A&E Settles for $2.1 Million After 4,000 Violations Across Three Boroughs

The largest-ever tenant harassment settlement in New York underscores how chronic neglect by major landlords puts the city’s promise of safe, affordable housing to the test.

In a city whose skyline is crowned with gilded towers, the less-glamorous substratum of New York’s housing stock often languishes in neglect. A&E Real Estate, an entity counting itself among the biggest private landlords in town, has agreed to a $2.1 million settlement after amassing over 4,000 building code violations and facing accusations of tenant harassment across fourteen properties in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a promise to tilt the balance away from powerful landlords, personally announced the deal outside a battered Jackson Heights apartment block with 220 open violations—listing tales of roaches, leaking ceilings, and broken lighting.

The legal imbroglio, spanning eighteen months, was initiated by the Adams administration and concluded in what city housing officials call a history-making penalty for A&E, whose neglectful reputation has festered for years. Tenant complaints are as varied as they are predictable: infestations, leaks, persistent darkness in corridors—each item a dull chronicle of urban adversity. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), under the newly appointed Commissioner Dina Levy, credits “sustained enforcement” (i.e., unceasing pressure) for bringing the case to a head.

To many of the 750 tenants covered by this settlement, the problem is banal but infuriating: a sluggish landlord who promises repairs after prodding, sometimes only when municipal lawyers get involved. A&E’s CEO, Donald Hastings, downplays the acrimony, portraying the deal as “partnership” and noting the inherited shabbiness of these properties. But even a cursory glance at city records belies this polish; the company’s buildings have long peppered housing court dockets and City Hall complaint logs alike.

For New Yorkers, A&E’s misadventures portend both relief and weary déjà vu. The payout—though, counting the company’s miles of holdings, still rather puny—signals at last a willingness from City Hall to throw its weight behind enforcement, not just rhetoric. Under Mayor Mamdani, the city has established an office dedicated to tenant protection and plans “rental ripoff” hearings: a public forum for amplifying the grievances that animate housing politics.

Nominally, the $2.1 million may sound robust, but divided among the affected tenants and then amortised across years of discomfort, it feels paltry. Many residents are still pursuing private lawsuits, like those in the La Mesa Verde apartments of Queens, where allegations of “systemic neglect” persist. The city’s own leverage remains, in context, limited: if A&E backslides, housing officials may chase further penalties, but such pursuits are long-winded and rarely yield transformative change in a rental market as gargantuan as New York’s.

The pattern of landlord mismanagement is hardly unique to Gotham, but the political context here is instructive. A&E’s executive chair, Douglas Eisenberg, was observed to have contributed $125,000 to a super PAC backing ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo. Such largesse is a time-honoured motif in city politics, and it raises pointed questions about the cosiness of landlord power vis-à-vis city government, even as the Mamdani administration pivots to a tenant-centric posture. The city’s faith in legal settlements—as opposed to, say, stronger regulatory remedies—remains to be tested.

City Hall’s renewed zeal for tenant protection comes against a backdrop of rising rents (median monthly rent for a Manhattan apartment reached a buoyant $4,150 in late 2025) and growing anxieties about affordability, particularly as the supply of rent-stabilised units continues its steady attrition. The case against A&E dovetails with broader struggles over housing equity, as the city’s much-ballyhooed building code remains less an equaliser than a reactive cudgel applied—often too late—to malefactors once the damage is done.

The ripple effects extend further. New York’s economy, pitched as a beacon of dynamism, depends on dependable, affordable dwellings for the workforce that keeps the city humming. Chronic building neglect frays neighbourhood life, drains public resources, and saps trust in the city’s capacity to broker fair deals between renters and the property class. The modest fine extracted here, though historic, bodes at best a partial reckoning—one wonders how many other landlords quietly weigh such penalties as a cost of doing business.

A warning and a template for cities elsewhere

Nationally, landlord-tenant disputes form a staple of urban life, with legal settlements rarely moving the needle on systematic change. The dollar amount at issue in New York is weighty by local standards but inconsequential in the context of the city’s $15 billion annual rental market. Still, the Mamdani administration’s doggedness may serve as a template for other metros confronting entrenched landlord impunity, from Los Angeles to Chicago. Each city faces the conundrum of balancing public shaming and legal force against appetites for investment in the housing stock.

Elsewhere, some governments have favoured more direct intervention—London’s borough councils, for instance, can take over buildings that flout repairs. New York, by contrast, continues to court private capital in housing even as it slaps errant landlords. This cautious approach reflects a city that, for all its progressive talk, rarely bites the hand that feeds its tax base.

Sceptics will note that settlements, once announced, often fade from memory as buildings slide back into their habitual squalor. Even so, public scrutiny can create a feedback loop: each case raises expectations for future enforcement, emboldens tenant organisers, and nudges more landlords to invest—lest they be next in the dock. The threat (however tepid) of further city action is not nothing.

New Yorkers, long practised in lowering their expectations, may greet the A&E settlement as “historic” while quietly wondering what took so long. Yet it is a modest start. Real change will rely not just on costly settlements but also on better inspection regimes, faster court processes, and—above all—a political consensus that substandard housing is not inevitable.

In sum, the city’s latest confrontation with A&E Real Estate yields more a warning flare than a robust solution. Whether this largest-ever fine is harbinger or outlier, New York’s tenants will watch closely to see if rhetoric is at last matched by results. The city cannot afford otherwise. ■