Eight years ago, Max Plyshevsky moved into a light-filled two-bedroom corner apartment in Sunset Park.
It was the first place the divorcee owned by himself. It was his haven, with room for his daughter when she came to visit. He invested his savings into the fourth-floor condo and figured he had a nest egg.
But in April 2019, all that went up in smoke when a vicious fire tore from a top floor apartment through the entire 54-unit building, leaving the highest three floors exposed to the sky and displacing all residents.
“It’s on the list of one of the biggest things that’s ever happened to me. Like having a child, it’s a major, major event that redirected the course of my life,” Plyshevsky said.
Plyshevsky, 47, a former software developer who lost his job following the fire, now lives in a single-wide trailer in the Hudson Valley, where he shops at Walmart, hikes with new friends and burns wood for heating.
And he continues to pay the mortgage and property taxes on his burned-out Sunset Park condo.
“I basically own air space in New York City, and I keep paying for it,” said Plyshevsky.
A sale of the ruined property would allow him to stop paying on the vacant apartment — a sale he and owners of three dozen other destroyed condo units in his building had hoped would take place last week, in a scheduled auction at the Brooklyn county courthouse.
A sale would mark the beginning of the end of a years-long saga that changed the course of his life and those of his former neighbors.
But the Nov. 30 auction, with a minimum bid of $9.5 million, brought not a single bidder. It was the second time that the property had failed to sell, with the wrecked state of the building and a lawsuit from former renters hanging over any future owner.
Eleanor Whitney, 42, a writer and marketing professional, bought her condo, on the building’s fifth floor, in cash in 2009. She thought she’d found her forever home in Brooklyn and had no plans to ever leave the city. But she lost that assurance in the fire, along with her beloved cat, Crackers.
The auction’s failure now means continued uncertainty and no financial relief.
“It’s this ghost that follows me around,” Whitney said, “and reminds me of this home and this future that I can’t have.”
Scant Insurance Coverage
Standing across from Sunset Park, the building still had 17 rental apartments dating to before its conversion to condominiums. All the rentals were rent-stabilized or rent-controlled and occupied by longtime tenants, who lived side by side with owners who had paid as much as $800,000 for condo units.
The fire, and a resulting lawsuit from tenants, have thrown the renters and condo owners into opposition.
While the homeowners are eager to sell the building and unburden themselves of property taxes and mortgage payments, the tenants are battling in court for what they argue is their right, under state law, to force both the condo owners and the owner of their units to repair the building and welcome them back.
The derelict six-story building still stands on the corner of 44th Street and 7th Avenue, at the southeast edge of the park after which the neighborhood is named.
Four months after the fire, in July 2019, the tenants sued their landlord, the condominium association representing the homeowners and the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, demanding repairs and that the owners pay to relocate tenants.
The condominium association representing the individual homeowners, some of whom had poured their life savings into purchasing their homes, said they simply could not afford to do so.
The building was also terribly underinsured, with hazard insurance policies with a maximum coverage of approximately $8 million — far below the building’s estimated $38 million value before the fire, or the approximately $26 million it would cost to rebuild, according to court filings.
The fate of the building — and its former residents — has been tied up in the court system ever since.
Speaking of both the displaced homeowners and tenants, condo general counsel Theresa Racht said in an interview with THE CITY: “There’s a lot of pain and loss here. Everybody lost.”
Plyshevsky, who has been living on his dwindling savings, said the ordeal changed his values.
“I was forced to really simplify my life. The thing it made clear to me is there’s no financial security,” he said.
The condo owners had hoped Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Debra Silber held the keys to freeing them from their financial burden, after a possible sale fell through over the summer.
Because the building was held in joint ownership, the court had to grant permission to sell it. Once sold, the proceeds can be distributed among the owners. Without this so-called partition action, all the owners would have to coordinate in order to move forward.
With the failure of the auction Silber ordered, now the condo owners along with the entity that owns the rental units must decide what to do next. One option is to lower the minimum bid and try again for an auction, with the judge’s approval. But complicating matters is the judge’s expected retirement next month.
Jeffrey Saltiel, a real estate litigator with 20 years of experience in partition sales appointed to referee the case, said that he’d never seen a case as complex as the one surrounding the Sunset Park building.
“What’s really unusual is, normally a partition is a one-to-three family building with multiple owners,” he said. “In this case, you have a building that used to be a condominium of 54 units that is now a 54-family building.”
Mourning Pets
It took 100 firefighters more than a day to get the five-alarm fire under control against 30- to 40-mile-per-hour winds. Ultimately, 23 firefighters, five police officers and four residents were injured in the blaze, which also killed 13 cats and one dog, according to court papers.
The fire department determined that the cause of the fire was accidental and originated from an unattended candle lit next to a window curtain on the sixth floor.
Some of the building’s displaced residents struggled to rebuild their lives in the aftermath, crashing with family, friends or living in hotels for months afterwards.
Marcela Salazar, 68, is one of the tenants who sued the sponsor and the condominium board to force repairs and allow them to return to the building. After living in a hotel for six months immediately after the fire, she moved two separate times before finding her current Section 8 rental in the neighborhood.
She, like all the other tenants in the building, lived in a rent-regulated unit — a classification that under state law grants them wide protections, including from eviction in case of fire damage.
Silber previously dismissed the tenants’ claims against the condo owners in a March 2021 decision, ruling that “[t]here is no duty which runs from the condominium board of managers to the tenants.” She also ruled that the building was so destroyed that it was “de facto” demolished — a classification that allows landlords to deregulate buildings, which would bar the tenants from returning.
The tenants, who are represented by Brooklyn Legal Services, appealed that decision the following month, and the matter is still ongoing.
Whether the building changes ownership bears little difference to the tenants because, according to the terms of sale, the buyer would inherit any pending litigation surrounding the property — and the tenants’ ongoing claim to return to the building, according to their attorney Jooyeon Lee.
The tenants’ legal team will need to convince an appeals judge that the building — which is still standing, albeit without a roof — is not dilapidated enough to meet the threshold for demolition and deregulation.
If Silber’s March 2021 decision deeming the building effectively demolished is upheld, the tenants face an uphill battle to return to their former homes, though they may negotiate a buy-out or other form of compensation.
Salazar told THE CITY last week that she has given up hope of ever returning to the fifth-floor apartment she called home for three decades.
She passes by the building often while walking her dog Juju, and still gets emotional remembering Princess, her beloved Shih-Tzu who died in the fire and whom she described as her “baby” and “the love of my life.”
“When I go to the old neighborhood — I go there often to go to the park to walk the dog — I see they haven’t done jack to that building,” she said. “I see that building every day and get depressed.”
That the property includes rent-regulated and rent-controlled units — to which tenants may have a right of return — makes for a worse bet, two real estate investors told THE CITY.
“That makes it pretty complicated,” said Eli Tabak of The Bluestone Group. “If the rent in those units were $800 or $900, it’s kind of like you’re buying units you’ll have to carry expenses for and not even have income on it to be able to cover those expenses.”
Whitney, Salazar’s former next-door neighbor, was unable to stay in New York.
“With the prices of rent and real estate and mortgage rates and not having the capital I’d put into the condo I owned, it really wasn’t possible to stay in New York and live a financially sustainable life,” she added. She’s been paying property taxes on the unit and keeps a liability insurance policy, just in case.
When the pandemic hit and Whitney’s job went remote, she moved to Yucca Valley, California — a decision that she didn’t make easily, as it took her away from the community she spent two decades building in New York.
“The fact is, this is not Plan A. This is not what I was really wanting for my life at this point,” she said. “There’s some sadness in it, even though I’m grateful.”