Dennis Block seemed glued to his black leather chair, his coffee untouched, apparently impervious to physical needs such as the bathroom or food, taking one landlord's phone call after another.
Almost all the callers wanted the same thing: to evict their tenants.
In a DVD he gives to landlords, Block describes himself this way: "A man who has evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet Earth."
He has never been busier.
Zooming property values have sent rents skyrocketing more than 25% in four years citywide and even higher in rapidly gentrifying areas. But hundreds of thousands of tenants are protected by rent-stabilization laws, which limit rent increases to 4% a year. When the tenant moves, market rates can take effect -- but tenants can be evicted only with good cause.
That's where Block comes in. He has dedicated his considerable creativity and intelligence to helping landlords evict tenants from rent-stabilized buildings. He boasts that his firm has filed more than 130,000 cases since 1980, a year after rent stabilization went into effect. He helps landlords identify minor violations -- a pet fish in an aquarium, a brightly painted bathroom, an extra occupant -- to toss out long-term tenants who are paying below market for their homes.
Tenant advocates tend to turn red with rage at the mention of Block's name. They say that in a city with a shortage of affordable housing, Block's efforts leave people with nowhere to go and in danger of becoming homeless. Worse, his example is followed by many other lawyers and landlords. "He puts people on the street totally turns communities upside down.... I think it's contemptible," said Brett Terrell, the director of advocacy for the Inner City Law Center, a nonprofit that works with tenants being evicted.
Block, 55, greets such criticism with indignation.
"I think my position is righteous," he said. "The average landlord is not a rich individual.... Under rent control, unlike any other business on planet Earth, a landlord is being ordered to support other individuals totally at his own costs. This is not fair."
Evicting rent-stabilized tenants, he says, is his "patriotic duty."
Even his critics agree that no one does it better than Block. A legal aid lawyer once joked that if a building had rats, Block could find a way to evict the tenants on the grounds that the vermin were pets.
