The owner of a White Plains apartment building wants to make a management company pay a greater portion of a $12.5 million settlement with tenants who accused them of allowing a former superintendent to prey on residents.
Madison House Apartments LLC, Peekskill, claims that Community Housing Management Corp., Elmsford, failed to provide competent security, maintenance, and supervision, in a complaint filed on Dec. 24 in Westchester Supreme Court.
Allocation of the $12.5 million August settlement “is entirely disproportionate,” the complaint states, with Community Housing’s “negligence and wrongdoing.”
The building in question is Madison House, an 8-story structure with 99 apartments on Ferris Avenue near the White Plains train station. It was built in 1971 as affordable, government-subsidized housing.
Madison House Apartments LLC acquired Madison House in 2013, and then made a deal with Community Housing to manage the building.
Community Housing hired Jose Feliciano as the building superintendent. Within a couple of months, female tenants began complaining.
Tenants had discovered that Feliciano had been convicted of manslaughter, the complaint states, and they felt uncomfortable around him.
They claimed that he entered their apartments without their permission, sent them sexually explicit text messages, discussed his sex life, and sexually harassed them. In 2018, he was arrested for possession of a weapon.
Despite the numerous complaints, Community Housing declined to discipline or fire Feliciano for years, according to the complaint. The management company’s president, Eugene Conroy, allegedly saw the low-income tenants as unruly and in need of a tough superintendent, like Feliciano, and he liked that the superintendent kept the building neat and clean.
Madison House Apartments claims that it did not know about the problems until 2020, when a tenant forwarded a complaint. Community Housing allegedly had failed to keep the owner informed.
In 2020, Feliciano was banned from the management offices for threatening an employee, the complaint states, but was still allowed to interact with tenants. Finally, in July 2020, Feliciano was fired after he was arrested for allegedly stalking and harassing a tenant.
Several tenants filed complaints with federal and county housing and human rights agencies. In 2022 the cases were moved to federal court. This past August, three tenants settled their disputes. A fourth case in pending.
Madison House Apartments agreed to pay $7.5 million and Community Housing agreed to pay $5 million. Madison House loaned $1 million to Community Housing to help cover the payment, and $125,000 of the loan has been repaid.
Now Madison House Apartments wants the court to recalculate how much each company must pay in the settlement. Community Housing was responsible for day-to-day management, according to the complaint, and was responsible for hiring Feliciano and for failing to fire him when it became aware of his behavior.
Community Housing “breached the management agreement,” the complaint states, “by acting negligently and failing to comply with its obligations.”
