Fires Stoke Conflicts At Greer Properties

For the second time in three years, tenants in Edgewood neighborhood apartments owned by entities controlled Rabbi Daniel Greer are alleging unsafe conditions and shoddy treatment after a fire.

The latest instance involves a fire that displaced at least four people living in a triplex at 834 Elm St. in the wee hours of Nov. 20.

The apartments there are among an estimated 125 in the Edgewood neighborhood owned by not-for-profit corporations controlled by Greer. For years the organizations renovated buildings throughout the neighborhood as a bulwark against blight. Now Greer has been accused in a federal lawsuit of sexually molesting students at his yeshiva in the neighborhood, and much has changed as a result.

The suit has devastated a once-stable small religious community in the neighborhood. It has raised questions about the future of Greer’s extensive portfolio of apartments. Family members who helped manage them have left town; the plaintiff’s attorney in the sexual abuse lawsuit has included some of the corporations owning the properties, including the one that owns 834 Elm, as named defendants in the case.

Elm Street Tenant Jessica Rizzo said she heard the carbon dioxide monitor in her second-floor apartment at 834 Elm go off some time after 3 a.m.. She said her father had installed the monitor along with new smoke detectors when she and her roommate, Olivia, moved in last year, after noticing that there weren’t any working ones there.

Not wanting to get out of bed for nothing, Rizzo said she started to ignore the monitor, even going so far as to Google what the beeping meant just in case it was a false alarm.

“I got up really to knock it off,” Rizzo said. ​“But as soon as I walked into the kitchen … I saw the smoke coming underneath the door.”

She rushed to wake her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend. ​“I said, ​‘Guys you have to get up, we have to go,’” she recalled. ​“That’s when I saw that the flames were in the back window. My roommates’ room, is in the back so I woke them up just in time.”

On their way out the front, she knocked on downstairs neighbor Ryan Bell’s door.

Bell had been home since nine the previous night. He said he had previously smelled smoke, like from a campfire. He went looking for the source but didn’t find anything. When his dad and stepmom arrived a little later they too smelled the smoke and helped him try locate it with no luck. When his parents left at midnight, he and his wife went to bed.

“I woke up around 3:30 to Jessica banging on the door screaming,” he recalled. ​“There was a lot of banging and smoke alarms going off, but not in my apartment but upstairs.”

By the time Bell and his wife got outside, the firefighters were already on the scene tackling the blaze. It appeared to have started somewhere in the back of the triplex.

The structure didn’t burn down. But the back of it was torched, damaging a spare bedroom where Bell said he kept a trove of vinyl records and many his clothes. Rizzo’s roommate’s room was in the back; her possessions sustained the most damage. A third-floor apartment also was damaged. Firefighters had to open up the back wall to finally quell the blaze.

Both tenants said their furniture sustained water damage, as did other personal effects in parts of their apartment that didn’t actually catch fire.

Bell said during a talk with city fire officials on the day of the fire he learned that electrical wiring might have caused the fire. If that turns out to be true — the fire marshal’s office is investigating — then the owner of the building, Edgewood-Elm Housing Inc/Edgewood Village Inc., which is owned by Greer, could be responsible for replacing the tenants’ damaged property. But Bell said he heard a different story from the fire inspector for his landlord’s insurance company.

“The property inspector said it was probably started by a cigarette,” Bell said. ​“He said that a neighbor saw somebody smoking on the porch earlier that night and then saw smoke coming from the back porch.”

Fire Marshal Bobby Doyle told the Independent that the Elm Street fire damage was consistent with an electrical fire.

Bunking With Grandma

After two weeks of Bell calling and asking questions, the only person he gets to talk to is Edgewood Elm’s. attorney, Stuart Margolis. Margolis did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Bell said that though their apartments are no longer inhabitable, there was no immediate offer to put the tenants in hotel rooms on the day of the fire.

Bell said that he got an offer to look at another apartment, and ended up bunking with his grandmother, while his wife went to Maryland to stay with her brother. Rizzo said her roommate paid for a hotel out of pocket. Neither tenants have renter’s insurance. Rizzo’s car sustained about $10,000 in damage, she said; her car insurance is handling that.

Bell and his wife, who had lived in their apartment about two months when the fire, declined looking at a new apartment owned by Edgewood-Elm. They have instead found a new place renting with Pike International. Bell said Edgewood-Elm has paid back last month’s rent and prorated rent for the time they weren’t living in the apartment, the furnace servicing fee and the security deposit.

But he said the owners declined to pay for the $400 they had to pony up for the furnace oil, or the difference between what Bell might receive from having a company come retrieve the oil. He said the owners also have been uncooperative about providing appropriate times and safe escort to retrieve what’s left of their stuff. Rizzo, who along with her roommate has taken another apartment managed by Edgewood-Elm, said her roommate was told she would not be reimbursed for the money she spent on a hotel or on the oil they put in their furnace or receive a discount on their rent for December.

On the day of the fire, city Building Official Jim Turcio deemed the triplex in violation of state building code. He issued an order stating that it presented ​“imminent danger of failure or collapse.” He noted: ​“fire damage to all rear porches, balconies, staircases and egresses; electrical damage through all units; 2nd & 3rd floor window damage, partial roof collapse; and fire and water damage to all rear rooms. The structure also remains open to trespass.”

He also wrote: ​“It shall be unlawful for any person to enter such premises except upon permission granted by the building officials; which may be granted for the purposes of making required repairs or demolishing the premises.”

Before the back side of the structure was boarded up, both Rizzo and Bell said, they were both urged by management to retrieve their things from the house.

Bell said after the fire and talking with nearby neighbors he noticed a trend of Edgewood-Elm renting to young people who don’t seem to know their rights as tenants and might not speak up in the face of ill treatment, or unresponsiveness from the landlord. He’s hoping it won’t take dragging his former landlord to court, but he has talked with a couple of attorneys.

Leaping From Window

A previous fire at a Greer property did end up in court. Three years ago, a tenant jumped from her third-floor window to save herself from another early-morning fire that had started on the lower floors of a triplex at 33 Pendleton St.

The tenant, Amy Yamaguchi, said in lawsuit she filed on March 23, 2015 that she woke up to the smell of smoke instead of the sound of fire or smoke alarms. When she attempted to escape her apartment through the front door it was blocked by heavy smoke and heat. When she tried to go out the back, she also was unable to exit.

Her suit, which is still pending, alleges that management failed to ​“ensure the premises contained sufficient smoke detectors; ensure that the smoke detectors present were operating properly; test and maintain the smoke detectors; make sure there was an automatic security system for detecting fires and report to the fire department; inspect the property for fire hazards; enforce fire regulations; enforce fire regulations on tenants; ensure a sufficient number of viable exits in the event of fire.”

In a response to the complaint, attorney Jesalyn Cole wrote that her clients had ​“insufficient information” to respond to some allegations and denied any negligence on their part. Yamaguchi is blamed for causing her own injuries by jumping out of the window, for not knowing the number of working smoke detectors in her apartment, and for not having informed her landlord if those detectors were working, which the attorney claimed was a condition of Yamaguchi’s lease agreement.

Meanwhile, Bell also said when he went to retrieve the rent and security deposit for 834 Elm from the attorney’s office he was made to sign for them, subsequently to discover that there was a piece of paper in the sealed envelopes that contained the checks that said: ​“This agreement terminates and settles all issues between the tenant and Edgewood-Elm.” Now he’s concerned that he might have unwittingly signed away his rights.

“Anything that was broken or lost to the fire, I would want replaced,” he said. ​“Ideally, I’d like some type of apology. We had to buy all new groceries and we had to travel a lot more and find a new place.”

Rizzo said she and her roommate have 10 more months left on their lease at the new apartment. She said the new place is more updated than the apartment at Elm Street, but the floors are so old and creaky she fears that they might fall through them.

“We’re only 20 years old so we don’t know what we should do, what we should be pressuring them to do,” she said. ​“Our parents aren’t involved, so it sucks. They gave us three days to decide on the new place, so we didn’t really have a choice. But when the 10 months are up, we are so done with them. But until those 10 months are up, if we do go to court, we’re still living under their management. Are they going to try to evict us? We don’t know.”