Farrukh Abadi
A five-alarm fire broke out in a six-story apartment building in the Bronx, NY on Friday (01/10), displacing more than 250 residents and leaving 7 people injured, including 5 firefighters. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Residents reported to monopoly media that the building was not adequately heated despite making numerous complaints to the city, and resorted to using space heaters and stoves to warm their apartments in the freezing temperatures. Over 400 complaints to the city have been logged in the last three years alone, including lack of heat, hot water, and infrastructure collapse, both for individual units and the entire building.
The owner of the building, Ved Parkash of Parkash 2910 LLC, has for years been identified by media outlets and city officials as a notorious slumlord. A landlord for 72 buildings in the Bronx and Queens, Parkash has a history of evicting his low-income residents, maximizing rent in rent-stabilized apartments by illegally subleasing units at higher rates and renting to more people past unit capacity, and leaving infestations and maintenance problems such as heat and structural problems unresolved. Today he faces 16 active lawsuits across the two boroughs.
Almost exactly three years ago to the day, a large fire in the Bronx killed 17 residents after residents took to heating their apartments with space heaters and stoves due to the heat being shut off in their building.
A report from the city in the aftermath of the deadly 2022 Twin Parks fire in the Bronx found that “Between 2017 and 2021, there were over 100 fires in New York City residential buildings caused by portable heaters like the one that caused the Twin Parks fire. Over that same period, New Yorkers called 311 nearly one million times to report a lack of heat in their homes. Yet the City of New York’s Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) issued just 21,610 violations to landlords for failure to maintain the minimum required temperature.” The report also cited that 30% of complaints regarding the lack of heat come from just 1.5% of those buildings that file heat-related complaints and are concentrated in impoverished areas across the city.
“In a cruel irony, this lack of basic building maintenance is occurring as buildings in these communities are sold for increasingly high prices. Instead of improved living conditions under new ownership, existing tenants often simultaneously face decreased services and the threat of rising rents or eviction,” the report noted. The report was written in 2023.
Working class and poor residents in New York City are caught between rising rent prices and increasingly dangerous and poorly-maintained housing. The Bronx in particular has double the state-wide level of poverty, with nearly one in three residents living below the poverty line. Allerton, the neighborhood in the Bronx where the recent fire took place, is among the poorest neighborhoods in New York City.
Photo: Screenshot from video of FDNY putting out the fire at 2910 Wallace Avenue in the Bronx. Retrieved from FDNY on X.
The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today:
Make a one-time donation
Make a monthly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
