Lawsuit heads to trial as tenants allege years of neglect at Jamaica towers

The Crossing, a two-building affordable housing complex where residents say they have been forced to live in poor conditions for years. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye

By Jacob Kaye

Ashley Cadet stood in her sweltering Jamaica apartment on a recent July evening.

The warmest moments of the day had already passed, but there was little reprieve from the summer heat inside the two-bedroom apartment in the high-rise building outfitted with windows that only open a few inches. Cadet’s 8-year-old son, who has autism, sat in her bedroom, where a portable air conditioner made it the only comfortable room in the apartment.

It’s a practiced routine for Cadet, who has been without her apartment’s central air conditioning in the summer and without heat in the winter for almost the entirety of the four years she’s lived in the 16-story tower in the heart of Downtown Jamaica.

“I feel bad for my son because I feel like I'm not providing enough,” Cadet recently told the Eagle. “I thought I was, because it was like, ‘Oh, this is a great place to live.’ But if we could have gone somewhere else, we would have.”

It’s not just a broken HVAC system that has made living in her building uncomfortable.

Apartments in the building where Cadet lives are plagued by leaks, peeling paint and mold. Tenants say they fear for their safety – there’s rarely a doorman or security guard to stop the many unwelcome visitors who easily break open the building’s poorly locked front door before stealing packages left for tenants in the lobby.

There are rickety, unreliable elevators, broken appliances, stained carpets in the hallways and foul odors emanating from each floor’s trash room, which are rarely tended to, tenants say. An apparent fly infestation has frustrated residents for weeks.

A number of residents at the Crossing in Jamaica have been without heat or central air conditioning for years. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye

While most New York City apartments come with at least one headache, tenants living at The Crossing, a two-building affordable housing apartment complex on Archer Avenue and 148th Street, say that nearly everything that could go wrong in a building has gone wrong in theirs.

But despite myriad requests to the building’s owners to fix The Crossing’s decrepit state, little work has actually been done, the tenants claim.

The poor conditions prompted a group of residents to form a tenants’ association and bring a lawsuit against the corporations that own the building, Jamsta II Housing Development Fund Corporation, BRP Jamsta Two TC Owner, and CJ Plaza Two, alleging illegal living conditions and harassment.

The case heads to trial this week, when tenants will take to the witness stand and detail the alleged squalid and dilapidated condition of their buildings at 148-10 Archer Ave. and 147-40 Archer Ave., both of which are less than a decade old.

Tenants of the Crossing in Downtown Jamaica have brought their landlords to court over alleged illegal living conditions and harassment. Eagle Photos by Jacob Kaye

“This is a couple of corporations that think they can receive a significant amount of money from the city and state, and take advantage of people,” said Monica Mercola, a staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society's Housing Justice Unit, which is representing the tenants in their court cases. “They think they can take advantage of people who won't fight back, and it's wrong.”

A representative of the buildings’ owners did not respond to a request for comment before print time.

In court filings, the landlords have said that they have “taken numerous measures to address the conditions” in the buildings. They have also denied claims that they have harassed tenants.

Though the landlords have submitted several motions to have the case against them dismissed, they have all been denied by a judge.

‘One bad situation’

Many of the 88 residents who signed on to the lawsuit against The Crossing’s owners have a similar story.

In search of a more affordable and higher quality home, many applied to the city’s affordable housing lottery program. They were excited when they learned they had qualified for The Crossing and were even more thrilled when they toured the buildings, which opened shortly after the start of the pandemic.

“I felt like it was an amazing place,” Cadet said. “It's a beautiful space. It's convenient. There are many things that I saw that were being offered and I was like, ‘Oh, I can't wait, it's a great place to be.’”

Some moved in after spending years in difficult living situations, including Stacy Ricks, who lived in a building owned by Zara Realty, a company with a number of apartment complexes in Queens that has been accused by tenants and state prosecutors of illegally increasing rents on rent-stabilized residents and harassing tenants.

Ricks, like Cadet, said that she was impressed by The Crossing when she first moved in.

But the image of the new, amenity-filled building began to crack about a year after Ricks arrived.

When she first began to notice the malfunctioning air conditioning, the lack of heat, the dirt-strewn carpets and disappearing packages, Ricks began to wonder if she’d ever live in an apartment where it felt like her landlord cared about her quality of life.

“It’s an epidemic,” she said. “Maybe they are talking to each other and they are like, ‘Oh, we can get money this way.’”

“You think you are leaving one bad situation only to come here,” she said. “And then – oh my god.”

Stacy Ricks, a tenant of The Crossing, who is suing her landlord over poor conditions in the building and harassment. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye

There are currently 315 open violations between the two buildings, according to the city’s Housing Preservation and Development database. The violations range from failures to address cockroach infestations to failures to maintain working fire or carbon monoxide detectors.

Once the issues began, residents said they had a hard time getting the owners to fix things.

One of The Crossing’s residents, Doris Anderson, said it’s been three months since a leak in her roof damaged her walls, furniture and personal belongings. A maintenance worker eventually came to stop the dripping for the time being and patch up the wall, but Anderson said the water has kept flowing and, at one point, came gushing out of an outlet. With the exception of several fans she has to keep her apartment cool, nearly everything else in her living room has been covered in plastic bags for months to prevent water damage.

Anderson also has a faulty faucet, which she said has gone mostly ignored by the building’s maintenance staff. She’s unable to wash her dishes without spraying water all over herself and the counter.

“I’m not getting no response,” Anderson said.

Doris Anderson, a resident at The Crossing, has kept her furniture covered in plastic after a leak in her ceiling has gone unaddressed for months, she said. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye

Cadet has faced similar problems. Though she didn’t have any leaks in her unit, the owners asked if they could send a contractor to cut a hole in her bedroom closet so they could access some pipes and fix a leak that was causing issues in some neighboring units.

She said she obliged and pulled all of her clothes out of the closet. The contractor eventually arrived and cut two crawl spaces into the wall. Three months later, the holes remain. Cadet said she’s been unable to get any answers about when someone might be back to patch the wall up. In the meantime, she’s lived out of suitcases and worried about the dust and critters that may be making their way into her apartment through the open holes, she said.

“I have not heard a thing [from the landlords],” Cadet said.

A group of tenants began to meet with attorneys from The Legal Aid Society in the summer of 2025. The first lawsuit was brought in October 2025 and the second was brought in March of this year.

A number of residents will appear before a Housing Court judge on Wednesday to detail the conditions they’ve been living in.

Despite their troubles, many of the residents the Eagle spoke with said they hope to remain in The Crossing and only want the buildings’ owners to make lasting repairs.

But others have already begun to look for new homes, including Ricks, who has begun renting an apartment in Astoria so that she and her husband have somewhere to go during the summer’s warmest nights.

“We have no choice,” Ricks said.

For those who stay, Mercola, the attorney, said the residents only want “their landlord and these corporations to do their jobs.”

“All these tenants want is for their landlords to make sure that their homes are habitable,” she said.