A Billionaire Bully Slumlord

By Deborah Privitello

This is the twisted Kafkaesque story of power and greed that has been visited upon our family by our billionaire landlord, Francis Greenburger  / Time Equities. It has turned our lives upside down!

I’m a widow and my children are victims, hostages of criminal harassment spanning 20 years that violates The Tenant Protection Act (TPA) and anti-harassment laws. This has culminated in four years of unimaginable abuse committed against us. We are the poster family for “constructive eviction,” a situation in which a landlord does not physically or legally evict a tenant, but takes actions that interfere with the tenant’s use and enjoyment of the premises significantly.

Greenburger has robbed us of our human rights. Article 17 consists of having the right to live free of interference in one’s life and privacy, which we have been stripped of. Our home is the last rent stabilized unit in a Greenburger building, and has been systematically decimated from flooding, a leaking roof, collapsing ceilings, structural damage, a defunct boiler, floors caving in, corroded pipes, toxic mold—the list is endless.

We were rendered displaced from our home, everything we own was left in sub-human conditions. There are serial vacate orders from the DOB for failure to maintain the warranty of habitability, a DHCR ruling  dating back to 2018 and again in 2021, deeming it uninhabitable from the landlord’s neglect.

Greenburger’s high powered attorney, whose firm took PPP loan money during the height of the pandemic (as did Greenburger), perjured themselves and wrote in court papers that the apartment has always been habitable despite the rulings of agencies and mountains of evidence. They continue to use the courts as a vehicle of harm with no access fraud claim mantras.

After waiting for justice for three plus years to see the judge who had been missing all this time, he appeared on a Zoom call two weeks ago. He said he is allowing Greenburger to cover up the crime scene again, against our rights and laws enacted to protect from this very obstruction of justice.

The scathing criminal harassment papers from Greenburger’s attorney submitted to the court violate our rights and our lease. We cannot get a fair trial if he grants any of it! Judges are supposed to uphold and promote the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. It represents a total disregard of our civil and human rights under the law to allow any of it.

The laws are supposed to be upheld and applied—not violated under any false guise of interpretation.

In 1480 plus days Greenburger / Time Equites has failed to repair or remedy the toxic conditions throughout their buildings, despite all the access afforded to them. 

The definition of a slumlord is a slang term for landlord. Usually a “slumlord” is an absentee landlord with more than one property, who attempts to maximize profits by minimizing spending on property maintenance to tenants they can intimidate!

This unimaginable situation of Greenburger’s willingness to do anything and everything to harm us has pushed us into a perpetual state of trauma, living in fear of his chokehold of fraud and framing victims.

The fact that the conscious deliberate actions of Greenburger are now at the helm of a mission to dismantle the TPA  further illuminates his goal of using his influence to remove tenant’s rights.

Greenburger has a pattern of this behavior. Case in point, Delmonico’s, a NY establishment since the 1800s, also fell prey to Greenburger’s neglect and twisting of facts. Like us, Delmonico’s has been subject to significant flooding and uninhabitable conditions due to mismanagement by Time Equities, and falsely accused of not paying rent versus Greenburger’s buildings not being properly maintained.

Attorney General Tish James has still not investigated Greenburger / Time Equites in spite of 92 violations dating back to 2018 on our apartment alone!

All of our pleas have never even put him on the landlord watchlist!