City sues Greens over smoke alarms at another James Street property
Greens #Greens
Syracuse, N.Y. — City lawyers on Tuesday filed another lawsuit against a prominent Syracuse family’s local real estate empire.
City lawyers accuse owners Green National — owned by local football legend Tim Green and his son, Troy — of failing to ensure smoke detectors worked at a 62-apartment complex on the 600 block of James Street, called the James.
The city has been taking Green National to task in light of horrors exposed at the Skyline complex, a 365-unit apartment building a couple blocks east of the James. Tenants have long complained about unsafe and unclean conditions at the Skyline. On March 17, a 93-year-old woman was found brutally murdered on the Skyline’s 12th floor.
Since then, the tenants at other Green National properties in and around Syracuse have chimed in on conditions in their own complexes. Tenants at the Vincent on Jamesville Avenue, for example, were unable to get their mail for several months due to damage at a makeshift mailroom.
Tenants previously told syracuse.com that security at the James is lax, with non-tenants able to pop open a back door and use common areas to sleep or use drugs in. Intruders slept in the laundry room and defecated in the washing machines, for example, and one woman said she regularly woke up to crime and strangers sleeping outside her door.
On March 12, a city code inspector found that the company did not have on file a certification showing they’d conducted a recent test of the smoke alarms.
The test would have been 62 days overdue as of March 12, and was 150 days overdue by the time the city filed the lawsuit, the lawsuit states.
“The tenants of this seven story high rise apartment building with 62 apartments rely on (Green National) to provide the safe environment advertised,” lawyers wrote. “…But instead (Green National) is putting tenant lives at risk by egregiously failing to meet its legal obligation to test and certify that the fire protection system is in working order.”
The lawsuit seeks an order that the owners inspect the fire alarm system and be fined $100 per day for every day it did not have a current inspection, back-dated to April 15.
It’s the latest lawsuit against Green National by the city and other parties. The city had previously sued the company to force fixes to chronically out-of-work elevators in the Skyline, and the city recently sued the company over a roach infestation at the Vincent.
Legal Services of Central New York has also filed a class-action lawsuit against the company on behalf of Skyline tenants.
Contact reporter Patrick Lohmann at PLohmann@Syracuse.com or (315)766-6670.