Flipped Off

Real estate investors had a great plan to cash in on pandemic-era Brooklyn. But tenants are fighting back.

- By Hannah Levintova

Anh-Thu Nguyen has shared her Park Slope apartment with various roommates for the past 12 years.

Early in March of 2021, Anh-Thu Nguyen called her Brooklyn landlord to add a new housemate to her lease. It was a mundane request, one that the 39-year-old labor organizer had made a handful of times since moving into her three-bedroom apartment in Park Slope on the heels of the last financial crisis.

Nguyen's home is on the second floor of a prewar building directly across from one of the borough's largest parks and surrounded by houses worth between $3 million and $5 million. The spot had become a financial refuge for Nguyen and various roommates over the years-creatives, advocates, and other strivers like her whose salaries didn't keep pace with the city's soaring cost of living, but who could afford to stay by living there together.

For a couple of weeks, Nguyen's landlord avoided her calls and emails. Then someone slipped a letter under her door stating that their building was under new management. When she dialed the number on the letter, the person who picked up someone named TJ-told her that he represented the new landlord, and they were refusing her housemate request. It didn't make sense to add someone now, he said, because the new owners-a mysterious LLC named after the building's address-wouldn't be renewing their lease, even though the housemates had never once missed a rent payment or caused any trouble. A written notice came by email the same day. They had 90 days to vacate the premises.