The Battle of 1214 Dean Street

September 1, 2020 6:35 AM

The Eco-Yogi Slumlords of Brooklyn. Gennaro Brooks-Church and Loretta Gendville were the poster couple for the Brooklyn boom, building a mini-empire ecologically-sound architecture, yoga classes, maternity ware. They were also exploiting their labour force while keeping tenants in overcrowded, under-maintained buildings. [SL New York Magazine]

Come for the distillation of the housing crisis, stay for the naked yoga studio hijinks.

posted by Gin and Broadband (26 comments total)

Woooooooooooowwwwww.

Those "Area Kids" stores are all over the damn place. I had no idea.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:57 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is so perfect I can't take it. Fashion-leftists from central casting:

"In 2015, Gendville somewhat notoriously put up a Bernie Sanders poster in one of her stores a few months after Hillary Clinton had visited the location. “Hillary Clinton is, you know, more in the game with all of the corporations, which I’m against,” she told BuzzFeed. (According to public records, Gendville has not voted since 2012.)"
posted by hilberseimer at 7:11 AM on September 1, 2020 [11 favorites]

What disgusting, hypocritical people.
posted by mermayd at 7:32 AM on September 1, 2020

Those "Area Kids" stores are all over the damn place.

They’re all gone. They’ve been retail apocalypsed for a couple of years now.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:50 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

The way you turn anyone who thinks they are a good person evil is to give them a video game where they look at a spreadsheet, and they have to make a number go up by choosing ever progressing indignities to visit upon people they don't have to see or talk to. Landlordism is bad for the soul.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:51 AM on September 1, 2020 [35 favorites]

I went to go look at a room in a similar setup on the same street. No thanks - I need a written lease. I need to know that my situation is legal and that I'm entitled to legal protections. But I'm fortunate enough to be picky. Lots of people, particularly people who earn their living in the informal economy, aren't.

I'm really happy to see that Equality for Flatbush is getting a shout-out in this article. They'e been very active in fair housing issues and they've been fighting like hell for an extension to the eviction moratorium.

The housing market does not serve people who live and work here. That's absolutely true. There are still new apartment buildings flying up here in Flatbush. No common areas, illegal bedrooms masquerading as living rooms, apartments broken up and rented out on a room-by-room basis. No closet space. I don't know who they're for but I do know that they're being built by developers who don't give a crap about the neighborhoods they build in or the tenants they rent to.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:40 AM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]

Gendville began a relationship with a 22-year-old named Shepherd Lantz, who had been working as her children’s manny.

"manny"? Is that a thing now? FFS.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:57 AM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]

Is that a thing now?

No.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:01 AM on September 1, 2020 [10 favorites]

Throughout the article, they keep revealing more and more reasons to find these people despicable. It's really quite impressive, really. I think they missed 'animal abuse', but really, it ticked a whole variety of other categories.

And, yeah, a whole lot of people are going to get more militant about housing issues as fallout from this kind of bullshit.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:08 AM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Capitalism will seek out and pervert all good intentions.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:15 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

There's a Law of Assholes isn't there?

The probability that a person is an asshole is independent of any other discernable human characteristic.

e.g. left-wing assholes, right-wing assholes, rich assholes, poor assholes, tall and short assholes, male assholes, female assholes, pro-Biden and Trump assholes, landlord and tenant assholes, pacifist and warmongering assholes.

Assholes.

And that is why democracy is a good thing because eventually the Asshole gets elected and you gotta move that sucker out.
posted by storybored at 9:16 AM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am feeling a little contrarian here. It isn't that I have any sympathy for these people rather it is that these people are not the problem. Their type is always with us and a bunch of schadenfreude and hating on them seems to me self indulgent, sort of like gnashing our teeth about house flippers in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis.

Living here in housing crunch Portland I could burst a blood vessel at every AirBNB "Host" that lives in San Francisco except that they are just the rats taking advantage of the cheese left out by our weak government and civic organization getting buffaled by the excessive lobbying power of AirBNB. The law for vacation rentals is not enforced at all and there isn't even a requirement to reveal the data on what housing is AirBNB. Likewise I don't really care about a couple of small time hustlers trying to claw their way into the upper middle class without getting a job in finance or a law school degree.
posted by Pembquist at 9:25 AM on September 1, 2020 [7 favorites]

My takeaway is that the "Grifter" genus has a rich, variegated web of species, not all of whom resemble Trump Spawn. What seems gaudy / tacky / gauche to me about Trump's Gold-Encrusted WesterN SizzliN aesthetic is very attractive to the crowd who admires him, whereas I can easily see myself duped by a "local vegan restaurant with a cool living wall". We all need to pay closer attention to the labor practices and ethics of businesses, journals, and artists we think are "on our wavelength". Articles like this help, but would this have been written (or read) without a hundred-year pandemic to force the con into the light?
posted by a_curious_koala at 10:31 AM on September 1, 2020 [10 favorites]

I’ve been hearing whispers about them for years around the neighborhood: they were flakes, they had no idea what they were doing, and they had no business expanding so rapidly.

What pisses me off is that while all this was going on, puff pieces kept appearing in the media, and the banks CONTINUED to loan them money. If any of these institutions had bothered to do their freaking jobs and do basic research, these bozos could have been protected from their own excesses, and so many people could have been saved from harm.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:50 AM on September 1, 2020 [8 favorites]

The landlords so far remain unrepentant. Brooks-Church told the New York Post he is being targeted as a white man.

I found the easter egg. Do I win a prize?

Also, holy shit, how useless are cops?
posted by klanawa at 11:08 AM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]

We all need to pay closer attention to the labor practices and ethics of businesses, journals, and artists we think are "on our wavelength".

I don't want to do that. I want to just go and buy lunch or whatever.

Maybe we should, collectively, choose a group of leaders to make rules. Some of those rules would concern business practices, others environmental practices, etc. The leaders would hire people to enforce those rules. Some other rules would dictate mandatory payments from people - let's call them citizens - to pay the salaries of the people who enforce the rules.

Mental note: make sure we choose good leaders.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:11 AM on September 1, 2020 [16 favorites]

I've been following this closely for the past few weeks. We live down the street from these people. They have a little pond in the front yard with koi and turtles living in it; the kids love to stop and count the turtles when we pass by.

We moved here about a year ago; it took us six months to figure out who even lived there. We'd see people walking out (always different) and try to introduce ourselves, but they would give us the brusque "no, we're just visiting friends" of people who know that the AirBnB they're renting is illegal. We saw Department of Buildings people staking out the home before we even saw the owners. There's a plaque in front of their house talking about how ecologically friendly it is. There's an aura of aggressive entitlement about the whole thing. We didn't catch on to how fucked up they were until we saw the anti-mask signs in the window (which came down after a couple of days, presumably to preempt someone putting a brick through one).

Shortly the initial eviction attempt, someone posted flyers up and down the block: "YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE SLUMLODS!" Yes, we know.

It's creepy. Paul Manafort had a house a few blocks away. There's a lot of nice people. There's probably a lot of monsters, too.

Truth be told it's probably the eco folks I suspect the most. People who are vocal about how dogs are more precious than people. I remember being a little kid and asking my mom if she had been a hippie in the sixties. "No, sweetie," she said, "the hippies had money." I guess they still do.

The turtles are nice, though. It's not their fault.
posted by phooky at 12:02 PM on September 1, 2020 [15 favorites]

The dude seems like a serious scam artist, probably learned from his 'radical ex-hippie' Ibiza-expat parents who, oh right, were also later caught up in a major drug sting funnily enough. Maybe it's just my shitty mood, but I feel like calling them flakes is letting them off the hook too easy - wouldn't surprise me if there were even more financial or drug-related crimes that they were involved in that the pandemic put a dent in too. I'm sure many more of these petit-bourgeois shitheels will be exposed in expensive cities all over the country as the economy slow-motion tanks over the coming months, god knows Seattle has plenty
posted by aiglet at 1:34 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ecospirituality is the left-wing version of the Evangelicals. Same grift, different packaging.
posted by fuzz at 2:17 PM on September 1, 2020 [8 favorites]

I hope everyone noticed the most important parts after the midlife crisis and messy labor relations:


"The market encourages buyers, whether Saudi princes or the owners of yoga studios, to treat homes like banks, as places to put their money, whether or not they actually live in them. It also motivates developers to build luxury properties with the highest returns, housing fewer residents. In New York, the pandemic brought the dangers of this system painfully to light, as mass economic devastation made many people, even landlords like Gendville and Brooks-Church, suddenly desperate for real-time shelter. "

They are grifters who thought they'd always have a supply of desperate, trusting tenants and employees. I've lived in Austin and run across too many hippie dippie-family money people who'd do something like this.
posted by Freecola at 2:59 PM on September 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

>>>"I don't really care about a couple of small time hustlers trying to claw their way into the upper middle class without getting a job in finance or a law school degree."

I'm with phooky, fuzz, aiglet and Freecola -- I'm hating on Gendville and Brooks-Church for propping up their Potemkin empire by spewing woo-ish platitudes while picking the pockets of yoga teachers and the young service-sector workers they crammed into 1214 Dean.

Gendville would say only that there was “no eviction.” In an email to outraged Area Yoga teachers, she sarcastically thanked them “for all of your judgments. Very yogic behavior!” She ended by saying that “I have to go back to ‘work’ … not everyone can sit around judging people and complaining all day.” (emphasis added)

Yeah, not everybody is encumbered with the responsibilities of owning two cafes where customers can cross their fingers that they won't go away with an unwanted side order of coronavirus served by a maskless COVID-skeptic owner.
posted by virago at 3:32 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's probably a lot of monsters, too.

There are so many monsters, but most of them aren't eco-grifters so much as investment bankers and private equity goons who will happily post a BLM sign in their window but wouldn't hesitate to call the police on people of color and would never dream of sending their kids to a public school.

I'm closer to the Manafort brownstone.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 4:31 PM on September 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Gendville would say only that there was “no eviction.” In an email to outraged Area Yoga teachers, she sarcastically thanked them “for all of your judgments. Very yogic behavior!” She ended by saying that “I have to go back to ‘work’ … not everyone can sit around judging people and complaining all day."

Pfft - from what I understand in the article, she didn't do a lick of work because her yoga teachers were doing it all for her unpaid because she told them it was good fucking karma or whatever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:59 PM on September 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Question about the "living walls" for anyone who knows about construction: does this sound like a fire hazard or nah?

Moving outward from the facade, the living wall consists of strips of wood that set the wall apart from the building, creating a void. Then there's a layer of vinyl sheeting, and then blocks of coconut coif in a binder, which serve as the substrate for the plants.

I'm no scientist, and I suppose the plants would, ideally, be moist, but it sounds like an open faced sandwich consisting of fibrous tinder; flammable, melty, toxic smoke-emitting plastic; and a channel that would let fire rapidly spread up the front of a building?
posted by evidenceofabsence at 11:07 PM on September 2, 2020

I'm just glad no one died in a fire like at the Ghost Ship in Oakland.

I work in property management and a lot of what I do is making sure the systems are operating (the lights, the heat, the fire safety systems) and it makes me so mad when people think they can ignore these things. There's nothing cool* about scheduling pest control or paying the water bill or having the fire extinguishers tested and it's easy to think you don't need to do those things.

*I'll never be featured in the styles section for what I do.
posted by vespabelle at 6:13 PM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

vespabelle, you raise the central issue: the failure of these venal assholes to make sure that the space they are renting out is safe to live in.

The lead paragraph mentions Angie Martinez, a 24-year-old barista who was paying $865 for one room that had neither heat nor a working fire alarm. I doubt things were much better in any of the eight other bedrooms.

Not that anyone with the NYFD would have known before New York Magazine blew the whistle -- the landlords put up signs warning: "DO NOT LET ANYONE FROM THE CITY IN. NO EXCEPTIONS." So much easier than actually paying the $49,130 they've accumulated in city fire code violations just since 2018! Not to mention renovating a building classified as a single-family home so that it could, y'know, safely house multiple tenants.

I'm just glad no one died in a fire like at the Ghost Ship in Oakland.

Agreed, or like this fire, which killed six people in my city in 2014. The landlord wound up serving 70 days of a 90-day jail sentence for not providing working exits from the third floor. (Full disclosure: I work for the paper, but I was not involved with reporting, editing or photographing this tragic fire or its aftermath.)
posted by virago at 12:43 AM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]