East Village SRO Owner Loses Certificate of No Harassment

18 minutes read

Tenant activists thought they had the perfect target in Michael Geylik. They thought wrong.

TakeRoot Justice and its puppy-dog politician Harvey Epstein called the media to a protest Tuesday morning outside Geylik’s single-room occupancy, a creaky, 160-year-old building at 109 East Ninth Street.

They chanted and held signs, spinning a narrative of a landlord who marred the innocent tenants’ wonderful building and refuses to make it nice again.

Then something happened that rarely does at such demonstrations: The owner showed up and told his side of the story.

Suddenly, the simple narrative of an evil landlord trying to force out hapless tenants from one of the city’s few remaining SROs became a lot more complicated.

PIX11 was among the media outlets that showed up. But after Geylik welcomed the crew into his East Village building, gave his version of events, and emailed a slew of documents backing it up, the news station canceled its segment and apologized for wasting his time.

The story of 109 East Ninth Street — which The Real Deal told last August — is certainly worthy of media coverage. It just doesn’t fit into a two-minute segment on the evening news.

For one thing, the tenants are not so innocent. One, a CUNY professor named Shiras Patterson Beckwith, claims his 80-square-foot unit with no kitchen or bathroom is his primary residence, as rent stabilization law requires. But he and his wife, CUNY adjunct assistant professor Amy-Beth Gartrell, have a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn and a weekend house in Pennsylvania.

“We’re lucky to already have an apartment full of everything we need,” they wrote to their wedding guests three years ago, “so please enjoy browsing our Honeyfund wish list, where you can contribute funds to our new home. It’s a rowhouse in Pittsburgh — small but cute.”

They added, “We own the house outright.”

Geylik is in housing court trying to evict Beckwith on residency grounds. Jenny Ackchin, a TakeRoot lawyer for the professor, claimed he was so poor that the judge should waive all of his court fees.

Another renter, Remigiusz Chlapek, has a long arrest record and is being held at Rikers Island on sex trafficking charges, charged with forcing an undocumented immigrant into prostitution for 11 months. Eventually, the alleged victim took refuge in another unit and told the tenant her situation. Chlapek was also charged with a narcotics offense, violating an order of protection and witness tampering — for allegedly trying to prevent her from testifying.

Geylik is in court trying to get Chlapek out for nonpayment of rent.

Another tenant was accused of stalking by a fellow resident of the SRO. The alleged stalker was seen at the protest Tuesday beside City Council member Harvey Epstein, who sent a press release and posted an Instagram message about how he was standing up for tenants.

(Epstein never talked to the landlord. When Geylik called the Epstein staffer who wrote the press release, she refused to say where she got her information.)

Two tenants have illegal bathtubs in their rooms and one has an illegal shower. The fixtures were apparently installed long before Geylik bought the building. A judge ordered an inspection by the Department of Buildings, which flagged the violations.

At Tuesday’s protest, a bizarre scene unfolded as Geylik and the tenants he’s fighting with were showing the media around the building. At one point, the landlord dared tenant Thomas Dukleth to show reporters his unit with the allegedly illegal bathroom fixture. Dukleth refused.

Evidence gathered by the landlord showed another tenant, James Hicks, was renting out his SRO unit, which is forbidden by rent stabilization rules. Hicks dared Geylik to take him to court, so the landlord did. Hicks eventually agreed to vacate, leaving five renters in the building, plus Geylik’s office on the ground floor.

Clearly, this is not the most sympathetic group of tenants. And they continue to shame Geylik for removing and not replacing the third-floor kitchen and bathroom, rather than blame the true culprits — which include city agencies, local politicians, TakeRoot Justice and the tenants themselves.

With regulated rents of as little as $155 a month, some residents don’t want to leave and others are not willing to without a lucrative buyout. But the owner has no reason to provide one because the building’s footprint is too small for any significant redevelopment.

Besides, Geylik is not a developer. He’s a consultant and part-owner of a couple of other small buildings. The only reason he bought the 13-unit, mostly vacant East Ninth Street building for $3.35 million in 2021 was to renovate the ground floor — a former dive bar — to use as his office. Which he did.

To get a certificate of occupancy, he had to clear violations issued in the late 1990s for illegal gas and plumbing work, which meant removing the kitchen and bathroom on the third floor.

Since doing that in 2022, Geylik has been trying to legally replace them but has been tied up in a Gordian knot of bureaucracy, activism, litigation, emotion and politics.

The trouble began with the 4.8-magnitude earthquake of April 2024.

Tenant Judy Sabin reported scary cracks inside 109 East Ninth Street, and a structural engineer told Geylik the building was in such bad shape that it would be dangerous — not to mention foolish — to install the communal kitchen and bathrooms before doing structural repairs.

The problem is, Geylik has not been able to do major work in the building because last year the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — pressured by TakeRoot Justice and local elected officials — suspended the certificate of no harassment it had granted him in 2023, and this month persuaded a judge to revoke it.

The revocation, ironically, was what activists at TakeRoot Justice — an offshoot of tenant organizer Cooper Square — were celebrating with their Tuesday morning protest.

“They brought this problem on themselves,” said one of Geylik’s lawyers. “I think the tenants’ attorneys now realize what they’ve done.”

The no-harassment certificate was created by the City Council to prevent landlords from doing unnecessary work for the purpose of harassing tenants. Geylik, however, has a stack of documents from the Department of Buildings ordering him to do the very work that tenants and HPD deemed harassment.

The Department of Buildings revoked Geylik’s building permits when the certificate of no harassment was issued and is now giving him the runaround. The agency’s counsel told another city lawyer that Geylik could do work without a certificate of no harassment if he didn’t touch any apartments. The lawyer relayed that to Geylik’s attorney, who in turn told the Manhattan buildings commissioner. The commissioner replied that the information was not credible and denied Geylik a building permit.

An HPD spokesperson told TRD, “The owner is allowed to make standard repairs,” and anything beyond that is up to the Department of Buildings.

But the Department of Buildings, citing tenants’ litigation demanding renovations, refuses to meet with Geylik about granting permits to do the work. Therefore the litigation and the stalemate continue.

The saga is rife with other contradictions and Catch-22’s. For example, housing court is the proper venue for resolving landlord-tenant disputes, of which Geylik has won one and might win the remaining two. But his eviction filings were deemed harassment by the tenants, their lawyers at the nonprofit TakeRoot Justice and HPD.

The HPD official who moved to revoke Geylik’s certificate never consulted his colleague who initially granted it after a thorough character investigation of the landlord.

The city made Geylik cure the 1990s violations in the common areas, but wasn’t aware of the cast-iron bathtubs — which can weigh 1,000 pounds when full — in at least two units. This might help explain why the upper floors are sagging toward the middle of the building.

The upshot of all this is that Geylik is shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, his newly renovated office is marred by temporary support columns and the SRO tenants are living in a wreck of a building.

Not once has a city official or politician put everyone in a room to work out a solution.

Instead the activists protest, the politicians pontificate and the lawyers litigate. City agencies pass memos back and forth and deny the permits needed to fix the property. And 109 East Ninth Street slips, ever so steadily, toward the abyss.