When lightning struck the apartment building at 655 New York Ave. in Brooklyn, it started a blaze that ripped through more than 100 apartments.

More than 200 firefighters arrived on the scene. Three and a half hours later, the fire was under control, but the homes were incinerated. 

That was in 2012. To this day, the building's residents haven't been able to return. 

The building is one of nearly 9,000 in New York City that have been placed under an order to vacate since 2012 — an emergency protection that today is being slapped on a record number of buildings, according to a Bisnow analysis of city data.

“It's all tremendously frustrating,” Legal Aid Society supervising attorney Edward Josephson said. “And there are a lot of these buildings, certainly more than we can handle.”

As of early August, more than 600 buildings spanning approximately 2,000 units have been subject to either a partial or full vacate order this year, meaning the city deemed the property unsafe. The total has already exceeded the annual average of 587 and is on pace to become the most recorded by far since the dataset began in 2012.

Most of the orders, roughly 400, were due to fire damage, while nearly 160 were for illegal occupancy and 54 were over habitability issues.

Of the 8,813 orders to vacate issued over the past 14 years, nearly half are still unresolved, according to the data. For those that have been resolved, it took an average of a year and a half to bring the building back to livable conditions.

Vacate orders are intended to protect New Yorkers and put pressure on landlords to restore the buildings. Instead, the properties are frequently abandoned — because landlords either can’t or won’t make repairs — leaving residents scrambling to find alternative housing. 

The issue is most prominent in older housing stock, which is most likely to be rent-stabilized. Those buildings have seen the greatest amount of disinvestment in recent years, and violations and fire risks have increased in turn. Housing industry voices have warned the problems will only increase as a rent freeze is set to take effect in October.

“The problem is that, if nothing else is done, the vacate order just sits there, and the landlords can take their sweet time,” Josephson said. “It's a tremendous waste of resources to have these buildings stay empty year after year.”

Displacement

When an order to vacate is issued, tenants often have very little time, if any, to gather their belongings and leave. 

Within 24 hours, residents may find themselves homeless, forced to seek shelter through the Red Cross, other community organizations or city services. They can file to reduce their rent to $1 a month and protect their rights to return, but even if they do, they are often left wondering when they may be able to go back home. 

The length of time a vacate order is in effect depends on the damage and the landlord's ability to rehabilitate the property. The process may be further complicated by insurance issues, red tape and litigation. 

When a fire devastated a 133-unit Jackson Heights apartment complex on April 14, 2021, tenants began seeking ways to recover documents, jewelry and other personal items, according to court records. In addition to the full-building vacate order, some floors were asbestos-ridden, further limiting access. 

Tenants sued five months after the fire, claiming that they weren't given updates as to when they could recover their possessions or return to their rent-stabilized apartments. They further alleged that landlord Kedex Properties, which couldn’t be reached for comment, failed to make repairs and that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development wasn’t penalizing the firm for the lack of work.

The 2021 lawsuit ended in a settlement nearly two years later that stipulated that the buildings at 89-11 and 89-07 34th Ave. would be ready for occupancy by the end of December 2022 and March 2023, respectively. 

In reality, the order to vacate wasn't lifted until July 19, 2023, according to city records.

Rakhil Tilyayeva, a senior staff attorney for Legal Services NYC, said she has seen repairs be delayed due to work permit requirements and a lack of resources for both agencies and the courts. Because the repairs are complicated, officials may hold off on setting deadlines or penalizing landlords.

As a result, tenants are left in limbo, unsure if they should sign a new lease. Renters can request to transfer and extend rental assistance, such as Section 8, but their eligibility can be at risk if they don't find a new apartment.

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of systemic issues that lead to a lot of unexpected pitfalls for tenants experiencing an already stressful situation,” Tilyayeva said. “Ultimately, I think there just needs to be more transparency with giving tenants a timeline for how long this will take so they can plan their lives accordingly.”

Sometimes, property owners drag their feet intentionally, Legal Aid Director Magda Rosa-Rios said. 

Since the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, landlords have lost essentially all avenues that were previously used to increase rents on regulated apartments, including when a tenant vacates or renovations are completed.

There is, however, an exception for substantial rehabilitation, defined as when a property is in substandard condition and undergoes extensive work, including the replacement of at least 75% of systems buildingwide. In those cases, if a rent-stabilized tenant chooses not to return, the landlord can apply to deregulate the unit and charge market rents — which, as of June, were at an all-time high. 

Arson and harassment are illegal, but that hasn’t stopped some owners from damaging their own properties or prolonging repairs to prevent rent-stabilized tenants from moving back in, Rosa-Rios claimed. 

She said she has seen landlords damage their own facade and remove staircases, causing enough structural damage to result in orders to vacate. At the same time, there has been a general rise in building deterioration and fires, especially among rent-stabilized housing stock. 

On top of that, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has instructed city agencies to increase inspections, which could contribute to the rise in orders to vacate.

“We have one case where the landlord just wants to demolish the building and build something totally new,” Rosa-Rios said. “They don't usually just come out and say it, but this one did.”

Rosa-Rios declined to share the case, citing client sensitivities, but the situation isn’t necessarily rare. Following a fire at 127 Evergreen Ave., an eight-unit, rent-stabilized building, the landlord filed for demolition permits. A group of tenants sued, arguing that the existing structure should be rehabilitated instead.

A judge decided earlier this year that the landlord didn't demonstrate that it would be economically infeasible to repair the building or that it had made good faith efforts for demolition approval, such as by relocating the stabilized tenants. 

But if the landlord can prove that it is unable to repair the building, it “is under no obligation to repair it, and any preexisting rent-stabilized tenancies are extinguished,” Brooklyn Judge Logan Schiff wrote in his May 6 decision.

“Even in cases where the landlord’s negligence contributed to the destruction of the building, while the tenants may have monetary claims, they nonetheless remain unable to seek restoration to any newly constructed building on the site,” Schiff wrote. 

The landlord, who couldn’t be reached for comment, has filed an appeal.

Transformation

Some vacated buildings sit in obvious disrepair. Windows are boarded, trash accumulates and ivy creeps up the walls, inside which families were once raised. 

In other cases, the buildings look just like any other. 

The three-unit building at 426 Chauncey St. in Brooklyn spent years boarded up. On the outside, it would seem like things turned around in 2018. Google Street View images show the building gleaming with a fresh coat of blue paint. New windows and doors replaced the wooden planks that previously protected the interior from the elements. 

But in June 2018, the building was hit with a new order to vacate. It had been illegally divided into four apartments and was missing a fire escape and sprinkler system, the city found. 

The building remained vacant for more than six years. The order was lifted around the time that the property was sold to a new owner, in December 2024. Joseph Aghelian, whose firm purchased the building, didn’t respond to Bisnow’s request for comment. 

A sale spurring repairs following years of vacancy happened in at least two cases that Tilyayeva has worked on. 

“It brings things right back to square one,” Tilyayeva said. “If we're seeing this happen repeatedly, we should have some sort of systemic way to address these issues.”

Earlier this year, the city launched the Back Home Unit, which aims to be a single point of contact for displaced tenants. Among its responsibilities is notifying residents when vacate orders are lifted — something that isn’t always communicated.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the mayor said the administration is exploring additional ways to provide longer-term support.

“We're also looking beyond the immediate response,” the spokesperson said. “Too many New Yorkers lose everything after a fire or other disaster and face an uphill battle to rebuild their lives.”

That has been the case for the residents of 655 New York Ave., who lost their homes 14 years ago.

Last year, MSquared paid $4.8M for the East Flatbush property, freeing prior owner Urban American from the decrepit structure. The former landlord declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. 

In court records, Urban American said it began work to rebuild, including conducting a multimillion-dollar asbestos treatment between October 2019 and January 2021. Certain construction has occurred, but it was delayed by regulations and the pandemic. 

“No doubt, the work has taken longer than all parties involved would have hoped,” an attorney for Urban American wrote in court documents. “But this is a major construction project, with layers of contractors, supply chains, and approvals required, meaning that the course of the project cannot be shoehorned into deadlines set by lawyers and judges.”

A 2024 analysis by CBRE, filed in court, found that the returns on the redevelopment would be “drastically insufficient to warrant an investment.”

MSquared plans to redevelop the existing structure into 134 apartments after securing a tax abatement to keep two-thirds of the building affordable, with 15% of the units set aside for formerly homeless individuals. 

“The building will also welcome back all 18 rent-stabilized tenants who preserved their right to return,” MSquared principal and Chief Operating Officer Carolee Fink said in a statement.