In May 2025, Lydia Rhea, a 26-year-old freelance musician and Juilliard graduate, thought she and her two roommates had found their dream apartment.
After years of living in cramped student quarters, the group found a newly constructed duplex penthouse at 463 West 125th Street in Harlem.
For three working musicians who needed space to rehearse, the unit seemed ideal. It boasted a spacious multi-level layout, large windows, two bathrooms, and in-unit laundry. Rhea even scored a second-floor bedroom featuring an ensuite bathroom and a private terrace.
They signed a 13-month lease offering a one-month free concession, paying a net rent of $5,485 per month. As the very first tenants to occupy the newly built unit, Rhea expected a pristine, modern, hassle-free living experience.
However, what was marketed as a modern luxury space quickly escalated into a year-long ordeal marked by apparent construction defects, toxic mold infestation, delayed mail delivery, and unresponsive building management, Rhea tells Realtor.com®.
“I feel a little bit stupid looking back on it,” Rhea says. “It looked clean, and it had really good access to trains…it looked to be like it was going to be a really good space.”
Public records show the building is owned by an LLC affiliated with ReGlobe founder Tomer Chen, a real estate developer who signed mortgage documents on behalf of the entity. The building was managed by Malek Management, according to emails from the company shared by Rhea.
A person who answered the phone at Malek Management claimed that the company no longer handles the building. Chen did not respond to multiple phone messages.
Mold is a persistent issue for some New York renters. In Fiscal Year 2025, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) received 38,278 mold complaints, according to HPD’s indoor allergen report. That’s a drop of about 8.5% from the prior year’s total of 41,835 mold complaints.
In 2024, Harlem was the moldiest New York City neighborhood, with 397 complaints, according to a report done by RentHop.
The red flags begin
Rhea says the red flags started almost immediately upon moving in, and the problems quickly worsened. At first, the issues seemed minor: a bad paint job, leaky faucets, broken doorknobs, and a brand-new, in-unit dishwasher that failed to run from day one.
Fixing the dishwasher alone took four grueling months of bouncing the job back and forth between an electrician and a plumber.
“It kept going back and forth of the electrician saying it needed to be the plumber, the plumber saying it needed to be the electrician,” Rhea explained. “And then all coming back to the super who’s like, ‘I don’t do this kind of work, and I don’t want to get electrocuted.’”
In August, Malek Management eventually replaced the broken dishwasher with a working one from an unoccupied apartment. But that ordeal was nothing compared to the missing mail debacle.
Ready for something new?
Who’s got mail?
After a few weeks in their new home, Rhea and her roommates realized that they hadn’t received a single piece of mail. As freelance musicians, the roommates were waiting on close to $10,000 in paper checks from gigs.
Rhea began knocking on her neighbor’s doors, only to discover that no one else was getting mail either.
Concerned, Rhea marched down to the local post office, where a clerk confirmed that they were holding the building’s mail. However, staff refused to release it over the counter, insisting a mail carrier was legally required to deliver it on-site.
After returning to the post office almost daily, the roommates finally found a carrier, who revealed that mail delivery had been completely halted because management installed the building’s mailboxes too high, violating federal postal regulations.
“The whole building wasn’t getting mail, but our management had not told us, ‘Hey, if you want to get your mail, you need to go to the post office between 9 and 10 a.m. Ask for this specific person. We’re working on fixing it,” Rhea said.
The situation descended further into absurdity when Rhea went back to collect her household’s mail—and the postal worker accidentally handed her the entire building’s mail.
“So we’ve gone from them being like, no, we can’t have the wrong postal worker hand you your mail for your unit, to being like, sure, let me just hand a random civilian everybody’s mail,” Rhea said.
Even after management lowered the mailboxes to comply with federal code, they failed to install proper master locks, leaving every tenant’s mail accessible to anyone with a mail key.
“We had it on security footage, and our management did nothing. The post office did nothing. I think it’s still like that to this day, to my knowledge,” Rhea said.
Rhea soon discovered that she wasn’t the only person having a hard time in her once ideal apartment.
“When we moved in, we were optimistic because we were sold this vision of it’s a brand new build,” a tenant who lived in the building said. “At the beginning, though, some of the signs started pointing towards this is not the best.”
After suffering from mailbox, security, and other amenity issues, it became clear that Rhea wasn’t the odd one out; this was a building-wide problem.
A persistent leak
In February 2026, following a series of severe blizzards, a persistent leak developed in the ceiling vent in Rhea’s bathroom. Initially, it leaked only during heavy storms. But soon afterwards, it started to drip every time she turned on the vent.
Management offered only temporary fixes, forcing Rhea to keep a towel permanently laid out on her bathroom floor.
But on April 8, the situation escalated from simply annoying to toxic. While pulling a laundry basket out of her closet, Rhea found her wall was completely covered in mold.
She reported the hazard immediately, but with a pre-planned two-week trip to London scheduled, she had no choice but to depart. The mold was so pervasive that she had to wash her packed clothing four times just to remove the stench.
From London, Rhea called management daily. Yet, management refused to address the mold until the ceiling leak was fixed—a repair that finally took place on April 27. But by then, mold had spread into other rooms, forcing Rhea’s roommates to throw out ruined furniture.
Other tenants experienced similar structural decay. One tenant reported leaks in their unit–despite not being located on the top floor. Eventually, the issue escalated into a safety hazard.
“We ended up discovering some mold, which ended up spreading,” the tenant said. “At first, they had a mold company come in, cut it out of the wall, and say, okay, well we cleared it…just because this mold on the surface here [is gone] doesn’t mean that there’s not the conditions that led to its formation in the first place.”
A shooting in front of the building
As Rhea and other neighbors’ apartments continued to rot away inside, the world outside became increasingly unsafe.
When Malek Management leased the building’s ground-floor retail space to a smoke shop, residents submitted repeated complaints about heavy loitering and harassment outside the front door.
“My wife was getting verbally harassed, especially late at night, and we were told ‘be patient, be patient,’ and it wasn’t fully addressed,” a tenant who lived in the building said. “Meanwhile, the mold issues were still not addressed.”
The situation escalated violently on April 24 at 6:30 p.m., when a drug-related shooting erupted directly outside the smoke shop. The resulting police shootout with multiple gunmen left neighboring storefront windows covered in bullet holes and police stationed outside the entry 24/7.
Residents say the building now felt like an unsafe, toxic prison.
”The frustrating part about the shooting…was more to do with the fact that they were not addressing that it happened and not addressing or acknowledging that tenants would like them to be taking measures to be made safe moving forward,” Rhea said.
With their lease ending in May, the roommates tried to negotiate. They asked to renew at their original rate with the one-month concession. Management immediately denied their request and would be adding a massive pay increase of $715 a month to their rent.
“We were in a bind because we were like, if they’re not fixing this problem, we don’t really feel like we can resign, but moving in New York City is really expensive,” Rhea explained.
Mold issue persists
Three weeks after initially reporting the mold, Rhea says she still had no answers. Though NYC housing guidelines dictate that documented mold must be corrected within a certain timeline depending on the square footage, she says the issue went unaddressed.
On May 4, Lydia finally filed a formal complaint with HPD. On May 7, she and her roommates notified management that they would be withholding their May rent.
The next morning at 7:30 a.m., Rhea received a frantic call from her super pleading with them not to leave and promising the mold would be resolved.
When contractors finally arrived on May 11, they cut into the closet drywall and made a shocking discovery: the wall, directly attached to her shower wall, contained zero waterproofing.
Water from the shower had been seeping directly through wet tiles into the bare drywall for a year, a direct violation of Building Code 2509.2, which mandates moisture-resistant backing for wet tiling.
Contractors also discovered a complete lack of waterproofing beneath the bathroom tiles, explaining why mold constantly grew under the bathroom floor tiles and why Rhea had to scrub her shower every three days.
“I was honestly not surprised,” Rhea said. “Clearly something was going on if the fact that this unit is a year old and there’s this many problems going on already. I think it just confirmed in my mind what we were starting to discover that it was just really cheaply built.”
The contractors revealed that the only real fix was to completely gut and rip out both bathrooms. They patched the closet, but within three days, the sickening smell of mold returned.
On May 18, the roommates submitted formal notice that they would vacate the unit on May 31.
The security deposit battle
Moving out brought one final clash. On June 1, the day after vacating, Rhea received text messages from her super alleging the tenants had damaged the apartment. As proof, he sent photos of the unaddressed mold and bad paint job.
“I was really exasperated when I got [the messages],” Rhea said. “We’re telling him that these issues have not been resolved, and then he’s doing a walkthrough and he’s sending me photos of mold.”
The next day, a phone call between Rhea, her property manager, and a roommate’s parent descended into a shouting match. Management claimed they would withhold the entire $6,200 security deposit to cover “damages” and the unpaid May rent.
In response, Rhea compiled a Google Drive containing emails, photos, and text messages that she believed would prove the landlord’s neglect and sent it over.
After a follow-up email more than a month later, Rhea and her roommates finally received a response that their security deposit would be returned on July 7.
“It just really opened my eyes in terms of, unfortunately, how corrupt New York City landlords can be,” Rhea said. “I think they expect you to not go to lengths to hold them responsible for things.”
The HPD case
While Rhea recovered her deposit, the musician’s attempt to hold the building owners and management officially accountable fell flat.
Prior to the contractor’s discovery of the missing insulation, an HPD inspector had visited the unit, verbally confirming the mold as a major violation.
Yet, the HPD case was closed without any follow-up and a message that said: “HPD conducted an inspection of this complaint. The conditions observed by the inspector did not violate the housing laws enforced by HPD. The complaint has been closed.”
Rhea, who had been expecting to go to small claims court to refund the security deposit, tried to reopen the case. Her calls to HPD escalated through various bureaucratic channels until an operator suggested mailing physical photos to the HPD Chief, then gave her a phone contact to report the inspector.
However, she says she was instead given the number for the Department of Homeland Security.
Exhausted, Rhea filed formal complaints to the Mamdani Administration and her NYC Council Member.
“I’m frustrated that there’s nothing really holding people accountable,” Rhea said. “I’m frustrated with how HPD handled it because online it’s showing as just a closed complaint and not a violation.”
Moving on
Since she moved out, Rhea’s old apartment has already been rented out to other tenants for $6495 per month, according to StreetEasy. She fears they may face similar issues.
“There wasn’t time to fully address the building-wide issues,” the tenant said. “Maybe they finally fixed the rooftop leaking, but I have no idea what’s going on behind the wall.”
Rhea has since secured a new apartment on the Upper West Side after spending the summer subletting in Washington Heights.
“I wanted a pre-war building,” Rhea explained. “I don’t want a new build. I want something with thick walls that has been maintained.”
Despite the nightmare experience, her affection for the city remains intact.
“I still wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the states for a lot of reasons,” Rhea said. “It’s a really amazing city to live in, but when they say that it makes you tough, they’re not lying.”
Manage your rentals like a pro.
