Developer Trying to Evict 79-Year-Old From Rent-Controlled Park Slope Apt.
(DNAINFO) Leslie Albrecht | July 14, 2016 — Ernesto Bonilla and his son have lived in a Fifth St. building since 1967 where the rent is now $86.25.
Developers are trying to kick an elderly man and his disabled son out of the Park Slope building they’ve lived in for nearly 50 years so they can renovate the property, court records show.
Lawyers for high-end housing specialists The Brooklyn Home Co. recently requested a court order to speed up eviction proceedings against Ernesto Bonilla, 79, and his son Ernesto J. Bonilla, 52, who’s known as Junior.
The father and son, along with the younger Bonilla’s girlfriend, live in a three-story 19th century rowhouse on Fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues that the Bonilla family has occupied since the elder Bonilla’s parents bought it in 1967.
The elder Bonilla, who worked as a dish washer at a restaurant and a factory worker in his younger days, now has Parkinson’s disease and dementia and spends much of his time in the building’s sunny third-floor apartment, where he was watching Spanish-language TV news on a recent visit.
“[Eviction] would be a psychological disaster for this gentleman, who has lived in the same place for over 40 years,” said the Bonillas’ attorney, Mayne Miller, referring to the elder Bonilla. “[Evictions] happen all the time but this is a particularly notable example because the father is old and ill and the son is disabled.”
The younger Bonilla was a toddler when his family moved from 15th Street to the Fifth Street brick and brownstone building. He and his parents and grandparents lived there with other relatives and rented out one of the floors to tenants.
In 2015, unbeknownst to the father and son, an aunt who had lived in the Fifth Street house with them sold the building for $1.525 million to an LLC linked to Brooklyn Home Co. The Bonillas received no money from the sale, and the aunt left the state shortly afterward.