‘Crappy luxury’: Inside NYC’s brand new apartment buildings that are falling apart

Water has come to define the 30-story high-rise at One Blue Slip in Greenpoint since it opened eight years ago.

There are the sweeping views of the East River and Newtown Creek, which separates Brooklyn from Long Island City like a Venetian canal, though slightly more toxic.

And then there’s what happens inside the 359-unit building: Water has both poured from ceilings and stopped running altogether.

On an extremely cold afternoon last month, several tenants said they couldn’t shower, flush the toilet or do their laundry. Building managers blamed frozen pipes leading from a rooftop water tank. The water outage affected the entire building and lasted three days. It followed chronic complaints about a lack of hot water, according to tenants and city complaint data.

It was a change from the fall, when tenants said water flooded the second floor. Photos and videos shared by residents show the water pouring into the luxurious lobby below, which features sofas, bookshelves, a fireplace and designer wood paneling.

The problems shocked residents, whose rents can reach over $12,400 a month for a three-bedroom apartment, or about $3,400 a month for a studio.

“ I moved into what looked like a hotel and I come home to a s— dump now,” said Joey Hes, a commercial property manager in Greenpoint who moved into One Blue Slip in 2022.  ”It’s come to the point this year where everything’s breaking down and people’s health is at stake.”

One Blue Slip is one of dozens of newly constructed apartment buildings in New York City, many of them marketed as luxury accommodations, that have been beset by unexpected maintenance problems and questionable construction.

Nearly 10% of roughly 1,600 residential buildings that have opened since 2016 have at least one housing code violation per apartment, according to a Gothamist analysis of city housing data. That set of properties averages 2.1 violations per unit, compared to a 0.8 average per unit citywide, indicating that many of the city’s newest residential buildings suffer from chronic or serious problems. Each building included in the review had received a property tax abatement through the state’s 421a program, a key tool for easing development costs.

Tenants in other recently constructed units have complained of major quality of life problems, like heat outages and vermin infestations, along with cheap finishes and other minor annoyances, despite paying top dollar for their apartments and fancy perks like lounges, yoga rooms and pet grooming stations.

In short, “luxury” can often equal “crappy.”

Housing Preservation and Development spokesperson Ilana Maier said the agency is investigating the conditions at One Blue Slip and other newly constructed buildings.

“Safe, decent housing is not a luxury — it’s a right,” Maier said

A spokesperson for the owner of One Blue Slip, Brookfield Properties, told Gothamist the company was investigating why the copper line pipe from the rooftop water tank froze in the extreme cold. He said the company has installed insulation for tanks.

“It is not something that should have happened, and we are still reviewing why it did,” said Brookfield spokesperson Andrew Brent. “We are taking steps to avoid such an occurrence from happening again.”

Costs, kinks and corner-cutting

Building experts blamed potential problems on a variety of factors.

To start, they say, developers are typically paying on loans for months or years before they can start building and begin collecting rents once the job is done. That — combined with the hefty costs of construction, rising prices for materials and project delays — can lead to cutting corners or using cheaper, more readily available materials.

“Every construction project is a combination of time and money,” said Ross Spivak, CEO of the firm RES Consulting NYC. “The sooner the project is completed, the sooner you can start selling or getting revenue.”

Spivak said construction errors can also cause problems that take time for building owners to work out.

“Not every developer and not every owner is greedy,” he said. ”Certain things happen on projects sometimes that are just unforeseen and there’s no way to predict and that’s what unfortunately leads to some of these poor circumstances.”

There’s also the dearth of talented tradespeople, Spivak said.

Supply-chain bottlenecks that started during the pandemic also jacked up the price of materials like copper plumbing, steel beams, boilers and bathroom fixtures, said Darrick Borowski, an architect and housing researcher.

“The quality of everything that goes into construction seems to be going down while the prices just continue to go up,” Borowski said.

Architect Andrew Briguet, a principal at the New York-based firm RAND, said he empathized with tenants who don’t expect to deal with broken boilers and leaky ceilings in pricey, brand new buildings.

“It’s disappointing to say the least,” Briguet said. “There’s an expectation of quality and care during the construction, but even though a lot of money goes into these buildings on the design and construction side, there’s an opportunity for human error.”

Tenants, industry groups and city agencies have noticed.

Complaints rose 46% in new buildings in 2021, according to a review of city data by the company Marketproof. Gothamist’s review found 200 buildings constructed since 2016 had at least one hazardous housing complaint per unit.

Residents at one of the city’s most expensive residential skyscrapers along Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan have complained of structural hazards, leaks and other chronic problems. Occupants of a 38-story tower in Long Island City reported persistent elevator outages and fears of getting stuck. Both buildings were constructed just a decade ago.

In Lower Manhattan, the skeleton of an incomplete, ultra high-end condo building called One Seaport looms over FDR Drive, but the place is unlikely to ever open. The problem? It’s leaning.

Department of Buildings spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said new projects are “complex” and one problem with a building can cause others.

“Because of this, maintenance issues are common with new building constructions, as different systems need to be fine-tuned to prevent damage,” Rudansky said.

To cut down on costs for developers, Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing a package of reforms over how state and local governments issue permits. The changes could speed up development by shortening the review period and cutting down the costly wait time for building permits.

“We can really build far more housing than people anticipated when you shave off the time necessary and we focus on getting rid of these burdens and regulations,” Hochul told Gothamist in an interview about her policy proposals.

But in plenty of newly constructed complexes, problems abound even years after opening — and tenants say they don’t accept excuses for major problems, especially when they’re paying New York City luxury prices.

A ‘bait and switch’ in the Bronx

For Rowena Manapat, the brand new Mott Haven apartment complex called One38 seemed like a perfect fit for her family when they signed a lease and moved in in August 2024. The building is one of several high-rises reshaping the skyline of the South Bronx, a neighborhood that has so far survived a real estate industry attempt to rebrand it as the “Piano District.”

At $4,400 a month for a two-bedroom, One38 was expensive, Manapat said. But it also offered amenities that were unthinkable in most other complexes she looked at — including an indoor pool that would allow her to grow the swim school she founded

But the building’s appeal may have been too good to be true. Manapat said she realized something was wrong the day she moved in and found her apartment “filthy” with dust covering the floors, quickly followed by other problems.

“We had no water, and the next night there was a power outage,” Manapat said.  ”It is crappy luxury.”

Manapat and several of her neighbors spoke with Gothamist on top of the building roof, which features a pickle ball court and panoramic views of Randall’s Island and Manhattan beyond.

They described how the building was for several months powered by loud mobile generators instead of the city’s electrical grid. And they shared photos and videos of a crumbling brick facade, brown tap water, leaky ceilings, and flooding in the gym and parking garage.

Attorney Alfred Lowe said he moved into One38 with his wife and children immediately after returning to New York City from a job in Paris. Lowe said he and his wife had viewed the $4,500-a-month two-bedroom apartment online and liked what they saw. His sister had even driven by to check out the building and approved, but then Lowe and his family arrived to find the building had no electricity. He said it was also lacking mailboxes and the gym was closed for months.

”From the outside of the building, everything looks amazing,” Lowe said.   ”It was a bait and switch.”

The city’s housing agency sued the owner, JCS Realty, over heat and hot water outages in November 2024. Lowe, Manapat and a few other neighbors began withholding their rent in April 2025, prompting the owner to sue for eviction.

In her court response, Manapat said she did not have consistent hot water from August 2024 until March 2025 and demanded rent abatements for the 18 months she has been living there.

She and other tenants said the company deactivated their key fobs, locking them out of whole sections of the building, including the gym and pool, and blocking them from using a stairwell that leads to the roof. Residents called it retaliation.

JCS Realty denies that claim. Joseph Klein, managing agent for the company, said it did so because tenants were no longer paying for the amenities. It also began reporting the residents, including Manapat’s teenaged daughter, to credit agencies — torpedoing their credit scores.

Klein admitted that the development had its “fair share” of problems when it first opened — including the unexpected flooding that he said cost $1 million to resolve and electrical connection issues that necessitated the generators. But he said the company has since fixed the problems, which he blamed in part on older water and electrical infrastructure in the Bronx.

“I consider the building a luxury property,” he said. “It’s unfortunate for this to happen, but they say it takes time for a building to settle in with staff and everything. It doesn’t just happen overnight.”

Klein said the company allowed tenants to break their leases early if they wanted to move and offered rent concessions. He also said the company will report completed rent payments to increase tenants’ credit scores.

“As long as there’s communication with the tenants and tenants know where we’re standing, and open and honest conversations, they can make their own decisions,” Klein said.

Lowe said he remains committed to fighting the company in court.

“I don’t have heat, I don’t have air conditioning. I don’t have hot water. I don’t have clean water. I don’t have a garage. I don’t have a pool,” Lowe said. “I don’t have anything, but my credit is being affected.”

The Atlantic Yards ‘ripoff’

Tenants at a 303-unit building feet from the Barclays Center decided to take their problems to City Hall.

The building, known as 38 Sixth, opened in 2017 and was the lone affordable housing site in the stalled Atlantic Yards-Pacific Park megaproject, after the developer failed to deliver nearly 900 other affordable units it was required to build.

The majority of the units at 38 Sixth are priced for people earning 145% to 165% of the area median income — now up to over $240,000 for a family of three. Rents in the building reach about $3,500 for two-bedroom apartments.

Psychotherapist Siena Shundi pays around $2,600 a month for her two-bedroom. She said she felt like she had won the lottery when she first moved into the 18th floor apartment, a short walk from the subway, when the building opened.

But she said problems like a broken lock on the building’s front door, hot water outages and leaks began to mount. The final straw for Shundi was when her son found a roach on his backpack the morning of the first day of school.

“ It shocks me, but it shocks everyone that I talk to,” Shundi said. “They’re just like, ‘Wasn’t that building just built?’”

Shundi and other tenants said the festering problems have worsened since 2022, when the company Avanath acquired the high-rise. The building has amassed 1,320 complaints from tenants over the past two years and more than 100 violations from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for issues like leaks and roaches, according to city data.

‘We call it the  Ikea building,” said Alex Martins, a 22-year-old recent college grad who moved into the building in 2019. “It’s pretty on the outside. It looks kind of nice. But once you start using it, it falls apart.”

In an unsigned statement, Avanath said there are no current water and flooding issues in the building, and blamed previous water damage on a contractor who struck a sprinkler head while making repairs.

The company said it continues to respond quickly to resident complaints and resolve city housing code violations.

Shundi leads the building’s tenant association and described the issues to Department of Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first “rental ripoff” hearing earlier this month.

She said she hoped the city would compel the owner to fix the chronic problems.

On the waterfront … without water

One Blue Slip is one of many new buildings in Greenpoint where tenants face problems. At the Tetris style Eagle+West, well-heeled residents have complained of creaky pipes, flooding and inattentive management, as Curbed reported last year. The 745-unit cantilevered complex was built by the same company as One Blue Slip, Brookfield Properties.

In recent months, the problems at One Blue Slip got to be too much for tenants, too. After more than 150 neighbors began to organize in a WhatsApp group chat, Betsy Siddon, who moved into the building five years ago, convened the nascent tenant association for a Zoom meeting last month.

Siddon said she pays $4,205 for her one-bedroom apartment overlooking the East River. She said she was stunned to encounter so many issues at the new building after experiencing relative calm at a Philadelphia apartment building constructed a century earlier.

“ This building was so wonderful when I moved in. When my friends came to visit, they said, ‘This is the nicest hotel we’ve ever been to,’” Siddon said. “And now when they come to visit, they’re like, ‘What is going on with your building?’”

But things have improved in the past few weeks, she said. Brookfield has issued rent credits to tenants. And the hot water is now running consistently.

Officials in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration say tenant organizing may be one of the best tools to compel better conditions, including in brand new luxury buildings with unexpected problems.

Earlier this month, Mamdani issued a letter informing property managers that they cannot interfere with tenants’ rights to organize. In an interview earlier this month, Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, said a goal of Mamdani’s “rental ripoff” hearings is to encourage more tenant organizing.

”In my ideal world, there’s an organized tenant association in every single building,” Weaver said.  ”We want to know what the city can do to encourage and implement tenant organizing.”