Mamdani’s White Knight for Troubled Buildings Has Dismal Record of Violations

Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently celebrated the transfer of ownership of three long-neglected rent-stabilized buildings in Brooklyn from Rubin Dukler, an owner who’d made frequent appearances on the city’s worst landlord list, to a new landlord named Mark Schwartz.

Schwartz is the mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey, and owns rent-stabilized apartment buildings across the city. Under the landlord swap that was cheered by the mayor and subsidized by the city, Schwartz has pledged to fix up the three Dukler buildings and provide tenants with decent living conditions they had long been denied.

In a Sept. 3 statement, Mamdani called the transfer “a new chapter” for the tenants and promised to work with the new owner “to put these 88 homes on a path toward stability and make clear that every New Yorker deserves a safe, well-maintained and stable place to call home.”

What the mayor did not mention was that Schwartz and his partners have racked up more than 1,400 open housing code violations deemed hazardous or immediately hazardous in the 28 buildings they now own or manage across the city, according to an internal city document obtained by The City Reporter.

Records show that the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) — the agency that will monitor Schwartz’s upgrade of the Dukler properties — has repeatedly cited Schwartz’s buildings for a sobering variety of squalid conditions. In the last four years alone, they have sued him or his partners 15 times to force required repairs.

And HPD has had to hire contractors to remedy conditions at their buildings because the owners failed to complete required repairs. The internal city document notes Schwartz and his partners currently owe the city $1.3 million for this work.

Of Mice and Mold

Tenants at 3569 Dekalb Ave., a 54-unit tenement near Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx that Schwartz and his partners have owned for many years, know all about this.

As of Nov. 2, that building had accumulated 268 open violations for conditions inspectors deemed hazardous or immediately hazardous, including 30 citations issued Aug. 26 for rat and mice infestations, non-functioning smoke detectors and toxic mold. Since Schwartz took ownership in 2018, the city has spent $21,500  to hire contractors to perform required repairs there.

“The roaches and the rats are crazy,” Maritza Diaz-Sanchez, 40, recently told The City Reporter, recalling a recent encounter when she said rats and mice ran through the lobby and up the staircase across her path. She pointed to a patch the building super had installed over a hole in the lobby floor to try and block additional furry guests.

“Two mouses and two rats,” she said. “It was a family.”

‘A Ton of Care’

In an interview, Schwartz admitted he was “embarrassed” by conditions at Dekalb Avenue, but insisted he’s aggressively moving to address all outstanding violations there and at his other properties across the city.

He said he’s had varying degrees of oversight of his buildings, relying at times on partners and third-party entities to stay on top of building conditions. This arrangement, he said, has not always obtained optimal results.

“When I handle it myself, they’re very clean. When, over the past years, over time in past years when others handle it, they don’t get taken care of as well as they should,” he said. “Every few years we give buildings back and forth to partners and third parties and it just doesn’t for the most part work out.”

“If I screw up I will say I screwed up,” he added. “If you rely on other people, you can’t say that.”

Last month Schwartz said he took control of 11 rent-stabilized buildings in which he had a small stake because he wants to better assist Mamdani’s efforts to preserve existing affordable housing.

“This administration and myself are getting very heavily involved in preservation. The rent-stabilized industry is a mess right now. The buildings need a ton of care,” he said. “I want to make sure our buildings are taken care of before I work with others. I’m very proud of our internal track record and the buildings we took over.”

Schwartz insisted he has “hit the ground” to remedy open citations: “We immediately began attacking all the violations and have made great progress.”

He has his work cut out for him. At one of those properties, a four-story property at 2044 Bergen St. in Crown Heights, a mile away from the Dukler buildings, Schwartz said he had been a “small partner” there for years but on Oct. 1 took full charge.

‘A Profitable Business Model’?

One of his first orders of business will be to address a lawsuit HPD filed last month. At the time there were 92 open violations in a building with 16 units, including 76 deemed hazardous. That represented a per-dwelling average of 4.75 hazardous violations — far in excess of the citywide average for rent-stabilized buildings of 0.5 violations per dwelling. Hazardous violations cited this year included roach and mice infestations and non-functioning self-closing doors and smoke detectors.

HPD alleged the owners had falsely certified that dozens of other violations had been remedied when inspectors discovered they were not. And they pointed out that the address of the building’s registered agent, Brian Dulitz, was a mail drop in a UPS store in Lower Manhattan. Dulitz has served as a registered agent on multiple Schwartz properties, including the Dukler buildings on Eastern Parkway.

HPD characterized the pattern of failure to address repair requests as deliberate, alleging the owners had “turned deferring maintenance of rent-stabilized buildings into a profitable business model.”

How Schwartz became the go-to guy in the Mamdani-supported landlord swap starts with him purchasing the mortgage on the Dukler properties in late 2024. Since then he said he’s moved to foreclose, but Dukler has continued to be the registered agent responsible for managing the three buildings.

Schwartz said in the summer of 2025, frustrated residents who had formed a tenants union after years of inaction from Dukler approached Schwartz about stepping in. Schwartz said he then began working with HPD — first under Eric Adams, then under Mamdani — seeking city subsidies to help him preserve and upgrade the 88 rent-stabilized apartments in the three buildings.

Rent Strike

On Sept. 4, the Dukler Tenant Union announced they’d reached an “agreement in principle” with Schwartz to rehabilitate their buildings with a long-term goal of converting them to co-ops that tenants would have the option to purchase.

The union said Schwartz agreed to cancel all arrears accumulated during a years-long rent strike in protest of Dukler’s failures, and that tenants will have some oversight over the upgrades to “ensure high quality renovations.” HPD will monitor contractors performing the rehabilitation.

“HPD is very hands-on,” Schwartz said. “The city is trying to expedite this for months. The city is begging to get this done by June. That would be a dream. I’m not going to lie to you. It is pressuring us.”

Asked to comment on Schwartz’s track record, the mayor’s office sent a statement from Cea Weaver, who runs Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“Working alongside new ownership, the Dukler Tenant Union has negotiated a strong Memo of Understanding with Mark Schwartz so that they have another tool in their toolbox to hold building management accountable,” Weaver said. “As we do with any building, we will use each and every mechanism at our disposal to enforce the city’s Housing Maintenance Code and support both building owners who come to the table in good faith, and tenants who fight for their right to live in a safe, stable home.”

Schwartz said tenants were aware of his track record when they signed the memorandum of understanding, but when The City Reporter visited the Dukler buildings on Monday, tenants universally declined to comment about their soon-to-be new landlord.

Arielle Hersh, director of policy at the nonprofit Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, which helped organize the Dukler tenants, said she would not discuss Schwartz’s portfolio on the record.

Schwartz, for his part, said he’s enthusiastically working with the Mamdani team to make his takeover of the Dukler buildings work, but he noted the administration’s plans to greatly expand this tactic to other in-need buildings will require ample funding.

He estimated repairs alone at the Dukler buildings are expected to cost $150,000 per unit.

“I love their approach. I want to work with them on their approach,” he said, adding that “the Eastern Parkway package, it’s several hundred thousand per unit. That’s three buildings. How do you do this with hundreds of buildings? I don’t know where they’re going to get the money.”

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