The Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against a Brooklyn landlord and management company for failing to provide tenants with disabilities safe and equal access to their homes.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of multiple tenants with mobility disabilities, alleges that the landlord has allowed critical accessibility infrastructure — including a wheelchair lift and elevators — to remain broken or unreliable for extended periods of time, forcing residents to endure dangerous and humiliating conditions simply to enter and leave their apartments.

The landlord and management company (Park Monroe II Rehab Housing Development Fund Corp., Shinda Management Corporation, and Claudette Henry) are well known to tenants’ advocates and have previously appeared on New York City’s “Worst Landlord” list due to longstanding building conditions and tenant complaints.

For over a year, the wheelchair lift servicing the building has been out of operation, leaving residents who use wheelchairs trapped in their homes or dependent on others to physically carry them up and down stairs. The building’s elevators also frequently malfunction, forcing tenants with disabilities and chronic conditions, such as arthritis, to navigate multiple flights of stairs or cross a hazardous rooftop to reach functioning elevators on the opposite side of the building.

The lawsuit details the severe impact these conditions have had on residents and their families, including a child who uses a wheelchair, who has missed school because she could not safely leave the building when the superintendent was unavailable to carry her downstairs.

“These conditions are not only unacceptable — they are discriminatory and dangerous,” said Madeleine Reichman, an attorney in the Civil Law Reform Unit at Legal Aid. “These residents should not have to risk injury, miss school, or depend on being physically carried just to access their homes. Federal, state, and local laws require housing providers to ensure equal access for tenants with disabilities, and we are seeking immediate relief to force this landlord to comply.”

In addition to this federal action, Legal Aid’s Group Advocacy Unit has filed a separate HP action in New York City Housing Court addressing additional longstanding building-wide conditions and maintenance failures impacting tenants at the property, including the loss of cooking gas service.