Queens residents sue city’s ‘worst landlord’ over crumbling building
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Queens Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas rallies with tenants of 41-25 Case St. before their first court hearing against their landlord, A&E Realty. Eagle photo by Noah Powelson
By Noah Powelson
Queens residents brought one of the city’s most notorious landlords to court on Monday after they said over 350 violations plaguing their building had gone unaddressed for years.
The 41-25 Case Street Tenant Union rallied outside Queens Civil Court on Monday before their first court appearance in their lawsuit against A&E Realty. The tenants, who live in an Elmhurst building that shares the same address, said A&E routinely ignores their requests for repairs for the hundreds of violations the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has on record.
Now the tenants are bringing their landlord, who was ranked as the city’s worst last year, to court, where they hope a judge will force A&E to repair the building or otherwise face legal consequences.
Tenant organizers and their attorneys claim that longstanding unaddressed problems in their building has created dangerous living conditions for everyone who resides in 41-25 Case St., which A&E bought in 2013. Tenants said they’ve lived with mold, elevator breakdowns, lapses in heat and hot water, rat infestations, crumbling ceilings and many other issues for long periods of time. The building’s problems are rarely fixed when reported, the tenants said, and the few times A&E addressed the complaints, the repairs were shoddy and often temporary.
Amber Gill, a tenant leader for the building, said a mold infestation in her apartment has repeatedly left both her and her family severely ill, and caused her son to regularly miss school due to sickness. Gill said she is immunocompromised, and ended up in the ICU last November after the mold infestation made her septic.
Despite reporting the issue to her landlord, Gill said they never sent anyone to fix the mold or the other problems in her apartment.
The resident also had to pay over $3,000 out of her own pocket to fix a gas stove after it was broken for 32 days, she said.
“The conditions in our apartments have affected far more than our comfort, they have affected our wealth, finance and daily lives,” Gill said on Monday. “The only thing I received was broken promises from A&E that ‘we will fix it tomorrow.’ I am here to tell you, tomorrow never came.”
Other tenants reported experiencing similar issues, including having no hot water during a two-week snow storm that occurred last winter.
In July 2025, tenants sent a list of apartment and common area repairs that required urgent attention, but said they never got a response.
Tenants at 41-25 Case St. sued their landlord, A&E realty over poor building conditions that they say have gone unaddressed. Photo via lawsuit
Bianca Zarate-MacPherson, a senior staff attorney with the Tenant Rights Coalition of Legal Services NYC's Queens office who represents the tenants, said the lawsuit was brought forward after years of reporting violations failed to produce meaningful improvements.
“The tenants have done their due diligence,” Zarate-MacPherson told the Eagle. “They have reached out to A&E management personally, nothing happened. They called 311, had hundreds of violations placed in their building, nothing happened. They sent a demand letter to management with the list of conditions, and still with that, nothing happened.”
“The next course of action is to take the landlord to court for these repairs,” Zarate-MacPherson added.
During the rally, tenants were joined by Queens Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, who said A&E’s neglect is a common source of problems for buildings across Queens.
“In my district, we have countless cases of A&E’s abuse, over and over again,” González-Rojas said. “This is not just one building, this is about whether working class New Yorkers, immigrant families, seniors and long-time residents can remain in the communities they help build and trust that the laws will protect them.”
During the hearing, attorneys representing both the tenants and A&E acknowledged the building had at one point accumulated over 600 violations in a single year. Many of those were resolved or addressed in some way before the hearing on Monday, but by the time the lawsuit was filed, the building still had 372 open violations with HPD.
As of Monday, June 1, the 41-25 Case St. building had 362 open violations.
Speaking before Queens Judge Shorab Ibrahim on Monday, Zarate-MacPherson and other Legal Services NYC attorneys requested the court force A&E to take serious action to address the building’s poor conditions.
Ibraham adjourned the case until Wednesday, June 3, but indicated during the hearing he was strongly inclined to grant the tenants’ request.
A&E said that it’s made many improvements to the building over the years.
“We have invested $4.5 million into 41-25 Case Street to improve living conditions for residents and deliver the quality of housing they need and deserve,” a spokesperson for the landlord said. “This is a significant investment that has made a meaningful difference in the form of electrical upgrades, window replacements, new boilers, and the closure of 2,000 work orders. Our progress shows why relying solely on the raw amount of HPD violations does not tell the full story, as many violations are duplicates or unable to be addressed if residents do not grant access to their homes for necessary repairs, to say nothing of the many currently closed pending inspection.”
“Most importantly, it demonstrates our commitment to the building and its community, and we welcome the opportunity to work directly with residents to address each concern they may have rather than through litigation,” they added.
The landlord of 41-25 Case St., Margaret Brunn, is an A&E executive who was ranked as the city’s worst landlord in 2025 by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
Brunn is also the landlord of 43-09 47th Ave., a Sunnyside building that suffered a major fire that left 14 people injured and 250 people displaced on Dec. 20, 2023. Last February, residents of the Sunnyside building and Queens elected officials called on A&E to pay $6 million to repair the building, an amount that A&E claimed hasn’t been paid because of issues with their insurance company.
In January 2026, A&E agreed to pay $2.1 million in a settlement with HPD for violations accumulated in 14 buildings across three boroughs. Roughly 750 tenants live in the buildings, and reportedly dealt with bed bugs, fire hazards, broken elevators and many other issues. Among the buildings included in the settlement was the A&E-owned apartment building at 35-64 84th St. in Jackson Heights.
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the settlement back in January, he said it would be the first of many legal actions the city would take to address A&E’s history of violations.
“For years, A&E has operated with callous disregard for those residing in its properties, racking up over 140,000 total violations,” Mamdani said at the time. “This is not just a failure to serve those to whom it holds an obligation, it is a cruelty to over tens of thousands of New Yorkers.”
