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ALBANY – Charles Singleton remembers the sound his hot water heater made when it ruptured in his bathroom ceiling in May 2020. It sounded like a bomb.

The ensuing flood of water wrecked a collection of memorabilia stored in a nearby closet and soaked his clothes. It left him with a gaping hole in his bathroom ceiling and without the use of one bedroom for months.

"I came around the corner and saw the bathroom light was arcing," he said. "Then I realized I was standing in water and I turned around and ran to the living room and jumped on the couch."

For more than two years Singleton has waged a battle with his landlord, Asaf Elkayam, over the damage, the resulting mold and halting pace of repairs to his apartment inside the Schuyler Apartments building on Trinity Place. Over a year ago he became so frustrated that he stopped paying rent.

“The closet was literally falling apart,” he said. “It was so bad codes didn’t want to be in the closet to take pictures.”

Singleton isn’t alone. Other tenants inside the 61-unit building said they have withheld rent from Elkayam over their frustrations with issues in their apartments, ranging from small water spots on their ceiling tiles to years without functioning heat -- and they're upset about recent rent increases, too. The state Attorney General's office has opened an investigation into the property in response to tenant complaints and the tenants are working with United Tenants of Albany to organize a tenant union.

The building, which used to be one of two high schools in the city, was built in the early 1900s and then renovated decades ago into housing. At one time it was marketed as possible upscale condominiums but they failed to sell. Tenants who have lived there for years describe it as a safe and affordable building with nicer apartments than others in the city’s South End.

Elkayam is one of the city’s larger landlords and mostly rents to college students. A 1998 graduate of then-SUNY Albany, Elkayam jumped into the city’s real estate market shortly after graduation. He looked around and realized that for less than $20,000 he could get a mortgage on a rental property, he told the Collecting Real Estate podcast in October 2021.

“The return on investment was good but most importantly the barrier to entry, the capital investment, was minimal,” he said. “People think being a landlord is a very sexy business … at the end of the day we’re up at 6 o’clock in the morning ‘til 9 or 10 at night busting our butts trying to do the best we can.”

That initial investment in a house on Hamilton Street has multiplied into at least 87 properties, according to a list compiled by United Tenants, including dozens of student rentals in the Pine Hills neighborhood. On the podcast, which is hosted by two other Capital Region landlords, Elkayam estimated that between the views from the front and back door of his office he could see more than 30 of his properties.

The Schuyler Apartments building is one of the larger properties in his real estate portfolio. Unlike the student housing he owns, some tenants have lived there for more than two decades.

Elkayam purchased the building in 2016. Under the previous owners, the Beltrone Group, tenants had access to trash chutes in their hallways, free off-street parking and other amenities for rents under $1,000 a month. Over the past few years, those amenities were stripped away or they were asked to pay more for them.

In an interview, Elkayam defended his management of the site, arguing he has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the building and that he and his employees try to be responsive as they could to tenant complaints.

“I take great pride in my work,” he said.

The recent rent hikes were an effort to get closer to market value for the apartments, he said. Tenants were paying around $900 for 1,200-square-foot apartments. The rents are now closer to $1,200 a month and Elkayam believes the market rate is closer to $1,500.

He dismissed many of the tenant complaints, saying he or his staff try to respond to their issues only to be stonewalled by tenants who wouldn’t let him or his employees inside their apartments to make repairs.

"At this point it's harassment," he said. "It's about 5 percent who are ruining it for everyone else."

Elkayam said, in general, he doesn’t want to evict tenants. It’s an expensive and time-consuming process. He estimated he loses up to $5,000 for a single apartment in the time it takes to evict a tenant and move a new one in.

However, he has filed eviction papers against at least four tenants in Schuyler Apartments, citing the thousands of dollars in back rent he's owed, he said. Elkayam has also applied to several programs meant to help landlords with back rent, including the state's Landlord Rental Assistance Program and the federal Paycheck Protection Program. He is also looking to sell the building, which has been on the market for several months.

Rick LaJoy, the director of the Department of Buildings and Regulatory Compliance, said he is aware of some issues at the Schuyler Apartments but from what he knows, most are relatively minor code violations. He acknowledged that some tenants’ windows don’t fully open or stay open and that the city had conversations with Elkayam about replacing all those windows.

“They’re mammoth, mammoth windows,” LaJoy said.

In some cases, the city has not been made aware of the problems, he said. Several tenants had scheduled inspections, only to cancel them, or never called to make the city aware of the issues with their apartments to begin with. City inspectors are unable to address issues unless they are made aware of them and can document the problems themselves, he added.

Two tenants said they had been dealing with COVID-19 and other health issues when city inspectors tried to come into their apartments.

LaJoy said inspectors regularly find issues with Elkayam’s properties but, in part, that is because he has so many rentals, he said. Typically, Elkayam moves quickly to fix those citations, LaJoy said. However, he did note that the city does have two court cases pending against Elkayam for failing to fix issues at the Schuyler Apartments, including a case involving Second Ward Councilman Derek Johnson for failure to fix the windows in Johnson's apartment.

Tenants say code issues in the building go beyond minor violations and expressed frustration that the codes department hasn't been more aggressive in pushing Elkayam to make repairs.

Jasmine Whittingham, one of the tenants leading the organizing efforts, said her apartment had deteriorated to the point of being unlivable.

For the past month, she has been without hot water. And during the recent heat wave, her apartment’s air conditioning wouldn’t work, forcing her to stay with friends when her apartment got too hot. Whittingham has been working with the building's management and city codes in her attempts to get the issues fixed.

Elkayam and Whittingham are tied up in an eviction proceeding and Whittingham said she’s looking at pursuing legal action.

She dismissed Elkayam’s suggestion that unhappy tenants should just move.

“If I could afford to move, I would,” she said.

Canyon Ryan, United Tenants' executive director, said that is a common refrain he hears from landlords that ignores how little affordable housing is available in the city.

Ryan said the tenants he's working with will be meeting in the coming week to start a tenant association to try and identify and remedy problems in the building.

Whittingham isn’t the only tenant with HVAC issues. Singleton's air conditioning also recently died and another tenant's HVAC problems go back even further.

Travis Brew said he had been fighting with the building’s management to fix his HVAC unit for years.

He moved into the building eight years ago and in 2018 his HVAC unit stopped blowing cold air. Then the heat began to fail. He had to turn the thermostat all the way up to keep the apartment warm and his National Grid bill jumped to nearly $400 a month. His solution was to heat the apartment up, then bundle up and turn the heat off. In 2020 the heat failed entirely.

“From then on, no heat, no AC, mold dripping down the walls,” he said.

Brew, who has respiratory issues that require him to use an oxygen tank, says he believes the mold is affecting his breathing.

Rather than fix the HVAC, the building's management gave him a space heater for his living room and bedroom, he said. Brew would only leave his bedroom in the winter if he had to because his apartment was so cold. In the meantime, rent kept going up.

But Brew never filed a complaint with the city or United Tenants of Albany. He didn’t want to ruffle feathers and believed the building’s management would follow through on their word to solve the problem, he said. He shared repeated messages he left with building management complaining that his issues were being marked as fixed in their system but nothing was actually being done.

“I just got to the point where I'm fed up,” he said. “It’s not like it's been like a week or two. This has been like three or four years.”

After the third rent increase in two years, Brew finally had enough and demanded to speak with Elkayam. He said he received a call after he mentioned to the building manager he had been speaking with Councilman Derek Johnson, who has been working with the tenants. Johnson and Elkayam also recently came to a settlement in housing court after Elkayam moved to evict Johnson over a rent dispute.

After Brew spoke to Alkayam, the mold in his apartment was painted over. But he's still without functioning central air, instead relying on a unit he bought himself.

Brew said he's beyond frustrated but doesn’t want to leave. His apartment is near his job, has plenty of space for his electronics and it has elevators, which means he doesn’t have to lug groceries up flights of stairs.

“But there’s plenty of nights where I’m up, looking at apartments.com to see what my options are,” he said.

Steve covers the city and county of Albany for the Times Union. He previously covered police, fire and accidents as the paper's breaking news reporter. Reach him at shughes@timesunion.com or 518-454-5438.