Out With the Poor, In With the Rich: The Landlord’s Guide to Gentrifying NYC
BySteve Croman has spent decades exploiting rent-control laws to bring in wealthier tenants. The state attorney general wants to make an example of him.
Photo Illustration: James B. Hoffman
In the summer of 2002, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, bought a couple of adjoined Beaux Arts town houses on East 72nd Street just off Central Park. He paid $26 million for the pair—a vast markup, it might have seemed, from a comparable purchase made earlier in the year. That March, a Manhattan landlord named Steve Croman had scooped up a six-story, 19,000-square-foot manse across the street for only $5.5 million. Croman’s town house came with a problem: It wasn’t a private home, but an apartment building of 23 below-market units, classified by New York state as rent-stabilized. That meant he could charge his new tenants only gradual, minor upticks in rent. But what might have appeared to be a dead-end investment was in fact an audacious, buy-low proposition. If Croman could get his tenants out, the building’s value would soar…
Out With the Poor, In With the Rich: The Landlord’s Guide to Gentrifying NYC
