Photo by the City of New York.

Our Slumlords

The owners of our home, 500 West 140th Street, Sugar Hill, Harlem, New York, New York 10031-6139, are:

	Philip Tager	Steven E. Carter
	Their business address: Perseus Capital Management, L.L.C., a tenants-only front for the slum-investment brokerage Cronus Capital, L.P. 275 Madison Avenue 39th Floor New York, NY 10016-1101 Phone: (212)774-5900 Fax: (212)774-5919 The venerable law firm Sherman Feigen Slivka lives there. Cronus may just rent space for voicemail and fax. Mr. Tager and Mr. Carter are real-estate investment brokers. They find money to buy up low-priced "distressed" properties in upper Manhattan. It appears that they invested their own funds in our home. Using dummy LLCs or LPs, they hold on for not more than five years, when they hope that The Market will double the selling price. "The Market" is jargon for "forces beyond the owners' control." The community controls The Market. Only we tenants and our neighbors have our hearts in the hood. While stifling us in squalor, our slumlords seek succor from the sweat of our struggle to survive. Rather than hiring an experienced slumlord manager, like Solar Realty Management Corp., which unloaded our home on them, Mr. Tager and Mr. Carter are themselves trying to manage the properties they bought or brokered. They hire agents and invent a management-company alias, like Perseus Capital Management, to hide their own and their investors' identities. A mail drop takes rent from tenants. Why can't tenants know who their landlords are? Well, New York still has housing laws and enforcement, such as they are, and it's less pricey in the long run to hire stooges to take the heat. Besides, their cocktail-clubbing chums think the stars of their posse are "in real-estate." They don't know that means slumlords.
	Philip Tager: (212)774-5901	Steven E. Carter: (212)774-5909
	Their home addresses:
	500 East 77th Street, #1019 New York, New York 10162-0004 (212)744-8016	121 West 19th Street Condo 5D New York NY 10011-4134

They bought us on May 3, 2007, for about $6.5 million. Washington Mutual holds the mortgage.

Less than two years ago, on July 28, 2005, our previous slumlords bought us for $2.25 million.
That's a profit of close to 100% per annum, precisely matching our home's rate of depreciation.