For months, Anna Giannicchi’s bathroom ceiling rained water. A light in her ceiling also stopped working. Her neighbors’ toilets flood “all the time” and others’ entire floors flood. Stoves do not work. There’s broken tiles. The stairwells are dirty and the lights sometimes do not work — and, Giannicchi said, “We all have roaches.”

Giannicchi lives in a Washington Heights apartment building managed by A&E Real Estate, a massive company whose president and vice president were named by the city last year as the worst landlords across the five boroughs.

The super helps, but he’s just one man, Giannicchi said. She organizes and meets with her neighbors, but the trouble remains. Yet that all could finally change later this year, thanks to an upcoming program spearheaded by NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

Dubbed “Fix The City”, the program will combine already existing policies and agencies into a targeted campaign to crack down on the city’s worst landlords, in part by forcing some to give up their buildings. It was first introduced in the Mamdani administration’s May Block-by-Block housing plan, just a few pages in the hundred-plus page report.

“It isn’t necessarily that we didn’t have the tools, I think we just decided that we needed to layer the tools together in a way that is a little bit more strategic,” Dina Levy, Commissioner of HPD, said.

Implementation is scheduled for later this year. Results will be seen fairly quickly, Levy said. Through a plethora of enforcement, legal, and financial strategies, and coordination alongside other city and state agencies, HPD hopes to pressure chronic, repeat-offender landlords into compliance. 

In some cases, HPD will force a transfer of ownership. Landlords will have to give up their buildings to “responsible preservation purchasers:” long-term owner who is willing to comply, repair, and maintain the buildings. Whether a nonprofit, for-profit, or a group of landlords, the purchasers must be supported by tenants, Levy said.

The program is an “organizing tool,” she said, a chance to work with organized tenants.

And Fix the City’s first targets? At least 10 of the city’s worst landlords.

These landlords make up a small but stubborn universe. Many have been refusing to comply with city law for years — or even decades, Levy said. Some have been able to “torture generations of tenants.” Levy said she’s still running into the same bad actors she was chasing 20 years ago when she first got involved in housing.

“The goal behind Fix the City is to really say, ‘We’re not tolerating it anymore,’” Levy said. 

A&E Real Estate, for example, was associated with nearly 9,000 open violations on the 2025 Landlord Watchlist by the public advocate. 

A statement from an A&E spokesperson, however, called accusations of neglect “misleading and unrealistic” while noting “there is much more work to be done.” A&E has invested over $800 million across its portfolio, the statement said, resulting in “replaced boilers, modernized elevators, fortified security, and the clearance of 35,000 violations.”

Every one of A&E’s buildings is in better shape today than it was when they assumed management, the statement said.

“It has been our mission to work with the City to improve every building we manage and address long-standing issues at properties that have been neglected for too long,” the statement said. “That will not change.”

Advocates welcome the initiative

Housing advocates welcome Fix the City.

“For years, even decades, many of the bad landlords are the same,” Andrea Shapiro, Director of Programs and Advocacy at The Metropolitan Council on Housing, said. “We hear their names over and over.”

Shapiro said that while there have been lots of different attempts in different ways by the city to solve the issue, they have not been concentrated or organized. Now’s the time for negligent landlords to either fix their buildings, Shapiro said, or get out of the business.

“I’m excited, definitely,” Shapiro said.

Sumathy Kumar, executive director of Housing Justice for All, said she feels the same.

“It feels like a more comprehensive approach,” Kumar said.

Kumar said that predatory landlords’ business model is based, in part, on raising rent. Amid today’s affordability and housing crisis, efforts like Fix the City are beneficial because they support tenants by finally giving them basic living conditions, Kumar said. As a result, she said, tenants will be the judge whether the program is a success.

“Tenants are the eyes and ears, on the ground, living in these apartments,” she said.

The New York City Small Home Owners Association (NYCSHA), which represents small landlords across the city, supports the program — with a caveat.

“We support holding chronic, negligent ‘bad actor’ landlords accountable, as their mismanagement tarnishes the reputation of the vast majority of responsible property owners,” Richard St. Paul, president of NYCSHA, wrote in a statement.

Yet he cautioned that Fix the City must stick to targeting the worst, most prolific landlords in NYC. St. Paul noted that many small landlords, like the ones NYCSHA represents, are buckling under their finances.

“We urge the administration to guarantee that the mechanisms designed to force out corporate slumlords do not inadvertently catch struggling, community-based landlords in the crossfire,” he wrote.

Back in Washington Heights, Giannicchi said she is approaching six years in her apartment. Giannicchi said the issues throughout the years and the “hellacious” management have drawn her closer to her neighbors. Some of them have lived in the building for over two decades, she said. Some even have it worse.

“I endured a raining bathroom for months,” she said. “Some people have endured that for years.”