Maybe It's A Plot To Get The Homeless Back

Camp La Guardia concerns spur Chester forum
By Chris Mckenna
Times Herald-Record
June 28, 2008 6:00 AM


CHESTER — County and local officials will hold a public forum Monday night to discuss the proposed sale of Camp La Guardia and let residents air their concerns.


Controversy has rippled through Chester and Blooming Grove since an Orange County Legislature committee voted Tuesday to sell the former homeless shelter and its 258 acres to Easy Equities, one of four entities bidding for the property.


That man behind that corporate name has since been revealed to be Jacob Selechnik, an apartment mogul with a history of thousands of housing-code violations in his New York City properties. He's offering $10.5 million up front with no building approvals in place — an unusual risk that has stoked suspicion among residents.


The Legislature is supposed to vote on the proposal Wednesday. But elected leaders involved with the upcoming forum said they'll urge lawmakers to postpone a decision until getting more information about the prospective buyers.


"We should not hastily make any decision to move forward until we have all the answers," said Legislator Greg Townsend, R-Monroe, who initiated the forum.
The gathering will take place at 8 p.m. Monday at the Chester Academy at 64 Hambletonian Avenue.


Chester Supervisor Steve Neuhaus said he plans to urge legislators to vote against the Easy Equities offer — which he opposes — and to extend deliberations over the sale, this time enlisting county Planning Commissioner David Church as a participant.


"My residents are very concerned," he said.


He said he wants to use the forum to correct misinformation that has gotten out and explain how the intended sale of the tract has been handled since the county bought it off New York City last year.


Philip Valastro, mayor of the Village of Chester, had been an enthusiastic supporter of a proposed development that would include a 5,000-student university. But he said Thursday he now wants more information about all of the projects.


"We've got to make sure we're picking the right one," Valastro said.


The Village Voice
NYC's 10 Worst Landlords
Jacob Selechnik


'Sometimes they don't open the windows and let the walls breathe'
by Ryan Vu and Joanna Raccuglia

When the Voice got Jacob Selechnik on the phone recently, the 62-year-old landlord with 15,260 housing-code violations on 110 properties immediately announced that he was retiring. He said he would do it "any day now." Asked why, Selechnik, who has been sued five times by HPD since 2004 and probed by the Department of Investigations, said simply: "I'm too old." In any event, his daughter Ellen and son-in-law Michael Goldberg have been increasingly involved in the vast, Bronx-based family business for years.

As astronomically high as Selechnik's current 2.2 violations per unit is, he had an even more shocking 23,127 violations, or 3.6 per apartment, until he was forced in the past two years by one court order after another to try to correct them. A printout of these violations could wallpaper an entire apartment. He also owes HPD $91,428 for emergency repairs made on 68 of his buildings.

Selechnik's other specialty is stealth. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation blacklisted him a few years ago, refusing to sell any of its foreclosed properties to him. So other landlords who were not on the "exclusionary list" bought properties Selechnik coveted and then flipped them to him. Similarly, when the family of an infant allegedly damaged by lead paint in one of his buildings sued him, he tried to get the case tossed by distancing himself from the ownership of the property. Bronx Supreme Court Judge Patricia Williams said his deposition was "rife with statements of ignorance" about the building, but she found enough evidence of ownership to sustain the suit.

Mold is still another specialty. Maria Fonseca is suing him for the chronic asthma and dermatitis she's suffering from stachybotrys, a toxic mold caused by excessive moisture that was described by an expert witness in the case as "highly allergic" and that has apparently contaminated the bedrooms and bathrooms in her Bronx apartment. Selechnik's response? "Sometimes they don't open the windows and let the walls breathe," he told the Post. Meeka Bhattacharya, an organizer with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, connected the Voice with tenants in other buildings whose kids got sick, allegedly because of mold. "Northwest and HPD have done building-wide inspections" in specific Selechnik properties, Bhattacharya said, "and found multiple violations, years of violations. We have been trying to work with Selechnik but he never responds." The history is also bleak: HPD sued him 20 years ago for a failure to provide heat and hot water and had to buy heat in 40 of his buildings.

Nicknamed Jake the Snake by the Coalition, Selechnik was described in an article in The Bronx County Historical Society Journal in 2002 as having "an alleged 20-year history of tax foreclosures" and "poor management and inadequate services to tenants," a one-man wrecking crew who's left his mark on the city's most blighted borough for decades on 110 properties")