"A house jammed with students, a life of promise lost; It was a quirky, old place, but it was home to Binland Lee and her 13 housemates. It was also blatantly illegal, from basement bedrooms without permits to the unit with only one way out — where Binland happily lived and where she died when fire struck last spring.
This story was reported by Globe Spotlight team reporters Jenn Abelson, Jonathan Saltzman, Casey Ross and Todd Wallack, and editor Thomas Farragher. It was written by Abelson.
April 28, 2013: 1:30 a.m.
It had been a long night.
As Binland Lee trudged up the rear staircase of 87 Linden St. early Sunday morning, the Boston University senior found a small gathering of housemates and friends sprawled across the living room sipping gin and tonics and mojitos and listening to music on a laptop.
The 22-year-old was exhausted after walking from a party near MIT where a friend had just confessed romantic feelings for her.
A little tipsy, Binland broke into a wide grin when she spotted Devi Gopal, an old classmate from Brooklyn Technical High School, sitting in her Allston apartment. They hung out for five minutes before Binland called it a night. Her freshly cut, glossy black hair swung across her back as she walked up stairs still adorned in twinkling Christmas lights.
Binland headed to her attic sanctuary, her perfect undergraduate space. The marine science major had hung a beach ball-colored hammock inspired by a school trip to Belize next to a giant poster of Hawaiian palm trees and ocean waves. Above the dormer window, Binland plastered a large blue and white flag of Finland — an amusing emblem of her trademark introduction.
“Hi, I’m Binland. Like Finland with a B,” she explained to new acquaintances.
She opened the tan curtain draped over her bed like a canopy and sank into the queen size mattress. Several hours later, Binland woke; fire was spreading through the house, climbing rapidly toward the attic....
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Related:
"His house and Binland Lee’s were alike in other ways. Both were illegally overstuffed with undergraduate tenants; neither had been inspected by the city in years. In the aftermath of the back-to-back calamities on Linden Street, city officials promised to intensify their efforts and crack down on violators, to better protect the tens of thousands of students who live off campus. But that’s not what happened....
JWho he?
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And the slumlords the Globe happened to find?
"A devastating mismatch: city vs. scofflaw landlords; Some of the giants in the student rental trade also lead the pack in health and safety code offenses. Their victims are beleaguered, sometimes endangered, tenants — and also a college town's reputation.
This story was reported by Globe Spotlight team reporters Jenn Abelson, Jonathan Saltzman, Casey Ross and Todd Wallack, and editor Thomas Farragher. It was written by Saltzman.
The two city inspectors upbraided the gray-haired man in a lavender button-down shirt as if he were an unruly teenager instead of one of Boston’s biggest landlords.
“Are you serious, Anwar?’’ inspector Iris Figueroa-Jones asked indignantly as she entered a squalid vacant apartment in one of Anwar N. Faisal’s buildings in Fenway last September. “What’s the problem, Anwar?’’
It was move-in weekend, that annual rite of late summer when tens of thousands of college students lug mattresses, flat-screen televisions, and 30-packs of beer into off-campus apartments all across Boston. It’s the U-Haul marathon, those exhausting but giddy days of settling in.
But three Berklee College of Music students weren’t feeling it. The young men had called the city in a panic after finding their new $3,800-a-month apartment near Northeastern University a wreck. Someone had punched gaping holes through doors and ripped them from frames. Kitchen cabinets were broken. Stale beer puddled on wood floors.
“Look at the house that you’re standing in, dude,’’ an exasperated student told Faisal in a confrontation witnessed by the Globe Spotlight Team.
Faisal promised to fix the doors, but those were the least of the problems....
**************
Anwar Faisal is one of the giants of the student apartment rental business in Boston — maybe the biggest of them all. Few, if any, landlords own and rent more units to students; few, if any, have a longer rap sheet of offenses against state sanitary and building codes; and no one better exemplifies the city’s ineffectiveness at policing chronic offenders like him.
He’s gotten rich at this game, his business footprint growing with the rollicking expansion of the city’s student population. He lives in a secluded mansion in Brookline and can get away from it all on a private island off Fairhaven held in his wife’s name. His tenants, meanwhile, enjoy rather different amenities: doors without working locks; heat that doesn’t work; vermin of every vintage.
Yet despite Faisal’s odious record, which includes a federal conviction for mortgage fraud, he remains a powerful player in the rental market and is treated not as a pariah but as a partner by one large school with a shortage of dorms. Northeastern has paid Faisal millions in leases for much of the past decade to house its students in a dozen buildings just steps from the campus. A high-ranking community liaison from the university said he had no idea that other Northeastern students rent shabby, sometimes even unliveable, units directly from Faisal, often in the same buildings as the university-leased apartments.
That's a heck of a welcome.
A 62-year-old Gaza refugee whose best-known company’s headquarters has an awning with the black, white, and green stripes and red triangle of the Palestinian flag, Faisal owns more than 100 residential properties in Greater Boston assessed at about $150 million, a fraction of their market value.
Related:
"If stacks of case files at Boston Housing Court are any guide, the settlement seems unlikely to change the ways of the Sanieoff brothers. Syroos Sanieoff is one of the city’s more incorrigible violators of the state’s sanitary code, and continued to generate complaints after the rapes. The brothers, who emigrated from Iran a generation ago, belong to a sprawling family that owns and leases hundreds of apartments in the college neighborhoods of Allston, Brighton, and Fenway."
Good thing Bo$ton has a vibrant Jewish community.
******************
Most of his properties are near Boston College, Boston University, and Northeastern. The majority of his customers in Boston, real estate agents say, are college students who find their way to his well-worn basement headquarters in Allston, where he operates Alpha Management Corp.
That makes Faisal something of an official greeter to each new wave of young Bostonians seeking their way in the city.
What he greets them with is, all too often, appalling.
The Spotlight Team set out to anatomize Faisal’s business and practices because his history as a landlord sums up what is deeply amiss in the student rental business here. A review of hundreds of city inspectional records and Boston Housing Court complaints, interviews with current and former tenants, and repeated visits to his buildings found an unmistakable pattern: violation after violation, real safety and health threats, and almost no meaningful penalties.
*******************
Inspectional Services had no record of Faisal — or any other Boston landlord — being convicted of a criminal violation of the state’s building and sanitary codes in recent years, and a spokeswoman for the judiciary said the courts have no way to track that.
Those codes, the state’s highest court has ruled, are intended to protect the public, not to punish offenders.
Not what I heard.
As a result, prosecutions of Faisal and other chronic violators follow a familiar, kid-glove routine. The city takes the landlord to court. Weeks or months go by. The landlord finally makes the needed repairs. Case closed — until the next violation.
“We want to get the problems fixed, and putting somebody in jail doesn’t always accomplish those things,’’ said Inspectional Services Commissioner Bryan Glascock. “We try to be remedial rather than punitive.’’
???????
Slumlords are right up their with too-big-to-jail banks!
The attorney general resolved many of the complaints it received about Faisal through mediation and filed no legal actions, according to a spokeswoman.
The penalties for Faisal’s mistreatment of tenants have, as a result, amounted to little more than administrative pinpricks. The stiffest fine the Globe found over the past decade was $335, which, the city said, went on his tax bill after he failed to pay a ticket in 2013 for an overloaded dumpster, loose trash, and graffiti on a building.
Tenants have sued Faisal repeatedly, but the occasional judgment ordering him to pay several thousand dollars in damages appears to have had little deterrent value.
There is no increasing scale of penalties for the third or the seventh or the hundredth offense. There is no tipping point in the system where Faisal’s right to operate as a landlord is called to question.
“This is America,’’ Glascock said. “Life, liberty, and property, I guess sort of in that order, are very well protected.’’
Only elite property and wealth is now protected.
And so Faisal carries on, virtually unimpeded....
No landlord is better known to city inspectors, and no one’s repeat offenses are more frustrating to them.
Faisal declined to be interviewed, despite repeated attempts by the Globe.
I would not want to talk to them, either.
A woman who identified herself as his assistant explained that Faisal has been wounded by reporters who “usually only use the negative and not the positive.’’
They do have an agenda to push, yeah.
Faisal did give an interview to a Boston Magazine writer last fall, for a substantial piece on his business practices. In the article, which tagged him the “Lord of the Sties,” Faisal rated himself an 8 or 9 on a scale of 10, for his skill as a rental property manager.
One of Faisal’s lawyers, Robert L. Allen Jr., told the Globe Faisal is a man of good works who provides scholarships to needy students abroad and was active in a mosque he helped establish in a former American Legion post he bought in Brighton in 2005 for $1 million.
Has DHS checked him for terrorist ties?
As for the conditions of Faisal’s apartments, Allen pointed a finger at student tenants....
Something about "slovenly squalor."
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Maybe the kids could go condo?
Another slumlord getting lots of attention:
"Becoming white: Donald Sterling’s past offers clues to current outcry" by Farah Stockman | Globe Staff May 06, 2014
There’s something worth
remembering about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was
banned from the NBA for life for his outrageous racist comments:
Sterling, 80, wasn’t born white.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Sterling —
originally named Donald Tokowitz — would not have been considered
exactly white by much of America when he was a child.
I'm shocked to see it finally mentioned, although it is an opinion column.
For the early half of the 20th century, Jews, Italians, and Slavs were widely viewed as different and inferior. The book “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America,”
by anthropologist Karen Brodkin, notes that a celebrated Saturday
Evening Post journalist once warned that admitting more non-Nordic
immigrants, including Jews, would result “in a hybrid race of people as
worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central
America.”
Cue the violin music.
For decades, Congress severely restricted Jewish immigration. Ivy
League colleges limited the number of Jewish students. Jews were
excluded from certain neighborhoods through the same racial covenants
that banned the sale of homes to blacks.
The common bond of poverty and housing discrimination forced Jews,
blacks, Mexicans, and Japanese to crowd together in Boyle Heights, the
poor section of East Los Angeles where Sterling grew up during the 1930s
and ’40s.
“During the Depression, no one had any hope of getting out of Boyle Heights,” said Bruce Phillips, a sociologist whose father grew up there. “On the ‘social distance’ scale,
Jews were in the middle, between people of color and white ethnic
groups. They were either the most acceptable nonwhite ethnic group, or
the least acceptable whites.”
Being on the “cusp of whiteness” caused some Jews to join Hispanics and blacks to fight discrimination.
*************************
But that “almost-white” status led others to focus feverishly on full
acceptance. As they grew more prosperous, nearly all of the Jews in
Boyle Heights moved to white suburbs in places like the San Fernando
Valley, where blacks and Hispanics couldn’t follow. For years, Sterling
couldn’t afford to follow either. After he graduated from Roosevelt High
in 1952, he married a girl from his class and worked at her father’s
furniture store.
Eventually, he became a divorce attorney, one of the few fields
Jewish lawyers could enter, since corporate law firms didn’t hire Jews
at the time. He saved enough money to buy his first apartment building
in 1963. Then he bought more buildings. Today, he’s one of the world’s
richest men.
It’s unclear how much solidarity he feels with the Jewish community
that raised him. He donates the same amount to the Jewish Home for the
Aging as to the United Negro College Fund: a paltry $10,000 a year. His
old high school, now 91 percent Hispanic, gets even less: $5,000. His
name change, from Tokowitz to Sterling, was a way to leave his ethnicity
behind.
This history helps explain, but not excuse, his racist comments. And it explains his bond with V. Stiviano, 31, who also grew up in Boyle Heights and attended Roosevelt High.
She, too, clawed her way out of poverty. She, too, changed her name.
Sterling assumed that she, too, would want to be accepted as white.
She apparently did it by prostituting herself, something of an open secret in the sports world reports.
That’s what the fight on the tape was really about: She was squandering her whiteness....
I've already seen too many tapes of her.
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I'm already sick of the story, but judging by the number of comments Farah will have some apologizing to do. Not being very wyly is she.
Someone who is considered wily:
"Technology is key to NBA’s future, commissioner says" by Callum Borchers | Globe Staff March 12, 2014
In his first week as commissioner of the National Basketball Association, Adam Silver made a West Coast trip to tour the site of a proposed arena for the Sacramento Kings — exactly the sort of thing a man in his position is expected to do. His next stop wasn’t Los Angeles, to visit the Lakers or Clippers, however; it was Silicon Valley, to pick the brains of technology executives who might be able to help the league innovate.
As the NBA seeks to grow its popularity worldwide, technology will be the key, Silver said Tuesday in an address to the Boston College Chief Executives’ Club of Boston at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Only a small percentage of NBA fans will ever attend a live game, he noted. Even fewer have a chance to sit court side.
The games are a province of the elite?
“One of my goals as commissioner is to use innovation and technology to capture that courtside experience,” Silver said.
The league’s plan to accomplish that aim includes increasing access to high-definition game video on mobile devices, where Silver predicted a majority of fans will watch in the future. He added that game broadcasts will feature more audio, as well, enabling viewers to hear what players and coaches are saying on the floor.
Beefing up the league’s social media presence is another strategy, Silver said, with the idea that such networks as Twitter can offer fans “the equivalent of cheering, yelling, and booing, just as if you were in the arena.”
On his trip to California after taking office last month, Silver met with Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to brainstorm social media initiatives to boost the sport’s popularity. He did not share specific proposals but said after his speech that there were intangible benefits to his visits.
“It’s amazing just to feel the energy,” Silver said. “Being in the halls of those companies, you could feel this is an incredibly smart group of largely young people who have a view that they’re changing the world. And we want to be part of that.”
Within league walls, he said, big data analytics are beginning to help clubs quantify aspects of the game that are conventionally considered immeasurable. Blocked shots, for instance, are easy to count, but altered shots — field goal attempts that go off-course because of an opponent’s tight defense — are much harder to tally.
Beginning this season, every NBA arena is outfitted with six SportVU cameras made by STATS, a Chicago-based sports data firm. The cameras are placed in strategic locations and make it possible to see when the trajectory of a shot is altered because of a defender’s good play.
The cameras also enable tracking of “rebound chances” — instances in which a player is within 3.5 feet of a rebound. That extra layer of data allows statisticians to calculate how often a player gets himself in position to collect a missed shot, and how often he succeeds
Rather than keep such detailed information in-house, the NBA has been posting it online to promote crowdsourcing of meaningful statistics.
Among the first to use the data were a trio of Harvard University undergraduates, who analyzed 83,000 shots from last season (when the cameras were in only 15 arenas) to study the “hot hand” — an old sports theory that holds a player who has hit several buckets in a row is more likely than usual to make his next attempt. Statisticians have long been skeptical of the hot hand, arguing that streaks are bound to occur in any large sample but that one shot has no bearing on the next.
Yet the students, who have since graduated, concluded that a hot player’s shooting percentage does, in fact, go up slightly — by 1.2 to 2.4 points.
“Now that we have richer data, maybe there is something to the hot hand, and you do want to get the ball to the guy who’s made four shots in a row,” Silver said. “Part of what is so powerful about big data is you collect it, and then it starts to tell stories. We’re collecting all kinds of new statistical data, and we’re democratizing it. Have fun. See what you can figure out. Maybe you’ll be smarter than our teams.”
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I'll bet he is wishing the social media presence wasn't so prevalent now.
Time for me to put the fire out for tonight and go watch the Spurs game.
