The 20-building LeFrak City housing complex in Corona is home to thousands of working-class and middle-income tenants, offering access to a swimming pool and park inside a secure campus near malls, subway lines and Queens’ famous food scene.
But since the start of 2023, the 4,605-unit development has also been the site of more evictions than anywhere else in the five boroughs, according to a Gothamist analysis of city housing data. At the same time, the complex’s influential owner is suing the state court system, seeking to speed up the removal process for tenants behind on rent.
The rise in evictions at LeFrak City, a collection of mostly rent-stabilized apartments constructed more than 50 years ago as an affordable option for middle-income residents, reveals a deeper housing crisis affecting everyday New Yorkers, say tenants, their advocates and policy experts.
Many people’s income still hasn’t rebounded after they lost jobs during the pandemic, and there are limited options for tenants in need of rental assistance. Meanwhile, tenants are struggling to find apartments they can afford amid record-high rents, and property owners who are tired of waiting for back rent are turning to housing court to either get paid or receive permission to remove tenants.
“It’s a red flag. Something’s not right,” said Assial Alladoumngue, a mother of two who has lived in her LeFrak City apartment for 12 years. “It’s not because, deliberately, people don’t want to pay. It’s that something happens sometimes.”
Limited liability companies tied to the LeFrak Organization, which owns the sprawling development, have successfully kicked out tenants from at least 121 apartments since the start of last year, mostly due to mounting unpaid rent, eviction data recorded by the city’s Department of Investigation shows.
It’s the highest number of removals in the city for a single complex since 2023, according to DOI records. Still, it’s a fraction of the roughly 21,000 residential evictions reported by city marshals across the five boroughs in that span.
Evictions have steadily increased in the city after a pandemic-related freeze on most legal lockouts ended in early 2022. In recent months, the number of evictions has approached levels last recorded before the COVID-19 crisis.
Hundreds of tenants in LeFrak City are also facing the threat of eviction if they can’t pay money they owe the LeFrak Organization, whose chairman served as an advisor to former President Donald Trump. Over the past 19 months, the LeFrak-linked limited liability companies — each named after foreign countries or exotic locales, like Peru Leasing and Mandalay Leasing, that correspond with the names of buildings at the housing complex — filed nonpayment cases against tenants more than 1,800 times, according to a Gothamist analysis of court filings.
The companies filed an additional 171 removal cases against tenants for reasons other than nonpayment. Those include cases where residents take over the apartment from a previous tenant without signing a lease, a type of case known as a “holdover” proceeding.
LeFrak Organization spokesperson Tyrone Stevens said tenants in about 500 apartments were currently behind on rent. He said the number of cases that actually result in the removal of a tenant was small and that removals usually occur when a tenant owes more than a year of back rent. He also said the company has missed out on $9 million in unpaid rent over the past four years.
“Eviction is rare and always a last resort,” said Stevens. “The issue is that a single tenant can rack up massive amounts of arrears and rental assistance has to get to these tenants much faster than the current status quo.”
The circumstances vary for tenants who have been evicted. About 9% of the evicted tenants owed more than $20,000 by the time LeFrak took them to housing court, records show. The amounts usually continued to rise before a judge ordered a marshal to lock the tenants out.
In another 30% of cases, tenants owed less than $5,000, or about two or three months’ rent, when the landlord filed the nonpayment notice. Several residents never showed up in court to respond to the landlord’s claims, resulting in an automatic order by the judge, according to court records.
Just 14 of the tenants who were evicted — less than 12% — had a lawyer representing them in housing court at some point in their proceedings, the review shows. That’s despite a citywide “right-to-counsel” law intended to connect low-income renters with attorneys.
The tenants who were evicted for nonpayment owed a median rent of just under $6,500 when their cases were filed with the court, and owed roughly $1.1 million combined.
Then there are the hundreds of eviction cases in LeFrak City that don’t result in a final removal but threaten to displace tenants who can’t access aid or otherwise pay off their debt.
The tenants named in 1,824 nonpayment cases since the start of 2023 — including those that resulted in an eviction — owed a median $4,051 in back rent, according to Gothamist’s review of court records. Based on the dates the cases were filed, the total arrears amounted to $9.5 million, though tenants managed to resolve most of the cases by paying the money they owed.
The rise in removals follows an ongoing pattern for the complex. LeFrak City accounts for more evictions than anywhere else in the city since the start of 2017, the Department of Investigation statistics show.
Alladoumngue, a 47-year-old native of Chad, was paying about $1,500 for her one-bedroom apartment when she fell behind on rent near the end of 2022. She said on-the-job leg injuries prevented her from continuing to work as a home health aide.
LeFrak sued her for nonpayment on three occasions between May 2021 and February 2023 — each time after she owed about $4,500 in rent. When she didn’t respond in court in February 2023, a marshal obtained a warrant to evict her, according to court documents. She stopped the eviction with the assistance of a lawyer who helped her fight the removal, pay her back rent and secure ongoing assistance through a state housing voucher program that pays most of her rent.
She qualified for the voucher because she has two minor children and receives cash assistance as her only source of income. Otherwise, she said, she and her children would be homeless.
“It’s a lifesaver,” Alladoumngue said. “I worked two jobs, but for now, I deal with financial stress, physical stress, because I’m in pain.”
Her children, who are 7 and 16, sleep in a bunk bed in the living room while she stays in the bedroom next to a second bed reserved for visitors and family members. She said she wants a bigger place but loves this section of Queens and knows she won’t be able to find another apartment she can afford.
“It’s not cheap, it’s high,” she said. “But nowadays, [a similar] apartment right now may be $2,500 [a month.]”
One-bedroom apartments in Corona listed on real estate platform StreetEasy range from roughly $2,050 to $2,860 a month.
Alladoumngue isn’t totally free from the threat of losing her apartment. When her May rent was late, the landlord took her back to housing court. She is working with an attorney to resolve her latest nonpayment case.
Other tenants are in more dire circumstances and face an imminent risk of eviction.
Manuelita Deoleo, 61, lives alone in her one-bedroom apartment and receives a modest Social Security check of around $1,000 a month. Her rent is nearly double that amount.
Deoleo said she was making a decent income by working two jobs as a hair stylist and a server at a catering hall before the pandemic left her abruptly unemployed in early 2020. She said she later developed chronic pain in her arms and legs that prevents her from returning to work.
After her rent arrears reached about $21,000 in May, a judge ordered her removal. She tried to pause it by joining a lawsuit to force the city’s social services agency to make more tenants facing eviction eligible for rental vouchers. But a state judge recently ruled against the plaintiffs, so her options remain limited.
A marshal could evict Deoleo by the end of the month. She said she doesn’t know where she would go if she were kicked out.
“COVID destroyed my life,” she said inside her first-floor apartment, where she still has a salon chair and old supplies stored in boxes. “I feel in New York like they forgot about people. Believe me, everybody over here needs help. In court, you see 1,000 people.”
LeFrak City was built more than a half-century ago as an affordable option for middle-income residents.
Photo by David Brand
Evictions can have devastating impacts on tenants, especially for people with medical needs and families with children whose lives and routines are upended. Finding another apartment can be nearly impossible for low-income renters, with less than 1% of units priced below $1,500 a month vacant and available to rent last year, according to the city’s most recent housing survey.
About a third of all New Yorkers spend at least half their income on rent, data analyzed by the policy group Community Service Society shows
“When we talk about the urgency of the need, these numbers are so big it almost feels like an abstract problem sometimes, but it’s not,” said New York Housing Conference Executive Director Rachel Fee, whose organization studies unpaid rent in affordable housing. “There’s real families behind each of the numbers, and every month they’re struggling to make it work.”
Fee said tenants would benefit from a “federal housing safety net” where all low-income renters could access Section 8 housing vouchers. They are currently available to just a fraction of households who need assistance.
Other forms of aid are also hard to come by.
New York City has its own voucher program called CityFHEPS, but most recipients must first enter a homeless shelter to qualify. The city’s social services agency is also denying more than half of applications for emergency grants, known as “one-shot deals,” to cover back rent, Gothamist has reported. New York state’s voucher program is limited to the lowest-income families who can prove they meet specific criteria.
LeFrak has framed its lawsuit against the state to speed up removals as beneficial to both tenants and landlords. In an interview in April, LeFrak’s attorney Craig Gambardella said tenants whose arrears increase during a monthslong nonpayment proceeding can have a harder time securing rental assistance because they owe too much money.
“We’re finding ourselves in a position where the current situation is untenable for landlords and tenants,” Gambardella told Gothamist at the time. He didn’t respond to an email and phone call seeking additional comment.
The state’s Office of Court Administration, the defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to questions for this story.
But nonprofit legal groups and social service organizations intervening in the suit have sharply criticized LeFrak’s tactics. They argue that speeding up the eviction process would lead to automatic eviction judgments when tenants miss a court date and would also limit their access to lawyers and aid options.
“It would be devastating to New Yorkers at large,” said Melissa Banks, deputy director of the Housing Rights Project at Legal Services NYC’s Queens office. “Every eviction is a calamity.”
She said LeFrak has been too aggressive in its use of housing court to seek back rent and remove tenants.
“It’s extremely crucial that tenants be able to get access to the services they’re entitled to, like right-to-counsel attorneys, social services that they qualify for [and] help understanding what rent help they can get,” said Banks. “When proceedings move forward quickly, when people don’t get real notice that there’s a case against them, it can have tragic consequences.”
Three evicted tenants who spoke with Gothamist said they ended up in homeless shelters or were forced to move in with family members after getting evicted. In responses filed with the court, others said they had nowhere to go and asked for more time to find a place.
Kashema Williams and her 13-year-old son managed to get back into their apartment after receiving an emergency grant from the city in November 2023, days after a marshal changed the locks and moved their possessions to a storage facility in the Bronx.
Williams said she paid about $800 to get her items delivered back to LeFrak City but then had to borrow more cash from a friend to pay the movers to bring the items to her apartment. She said she fell behind on rent after losing her job at an accounting firm.
“The pandemic rocked me because I was at a job for a really long time and they just came out of nowhere and let everyone go,” said Williams. “It was really difficult trying to get that kind of income back up.”
When she returned to the apartment, she said, representatives for the landlord told her they would fix problems in the apartment and paint the walls, but it took months to complete the jobs. She then fell behind on rent again, court records show.
So she decided to leave and move in with a family member in June.
“It was exhausting,” Williams said. “I tried. I really did.”