Tenant forced to wear helmet inside flat as ceiling crumbles: ‘Our lives are miserable’

'I could have died because of the ceiling collapsing on my head,' the longtime tenant said. (Representational image: Unsplash)

A resident of a crumbling New York City apartment has been forced to wear a bike helmet in his bathroom for years as a precaution against getting hit by parts of the ceiling. The five-storey building has also had no water supply for six months and has reported constant leaks and instances of collapsed roofs.

“Our lives are miserable — we live in danger,” longtime tenant Waleed Said told the New York Post, describing how he would put on a bike helmet for years when he entered his bathroom. “I could have died because of the ceiling collapsing on my head.”

He and other residents of the building in the Manhattan neighborhood have claimed their landlord, Frank Ng, has purposefully let the property decay to a “dangerous” state. They said that they are fearful for their lives. Tenants also claimed that the neglect amounts to harassment and is being done intentionally to drive out longtime residents.

Five of them have even sued Ng for letting the building decay to such a degree that it has 325 housing violations in two years. Ng has also had to pay city agencies more than $130,000 (about Rs 1 crore) for repairs, fees, violations, and settlements, the New York Post reported.

The tenants said they decided to file a suit against the landlord after a massive storm in 2020, which sent a “waterfall” of stormwater cascading from the ceilings across nearly every floor -- a result of longtime unresolved problems with the roof. At the time, water had poured through ceiling-mounted light fixtures, and the electricity was cut to avoid a potential blaze.

Meanwhile, NG has claimed at court that he has been trying to complete repairs but is facing “difficulty” in accessing the apartments, because the tenants have sometimes been “hostile to the workmen.”