Take John Down

Please note: As of November 8th, 2022, this matter has been resolved. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) stepped in and had us both sign a concilation agreement. My lease has been renewed and the relationship between John and me is now very cordial. I'm very pleased that we were able to resolve this matter outside of housing court. I've decided for now to keep this site up as it's been providing many tenants resources for their own housing matters.

Got 10 seconds? to send an automated email to politicians who can start a formal investigation.

TL;DR: my landlord is attempting to remove me from my apartment by doubling my rent after I reported him for refusing to fix my heat and a gas leak. His 10 buildings have been issued 271 HPD violations since 2010, 58 of which were deemed to be "immediately hazardous" to tenants. NY State has sued him 22 times for $610,538 in unpaid tax. It's clear that fines and lawsuits won't solve this problem, nor will continuing with the status quo: he's been a landlord for 49 years and fines and lawsuits have barely slowed him down. It's going to take emails and phone calls to public officials to take him down.

Got 20 seconds? to share this site.

Never forget: where there's people, there's power. Now is the time for us to exercise that power and force politicians, who we pay with our tax money, to do their jobs and protect us. Governments can and should be afraid of their people, and there's no reason change is limited to election day. Let's bury them in emails, let's clog their phone lines: let's let them know their job is at stake.

It starts with landlords, but it won't end there. This is just the beginning, my friends.

What he's done to me:

What he's done to others:

What he's done to the government and businesses:

Other sketchy stuff:

What you can do to help:

If you also have a bad landlord:

Here are the resources we used to gather this information. All of the data we pulled was from public records.

About me:

I'm Joe Puccio. I moved to New York in February 2021 and love living here. Where I live now, Greenwich Village, is the first place I've ever lived where I feel comfortable just being me. The only stain on my experience of New York is my landlord. After 11 months of putting up with him, I started to push back. Now he's retaliating by trying to force me out. I've reported everything to 311, the HPD, and a number of other relevant public officials and journalists (tap here for a full list), but nobody has taken action of any consequence. I've made a lot of close friends in my neighborhood and want to stay here, but all of the other apartments in the area cost $1,000 more per month now that rent prices have returned to their pre-pandemic levels, which I can't afford.

I'd like for this to be a proof of concept, to pave the way for the thousands of others to get help from strangers on the internet when they're harassed by their landlords; if we're successful with John, I'll transition this site into one that allows others to share stories of their landlord and which public officials we all can email and call to help them out.

Remember: "where there's people, there's power." – Fred Hampton.