Our Methods

Our methodology for making Worst Evictors combined data analysis from publicly available data with on-the-ground knowledge.

Worst Evictors List Methodology

The evictions data behind the Worst Evictors List represents any residential eviction case (Holdover or Non-Payment) filed at a New York City court between March 23rd, 2020, and September 23rd, 2021. See the "On Eviction Filings data" section below for more information on this source. We found it important to use a variety of tools and strategies when generating this list as an effort to make the most comprehensive survey of who is trying to evict New Yorkers, as well as to provide a list that would help and encourage New Yorkers to organize.

Generating the initial list

  • Using HPD Registration data from October 2021, we generated a list of buildings (grouped by tax lot) associated with each HPD “Head Officer”, "Individual Owner", or "Corporate Owner" contact in the database.

  • Using the networkx Python package, we grouped owner contact names together that shared a common registered business address, which also generated an aggregated list of buildings for each grouping of owner names.

  • Using these lists of buildings for each landlord entity, we counted the number of residential eviction cases in NYC between March 23rd, 2020, and September 23rd, 2021, that occurred in these buildings.

  • We then joined and aggregated several additional datasets to our evictor profiles by matching building records via their borough-block-lot codes:

    • Residential unit counts in 2020

    • Rent stabilized unit count estimates in 2020 (most recent publicly available data on rent stabilized units, via nycdb)

    • Total executed Marshal Evictions since 2017

    • Housing subsidy programs in 2020 and 2021

    • See below for notes on lender, law firm and estimated portfolio value data aggregations.

Curating and filtering the list

  • Narrative information about the landlords came from press as well as from organizing groups and tenants who live and organize in buildings owned by the Worst Evictors.

  • Management companies with financial stake in some of the buildings within their management portfolio were separated from the primary Worst Evictors list but included as "Dishonorable Mentions"

  • Portfolios that are majority condo/co-op apartments, such as the Parkchester Apartments in the Bronx, were omitted from the Worst Evictors list.

  • Other notes on curation:

    • LeFrak originally showed up in our data analysis as two separate portfolios, one for LeFrak City development (centered around the 97-20 57TH AVENUE business address) and one for LeFrak's citywide portfolio (centered around the 59-17 JUNCTION BOULEVARD business address). Further research revealed that both sets of properties belong to the larger LeFrak organization.

    • As a precaution, we removed the property at 1590 Madison Ave from Alan Sullivan's original portfolio as the registered business address in this building's HPD contact list differed from the standard Elmont, NY address for the DeMatteis Organization.

    • Michael Goldberg is listed once in HPD registration data with the same business address of Leon Lovinger, but after further investigation, we were not able to establish a clear business connection between the two individuals. Therefore, we restricted the Memadet Realty Corporation portfolio to include just buildings listing Michael Goldberg as the owner.

Data sources

With the exception of building-level eviction filings data, all of the data behind the Worst Evictors project is publicly accessible via these links:

On Eviction Filings data

The eviction filings data behind this project comes from the Office of Court Administration via the Housing Data Coalition. It was obtained and made available through the collaborative efforts of the Housing Data Coalition, the Right to Counsel Coalition, BetaNYC, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the University Neighborhood Housing Program, and JustFix.

The Office of Court Administration (OCA) granted JustFix specific access to the building-level eviction filings data for the purpose of generating the Worst Evictors project. According to a data security agreement, this project is only authorized to publish and share eviction filings data at the landlord portfolio level.

Any member of the public can access OCA's eviction filings data, with building-level identification omitted, via the Housing Data Coalition on GitHub.

On lender data methodology (i.e. "Funded by" and "Public funding sources"):

To approximate lenders that have originated loans to the landlord in question, we first pulled the "Party_1" name on the most recent Mortgage or Agreement document in the ACRIS data for all buildings within each evictor's portfolio. We then pulled "Party_2" for all Mortgage and Agreement documents in the ACRIS data where the "Party_1" named matched that of the most recent Mortgage / Agreement document. Finally, we searched through these financing documents for party names that we consider sources of public funding (HPD and HDC, among others), and semi-public funding (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae).

Note that the analysis of top funders draws from the entire ACRIS database of financial documents, while the analysis of public funding sources only draws from documents filed in 2008 or later. Some of the worst evictors' top funders are also sources of public funding for them, so certain entities may show up in both sections of the list.

Because of concurrent analysis linking each building's BBL code to a landlord on the Worst Evictors List, we can be confident that the most recent "Party_1" (borrower) for each BBL is connected to the landlord in question. From there, we can query the ACRIS data for all lenders who have originated debt to the most recent "Party_1" name.

In many cases, there is a long list of lenders for each landlord, but we only list the four most common lender names we found.

On methodology for adding the law firms and lawyers (i.e. "Represented by"):

For each evictor, we used the curated list of associated properties generated through our methodology to search the New York State Unified Court System database of cases. From there, we pulled out the lawyers listed.

On data describing the total price paid for buildings:

In order to gather estimates of how much each evictor "paid for buildings" they own, we used ACRIS lender data to find the most recent deed transfer for each building in the landlord's associated portfolio. Deeds that had a recorded amount of one dollar or less were excluded. We also deduplicated any unique deeds that showed up more than once within the portfolio (indicating multiple buildings being sold as part of a group sale). The number listed on each evictor profile represents the sum of all available deed amounts for buildings in their portfolio. Note that the actual "net worth" of each evictor is likely much higher than these amounts shown, as these quantities simply estimate the total cost of each building at the time the landlord purchased them.

For some evictors on the list, many of the buildings that they own do not have any recent deed amount on file (which often occurs for buildings purchased before 2003, when ACRIS did not record deed amounts). The amounts listed for the following evictors should be seen as exceptionally deep underestimates of the true amount paid to buy their buildings (as in, 50% or more of their buildings did not have a most recent sale amount we could use):

  • RICHARD LEFRAK, JOSEPH ROONEY, AMONG OTHERS (LeFrak)

  • LABE TWERSKI (Residential)

  • ILSOO KIM, ROBERT CORSO (Progressive)

  • ADAM WEINSTEIN (Phipps Houses)

  • DEMETRIOS MORAGIANIS (Proto Property Services LLC)

  • MARK STAGG (Stagg Group)

  • LARRY GLUCK (Stellar)

  • JOSEPH POPACK (Dira Realty)

Additionally, none of the 5 buildings within the ALAN SULLIVAN (The DeMatteis Organization, Ry Management) portfolio had recent deed amounts on file, so the amount paid for buildings in this portfolio is left as "unknown."

Want to look at our code?

All of the code that generated the worst evictors list is publicly available via the following links:

  • To see how we filtered our eviction filings data from the Office of Court Administration, you can take a look at our SQL code, as well as access OCA's eviction filings data via the Housing Data Coalition on GitHub. Note: members must be part of a security agreement with the Office of Court Administration in order to access the "bbl" value for each eviction case as shown in the SQL code provided above.

  • To see how we grouped landlord portfolios together using public landlord registration data from HPD, you can visit our open source code within the Who Owns What Github repository. Specifically, the code within the "portfoliograph" subdirectory as well as our "search function" contain the logic we used in grouping landlord portfolios for this list.

  • To see how we constructed a ranking of Worst Evictors from our generated landlord portfolio groupings, you can take a look at our SQL code.

Worst Evictors Map Methodology

The landlord portfolio data on the Worst Evictors map is a building-by-building representation of the full portfolios of each of the top 20 worst evictors, along with their portfolio-wide count of households sued for eviction. Both the evictions data and the portfolio groupings match up exactly with what's shown on the Worst Evictors List, described above.

Data sources

With the exception of building-level eviction filings data, all of the data behind the Evictions Map is publicly accessible via these links:

Please consider this a detailed, though not exhaustive, description of the methodology. For more details about methodology or for general inquiries, contact info@righttocounselnyc.org.