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<\/a>Photo courtesy of the Jersey City Tenants Union.<\/p>\nBy John Heinis\/Hudson County View<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just don\u2019t care to fix anything. The kitchen floor is in awful shape. They put some screws in the kitchen floor tile so that they don\u2019t move around too much. It\u2019s an awful thing. We just gotta go on strike to get what we want,\u201d Charlie, a tenant at 154 Belmont Ave. where a rally was held last week who declined to give his last name, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been living in this building 40 years. Nothing gets done, they want me to get out. Rats, mice, holes in the bottom, holes on top, and they still have the nerve to make me pay for water,\u201d added fellow building tenant Luneste Alexender.<\/p>\n
429 Bergen Ave., on rent strike since November, was joined this month by 150 and 154 Belmont Ave., also owned by Amir Ben-Yohanon. The Belmont buildings were previously without heat in the winter of 2024 along with 35 Kensington Ave., as HCV first reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ben-Yohanon owns these buildings through a separate\u00a0LLC from\u00a0429 Bergen Ave., a common practice among Jersey City landlords\u00a0who may have dozens of LLCs obscuring their real estate portfolio in the city.<\/p>\n Tenants at 19 and 25 Kensington Ave. are also withholding rent from Optimum Properties.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned about this building a while ago but just recently I just learned the severity of how people are living here. I\u2019m talking rats biting peoples\u2019 toes, what looks like cracks in drooping walls,\u201d Bergen Grand Tenants Association President Liv Malone declared at the rally.<\/p>\n A tenant in the crowd interjected that the building at 429 Bergen Ave. has \u201cwater coming in everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo I\u2019ve just really enjoyed getting to know everyone who lives here and thinking about how they can get to live in a home that\u2019s safe and that\u2019s clean. Because I can promise you that the landlord that we share, Amir Ben-Yohanon, does not live like this and the only way that that will change is by the people living here deciding it\u2019s done and that\u2019s what you guys are doing here,\u201d Malone concluded.<\/p>\n Eli King, an organizer with Jersey City Tenants Union, echoed that sentiment without mentioning calling out any specific landlords.<\/p>\n \u201cLandlords know their power and they\u2019re not afraid to use it, to neglect basic living standards in buildings they own to maximize the profit from their investment. Tenants are coming together and using our power: there\u2019s more of us than there are of them and every dollar of those profits is money that we work for,\u201d he asserted.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth of these owners own massive portfolios in the city and we\u2019re not going to stop with these buildings or with these landlords. Anyone who is ready to get organized and fight back against their landlord, come talk to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben-Yohanon did not return an email seeking comment on Sunday, while Optimum Properties could not be reached for comment.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n