April 3, 2024
Public Service Awards
I was happy to be sandwiched between two great public interest attorneys, Steve Banks and Jane Landry-Reyes, at last night’s Public Service Awards at Brooklyn Law School:
In a special ceremony, Brooklyn Law School honored public service work with awards for those in the field, as well as Class of 2024 members who have performed exceptionally by working in the Law School’s own clinics and on various pro bono projects.
The students honored at the April 2 event devoted a combined 87,000 hours to assisting immigrants, small business owners, survivors of domestic violence, people threatened with eviction, and many others in need of legal service. They worked with a wide range of government agencies and entities that provide critical public services, such as the Legal Aid Society, the Veterans Advocacy Project, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Additionally, three awards were presented for those who have distinguished themselves in public service careers.
President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer opened the event, describing the school’s public service work, including its five-plus decades of clinical work, as representing the “lifeblood of Brooklyn Law School.” Noting that housing justice was a key theme of the work of this year’s honorees, Meyer presented the Distinguished Commitment to Public Service Award to keynote speaker Steven Banks, special counsel in the pro bono practice at Paul, Weiss. Banks previously served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services from 2014 to 2022, where his accomplishments included establishing the first-in-the-nation Right to Counsel program for low-income tenants.
He also spent three decades at New York City’s Legal Aid Society. While there, Banks said, he visited local law schools, including Brooklyn Law School, and would have liked to hire as many graduates as he could. He recognized that while some students would go into public service, others would end up at private law firms, doing pro bono work and making an impact in other ways, he said.
“Whatever public service path you choose, the most important thing is to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say to yourself, ‘I’m going to go to work to make a difference today,’ whatever you choose in the practice of law,” Banks said. “It is hard work to make a difference, but that’s really what your North Star has to be and can be. Do not forget what you knew before you went to law school, when you knew there were people who needed help. Your law degree gives you the ability to provide that help, no matter what path you choose.”
The Faculty Award for Excellence in Public Service was presented to Professor David Reiss by Assistant Professor of Law Naveen Thomas. Reiss, who is the founding director of Brooklyn Law School’s Community Development Clinic, was a pioneer in “using legal education as a tool to teach practical skills, to instill in students the lasting value of pro bono work, to empower underserved individuals and communities, and to promote economic growth from the ground up,” Thomas said.
“People often assume that business lawyers are focused solely on maximizing profits and promoting corporate interests detached from the realm of public service,” Thomas said. “But to the contrary, one of my principal goals as a law professor has been to dispel this notion by demonstrating to students that business law and public service are not incompatible, and that, in fact, when properly used, the first can be used to advance the second and David personifies this.”
In his remarks, Reiss shared some advice for students: “Always remember that feeling, in a clinic or when you are doing pro bono work of helping a person. Maybe they are faced with eviction, maybe they’re faced with the loss of their home,” Reiss said. “Remember that feeling of incredible personal satisfaction in yourself of making that difference. And everyone in this room has felt that.”
Even that very day, Reiss said, he felt that sensation of helping others when civil lawyers asked him to testify at a hearing next month for someone whose home was lost in a foreclosure rescue scam a decade ago, and to utilize his knowledge of a “very obscure area of the law” to shed light on this type of case. “They needed somebody who is very specialized to explain it to the judge in this hearing, and they asked me to do that, and I was very happy to do it,” Reiss said.
Brooklyn Law School’s write-up of the event went on to sing the praises of Jane Landry-Reyes. It was also great to hear about the arc of her career in legal services and government.
Congratulations to all of the students who won awards. Special thanks to my colleague, Naveen Thomas, for his very kind words.
April 3, 2024 | Permalink | No Comments
April 2, 2024
Owning the New Yorker
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Mickey Barreto, in New York. — Photo: Reproduction/Fantastic
I was interviewed by TV Globo, the largest broadcaster in Latin America, about Mickey Barreto who claimed to own the New Yorker hotel in Manhattan. The video is in Portuguese, but there is a rough English translation of the transcript. The transcript opens,
After Living for Free in a NY Hotel for 5 years, a Brazilian Puts the Entire Building in His Name and the Case Ends up in Court
A Brazilian is in the middle of a controversy involving New York ‘s housing legislation . After staying in a hotel room for 5 years, Mickey Barreto believes he owns the entire building.
The confusion ended up in court . He was even arrested on fraud charges. While free awaiting trial, Mickey spoke to Fantástico. New York hotels are among the most expensive in the world and living on Manhattan Island is not for everyone, but Brazilian Mickey Barreto paid nothing.
Barreto lived for free, for 5 years, at the New Yorker hotel. And there’s more: he managed to put the entire building in his name. A negotiation made based on New York City rent law. The hotel says there was fraud.
The Brazilian, who is actually called Marcos Aurélio Canuto Muniz Barreto, managed to understand a complex law — and benefit from it.
The New Yorker Hotel opened in 1930, with more than a thousand rooms and 43 floors . At the time, it was one of the largest in the world. It hosted politicians and celebrities, such as inventor Nikola Tesla, baseball player Joe DiMaggio and boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1972, it faced a crisis and closed its doors. It ended up becoming one of the cheapest hotels in the city.
When Mickey Barreto arrived from California in 2018, he said he had no plans to stay at the hotel for long. Until he learned of an old law in New York that allowed someone to stay with all room service included and pay very cheaply.
Under the law, still in effect, New York hotels built before 1969 that charged less than US$88 per week that year — a cheap rate at the time — would have to give guests a rental contract for 6 months or more. The guest would then have the right to become a permanent resident. “The legislation limits the amount that each owner can charge for rent in New York in certain apartments. It is a 1969 law that applies to different places. And through a legal loophole, hotels considered cheap entered this regulation. Mickey Barreto discovered that this hotel is technically included in the rules defined by law”, explains David Reiss, a jurist at the Brooklyn School of Law.
The hotel resisted, but Barreto won the case in court and that was how he started living at the New Yorker. But, in addition to refusing to pay, Mickey Barreto wrote a deed and managed to register the hotel in his name, claiming that a judge gave him ownership of the hotel.
“According to the law, having possession is not the same thing as being an owner . Every tenant has possession of the apartment where he lives, but that does not mean that he is the owner. There is no legal basis for this correlation. I think he only gained in Justice because the hotel didn’t send any lawyers. And here in the United States, if you don’t send your lawyers, you’re going to lose”, says the jurist.
Already calling himself the owner of the New Yorker, Barreto went to the hotel’s restaurant and demanded that the concessionaire pay him for renting the place. He was ignored, but continued to bother employees and even demanded a complete reform of the entrance.
April 2, 2024 | Permalink | No Comments
March 22, 2024
Real Estate Authority Editorial Board
I am happy to continue serving on the Real Estate Authority Editorial Board, along with a group of leading real estate lawyers:
Danielle Jackson | Simpson Thacher
Bonnie Neuman | Cadwalader
Alexander Lycoyannis | Holland & Knight
Meredith Katz | Greenberg Traurig
David Reiss | Brooklyn Law School
Tatiana Pawlowski | McGuireWoods
Michael Kaplan | WilmerHale
Darwin Huang | Kasowitz
Guy Maisnik | Jeffer Mangels
Stacie Trott | DLA Piper
Steven Nudelman | Greenbaum Rowe
Beatriz Azcuy | Sidley
Andrew T. White | Winston & Strawn
Cindy Campbell | Seyfarth
Brian Ashin | King & Spalding
Terri L. Adler | Adler Stachenfeld
David P. Flynn | Phillips Lytle
March 22, 2024 | Permalink | No Comments
March 12, 2024
Prospects for a Social Housing Development Authority
I will be speaking about The Prospects for a New York State Social Housing Development Authority at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House on March 28th. The presentation will address a newly introduced bill to create the New York State Social Housing Development Authority and a report prepared by (among others) my wonderful student, Taylor Abbruzzese, a joint J.D. Candidate at Brooklyn Law School and M.U.P. candidate at Hunter College, on the same topic.
You can register here.
March 12, 2024 | Permalink | No Comments
February 8, 2024
Why Does a Bank Sell Your Mortgage?
Loan servicer by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free
I was quoted in Marketplace’s story, Why Does a Bank Sell Your Mortgage? You can listen to it here. The transcript opens,
Right after Marc Hill bought his first home, a townhouse north of Chicago, in the summer of 2019, he got a letter telling him his mortgage had been sold. He didn’t think much of it after Googling around.
“I read that was kind of normal. And then it happened again. And then again. And I was like, ‘Well, what’s going on here?’” he said with a laugh.
Recently, less than five years after his purchase, the mortgage on Hill’s townhouse changed hands for the fourth time.
“Welcome to the 21st century housing market,” said David Reiss, a professor of real estate finance and housing policy at Brooklyn Law School. Today, upward of 70% of mortgages are sold into the secondary market.
“A lot of people have a sense that mortgages work like they did maybe in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” he said. “Where you walk into your bank and if they think you’re a good risk, they’re going to give you some mortgage, and that’s going to come from money that they have from deposits.”
Sometimes that is how it works. But for the most part, Reiss said, “instead of banks lending you money that they have in deposit, once the bank makes the mortgage they then sell it to investors.”
When the bank or lender that originated your mortgage sells it, they get back all the money they lent you right away, plus a chunk of the interest you’re expected to pay over the life of your mortgage. They also get some of your closing costs.
February 8, 2024 | Permalink | No Comments
October 10, 2023
Debranding Trump
Dano CC BY 2.0 DEED
Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted me in Posts Falsely Say Trump Name Erased from New York Properties. It reads, in part,
“We have already seen cases where Trump’s name has been removed from a property because the owner no longer thought it benefited the property,” David Reiss, professor at Brooklyn Law School, confirmed to AFP on October 4.
In September 2023, it was also reported that Trump would sell his multimillion-dollar lease on a public golf course in the Bronx to the Bally’s casino chain . . . “naming rights are often a separately negotiated item. For instance, companies pay millions of dollars to get naming rights to stadiums,” Reiss explained.
Both the Trump Tower and Trump Park Avenue, for example, still bear the former president’s name and remain under his ownership, as of this writing, a member of buildings staff confirmed to AFP by telephone.
AFP contacted the Trump Organization for further comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
While exceptions happen, Reiss noted that “generally when a party gives up ownership or control of a property, their name goes with them.”
October 10, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
October 2, 2023
How to Fake-Own the New Yorker Hotel
Reinhold Möller, CC BY-SA 4.0
New York magazine’s Curbed interviewed me for their explainer, How to Fake-Own the New Yorker Hotel. It reads:
The story of how a guy named Mickey Barreto came to own, at least on paper, the New Yorker hotel is a weird one. It started in June 2018, when Barreto first booked a night at the Art Deco landmark for $149. He had plans to stay a while: Using an obscure clause in the city’s rent-stabilization law, Barreto requested a six-month lease to live at the hotel. The gambit worked. Even as the owner of the hotel, which happens to be the Unification Church despite the fact that it operates as a Wyndham, tried to boot him, the judge ordered them to let him back in.
Around the same time he requested the lease, and despite the fact that he did not own the New Yorker, Barreto filed a deed transferring ownership of the hotel from himself to something called Mickey Barreto Missions. Why did Barreto believe he owned the building? As he told a judge in 2019, the “building was never subdivided. It’s all one lot. It’s all one parcel.” Which meant, at least to him, that because he had a legal claim to room 2565, he had a legal claim to the whole thing: “What affects that part of the building called 2565, whatever happens in there, happens to the whole lot, the whole parcel.” He then went around presenting himself as the owner, attempting to collect rent from the building’s street-level businesses and at one point calling the Fire Department to have the building evacuated and, per court documents, identifying “himself as the owner of the subject property.” In the end, the judge found Barreto’s deed, which was extremely fraudulent, to be extremely fraudulent.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can we start with fake-owning a hotel? Barreto managed to file documents transferring ownership of the hotel to himself. Can someone just … do that?
The government looks at deeds and says: Do they meet our technical requirements for a deed? Is it on the right kind of paper, is it the right size? Does it have a notary stamp on it? If it meets all those technical requirements, then it is recordable. The way you sell a property is based on the fact that most people are doing the right thing and they’re not doing shenanigans. But if you record something that is fraudulent, that doesn’t make it real. A fraudulent deed conveys nothing, and really nobody’s going to be misled by this. It just needs cleaning up. The true owner has to go to court and get this deed declared fraudulent so that it could be removed from the recording documents.
You may not remember this famous headline some 20 years ago when the New York Daily News transferred ownership of the Empire State Building to itself. The notary was Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, and one of the witnesses of the deed was Fay Wray from King Kong. They got a big headline, but it’s less interesting than the headline suggests.
They were trying to prove a point.
I believe what they were trying to demonstrate is that regular people can have their properties swept away from them through deeded theft, which is another name for this. And this can be a serious problem for people living in relatively modest homes, typically in the outer boroughs. And typically the victims are elderly people, and it’s a way to steal people’s property. This is a horrific fraud.
Barreto’s fraud was more like the Empire State Building fraud. Barreto told the restaurant to pay rent to him and all these things, but no sophisticated person is going to fall for this. They’re going to call the property manager and say, “What’s going on?” It’s not going to change anything.
So it’s mostly a hassle.
If this happened to you, you’d be miserable and you’d probably have to hire a lawyer. It would be a pain in the butt. But it doesn’t happen that often. And when you think about all of the transactions that happen whenever you design a government system like the recording system, you want to balance ease of use versus potential for fraud. Maybe it’s a cost we accept as a government because it doesn’t happen very much.
It was also funny to me that he transferred the deed from Mickey Barreto Missions to Mickey Barreto Missions.
I mean, his deed was really weird because the deed was from himself to himself. So that’s even more fraudulent on its face. If David Reiss transfers to David Reiss, that doesn’t really even do anything. This is just nonsense, right?
Right.
I mean maybe he was magically thinking that this would give him ownership of the building or just wanted to gunk up the works for them or is just a little wacky. Whatever his reasoning, trying to interpret it as a legal matter doesn’t get you anywhere because he had no rights and he kind of made it up. It’s like if your kid was writing a deed.
Okay, so he was not using magical thinking when it came to claiming a lease at the New Yorker Hotel. Can you tell me about that clause?
So, this is part of the rent-stabilization law that allows guests at single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels to become tenants, usually by living there continuously for six months or by staying there for one night and requesting a lease. They’re a very specialized, small part of the New York City housing stock that are very complex. Most of them are in very bad condition. They’re kind of a holdover from an earlier era — after World War II a lot of them filled up with single men who would come to New York City to make their way in the world. They fell on very hard times in the ’70s and ’80s and kind of phased out. Then the government came up with a supportive SRO model where it had a similar type of housing space with services on-site. But we’re not talking about very many units.
But the New Yorker Hotel is kind of nice. Is it an anomaly?
The New Yorker Hotel is owned by the Unification Church, the Moonies church. I’m guessing it’s a complicated story. It’s not your typical hotel owner.
And Barreto knew about this odd little provision on rent-stabilized hotels.
He clearly knew what he was doing. He was either advised by somebody or had done his own research and realized that he was able to request a lease. Some not-for-profit legal entities will even provide form letters to tenants so that they can do this, because for some people this is a very attractive housing option. It’s very reliable compared to being in a men’s shelter or a women’s shelter or something like that. So it’s obscure, but it’s doable. There have been other cases about this, and owners will often fight with a tenant about it because they would rather use it as a hotel unit where they can rent it out at a higher nightly rate. But that’s not complying with the law. So what he did in regards to rent stabilization and getting the lease is not extraordinary, although it’s rare.
And he paid $149 for one night at the hotel, but I assume once the court said he could stay, he would have paid a much lower rent?
That’s right. It can’t be higher than the legal rent. And the legal rent is set by a combination of what the initial rent was back in the day, and then whatever increases had been allowed over time under the rent-stabilization law.
So if someone gets a six-month lease, can they stay indefinitely because it’s a rent-stabilized lease?
Effectively, yes.
Are there similarly obscure laws tenants or people can use to try to get leases from properties like this?
If you become a family member of a rent-stabilized tenant, you can succeed tenancy upon their death, but that’s really well known. You can’t be evicted without a court process if you’re a resident for more than 30 days in an apartment, and you sometimes hear horror stories of a roommate who doesn’t leave and gets tenancy rights. But I don’t know if I’m familiar with a thing that’s so similar to this.
October 2, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
