the tenants about the transfer.
“This was going on behind the scenes, but none of us were made aware of this,” one longtime tenant said.
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“We just kept getting our rent checks. We just kept paying them to St. Matthew’s and St. Timothy’s. Meanwhile, the church also closed, and we’re still paying rent to them, which felt weird.”
The building is now in the process of being sold to another HDFC nonprofit, Sisters of Charity.
“We just feel like we’re not being listened to, and we are very concerned that, you know, they’re going to take advantage of the 30% and remove those apartments from making rent stabilization,” another tenant and association leader told The Post.
Ann Korchak, president of the Small Property Owners of New York, warned that landlords fear the arrangement could become a model for other buildings.
“No New York renter would be immune from the nightmare that the residents of this Upper West Side building are experiencing,” she said.
“Small owners are deeply concerned that the City Administration’s supportive housing model will eventually be integrated into privately-owned residential properties.”
HPD officials and the Sisters of Charity CEO Matthew Janeczko told residents at a meeting that the placements would be strictly capped at eight units, but the building’s 40-year agreement reviewed by The Post explicitly permits the owner to set aside up to 30% of the building – up to 23 apartments – for alternative placements.
The Article XI contract, which was approved by the New York City Council in 2024, also subsidizes the landlord for the placements with payments of up to $6,000 a month. All standard Article XI regulatory agreements require 10% of units for formerly homeless households.
Residents charge that the agreement gives the landlord incentive to force the building’s current tenants – many of who are elderly or work for the city as teachers and public servants.
“We know that as we are rent-stabilized tenants, we know that they can’t kick us out, but they could make our living conditions so horrendous that we just choose to leave,” said one tenant who has lived in the building for over ten years.
New York City primarily uses two models to move homeless and high-risk individuals into permanent housing – congregate housing, in which an entire building is dedicated to supportive housing with onsite social service – and scattered-site housing – in which individuals lease conventional and private buildings.
The scattered site model still requires social workers, case managers or weekly mobile crisis teams to visit clients on a scheduled basis – but all of the tenants interviewed by the Post claimed they have never observed support staff in or outside of the building.
“It is not OK to gamble on our safety,” another longtime resident said. “You have done so already, twice. So what’s it gonna take?”
A spokesperson for the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development said officials are “listening to the residents’ concerns” and working alongside elected officials to address them.
“HPD recently oversaw the appointment of a new property management company and is working with them to strengthen the financial and physical stability of the building now and for decades to come,” the spokesperson said.
“We are also exploring a transfer of the building to a new nonprofit owner with greater capacity to address long-running issues facing the building,” the spokesperson added. “As always, our top priority is to ensure the safety and stability of all tenants and their building, preserving much-needed affordable housing in a neighborhood with too little of it.”