Former Tenants Of Hampton Bays Apartment Building Decry Conditions Prior To Fire; Owner Blames Tenants In Return

Nearly two weeks after a fire destroyed an apartment building in Hampton Bays and left five families displaced, multiple complaints about the living conditions of the dwellings have been raised.

The former tenants have banded together to ask the property owner not to interfere until the investigation into the cause of the fire has been concluded.

Water leaks, electrical problems, infestations of cockroaches and mice, and appliances not working or in poor condition are some of the grievances raised by the displaced families — allegations vehemently denied by the landlord.

Aurelia González, who lived with her three daughters in one of the apartments located at 317 East Montauk Highway, said she always struggled with persistent water leaks. She said she complained multiple times directly with her landlord, Victor La Terra, owner of L Squared, the company that owns the 13-unit apartment complex. Gonzalez said the issue was never solved.

“When it rained, the water entered through the roof, and we told him that, but he replied that if I liked it that way, fine, and if not, I should look elsewhere to live,” González said.

Hermes Gonzalez, the tenant of apartment 2E, also described experiencing water leaks in the unit he shared with his wife, Miriam, and his 9-year-old son.

“If it rained at night, at 1 in the morning I had to get up to put a bucket,” he said, adding, “In my country, I was poor, but I never experienced that.”

The former tenants also report that the landlord entered the units without asking for their permission.

“Once he came and went in [the apartment], but my 22-year-old daughter wouldn’t let him in,” Aurelia González said. “One day, my younger girls were sleeping, and he came in and she saw him and got mad. She started complaining about him and told him that we were paying the rent and he wasn’t supposed to come in. He said he was the owner and that gave him the right to do so.”

Diego Acevedo, the tenant of apartment 1A, who had lived in the building for a year before the fire, said that when he first moved in, his apartment was “uninhabitable” and that he had to pay out of his own pocket roughly the equivalent of one month’s rent in costs to clean and repair the unit in order for him to live there.

“It had several issues,” he said. “When I moved in, it had a lot of garbage, so I had to clean it up. The plumbing was failing, I had to fix that. The painting was inadequate, I had to fix that. And I also had to do a lot of other repairs. Out of all those repairs, the landlord only paid me back for one item — he fixed the sink in the kitchen — but everything else I paid on my own with a credit card, so I have all the statements of everything I paid.”

Tenants also alleged the building was a nest of cockroaches, mice and bedbugs, which they said they had to get used to living with.

“There was also a problem with mice. I have no evidence, but I have the mousetraps. I ended up killing 27 mice,” Acevedo said. “There was also an infestation of cockroaches throughout the complex — it was horrible.” The landlord sprayed the apartment, he said, but it was ineffective.

Hermes González said the landlord accused them of bringing the cockroaches and bedbugs in because they left the doors of the apartments open.

González said that in order to keep the infestation at bay he had to pay someone to professionally fumigate his unit, paying around $150 to $200 for the service.

Minerva Pérez, the executive director of OLA of Eastern Long Island, one of the organizations helping the displaced families after the fire, said the former tenants had voiced their concerns about the state of the property to the owner many times, “begging him” to fix what she said would probably be considered multiple code violations.

Tenants said they endured the conditions in which they lived, mainly because of “how difficult and expensive” it can be to find a place to live in the Hamptons, the area where they all work.

Pérez said that due to the housing crisis on the East End, where rental units are extremely hard to find, many tenants are forced to accept poor conditions in order not to upset their landlords because they don’t want to lose their homes.

“The reality is that in any other community, the fire would already be a tragedy in itself, having to go to another place is a tragedy, but here in this area, there is not even that possibility, there is nowhere to go,” Pérez said. “These are families that have been there for five, 10 years, but the housing crisis that exists only exacerbates the situation.”

La Terra denied each of the complaints in an interview. He said the building was up to date on maintenance and everything in the complex was working properly. “The only condition that existed is neglect and lack of cleanliness on the part of the tenants,” he said. “Everything was in working order.”

The owner of the complex also denied entering the units without the authorization of the tenants. “That is not true. If I had been there [on the day of the fire], I would have gone in and turned off the oven, but I never go in without authorization,” he said.

A determination of the cause of the fire is still pending and an investigation is ongoing, however preliminary indications suggested the fire could have started in one of the downstairs apartments.

La Terra said he believes the fire started in apartment 2W, where John Muñoz, his wife, Inés Morales, and their 8-year-old son, Junior, lived.

Muñoz said that around 3:15 p.m. on April 1, he put on a pot of rice on low heat while he went out to wait for his son at the school bus stop nearby. When he returned a few minutes later, the fire was already in progress, he said.

“Anyone can say that it was my negligence, because the fire supposedly started in my apartment, in my kitchen, but my stove had electrical problems. The stove had to be shaken in order to turn it on, I’m sure it had a short, and when it was moved it made contact and it worked. It also had to be connected directly, because there was no appropriate plug,” Muñoz said. “We told the landlord many times to fix it, but he said it was my kitchen and not his.”

Muñoz, like several of his neighbors, said they believe the fire might have been caused due to existing damage to the electrical systems. “I think it’s more because of the electric panel located in the rear,” he said.

“What we suspect is that it is the fault of the building because the breakers would jump frequently, the electrical connections were very old, and there was never any maintenance. The breakers were in my unit, so every time they tripped, the neighbors had to come and ask to put them up, and that happened very frequently,” Acevedo said.

Acevedo said he told the landlord about the breakers, but he said La Terra told him that the tenants were overloading the circuit. “We all had a refrigerator and a microwave and a television at most,” he said.

La Terra said in an interview that “there were no electrical problems in the apartment and they are not going to discover that there were electrical problems.”

He added: “All the apartments were fine. Any violations they had we cleared up. Many of those violations were lies.”

Currently there are pending code enforcement charges at the apartment complex, town officials said. There is also a pending lawsuit that La Terra filed in federal court in 2020, accusing the town of targeting his business because his tenants were predominantly Latino.

La Terra reiterated several times that although the cause of the fire is unknown, he presumes that it was caused by accumulated grease in the kitchen of apartment 2W and negligence in leaving the unit unattended while the tenant picked up his son from the bus stop.

“If you go to pick up your son, you don’t leave anything on the stove. It is extreme negligence. Anyone with intelligence remembers to turn off the oven. It must have been a grease fire that spread quickly, if that was the case. Remember, I keep saying, ‘if that was the case.’ What responsible man leaves something on the stove and goes to pick up his son?” he said.

He also said he believes he was always diligent in solving the requests of the tenants.

“We fumigated. In other words, they are saying that the destruction of an entire building was caused by a few cockroaches?” he said. “If someone had a problem, I always solved it. I have a high tolerance. It is not only my building but their home.”

La Terra went on to say: “They have been there for years and are month-to-month renters. That means they can leave at any time, and if they are too much trouble for me I can tell them to leave. As they lived there for quite some time, I can only come to one conclusion, and that is that they were happy there.”

Under the warranty of habitability, a provision of the New York State Real Property Law, tenants have the right to “a livable, safe and sanitary apartment, a right that is implied in every written or oral residential lease.”

Specifically, the law says that housing must be “fit for human habitation” and that tenants “shall not be subjected to any conditions which would be dangerous, hazardous or detrimental to their life, health or safety.”

According to the Tenant’s Rights and Protections Guide published by the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James, an example of a violation of this warranty includes failure to eliminate an insect infestation.

The guide also specifies that a tenant whose property has multiple dwellings “must keep the apartments and the building’s public areas in “good repair” and clean and free of vermin, garbage, or other offensive material.” This includes, “to maintain electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, and ventilating systems, and appliances that the landlord installed (such as refrigerators and stoves) in good and safe working order.”

Under the law, tenants also have a right to privacy within their homes. A landlord, however, may enter a tenant’s apartment “with reasonable prior notice, and at a reasonable time, and with the tenant’s consent, either to provide routine or agreed-upon repairs or services or in accordance with the lease.” In cases of emergency, such as a fire, a property owner may enter a dwelling without permission.

For now, the tenants have sent a letter to the owner of the property and his lawyer asking the owner to preserve all the evidence at the scene of the fire until the formal investigation concludes.

To read this article in Spanish, visit TuPrensaLocal.com.