“A hundred percent, yes. He also, like, after we moved out, didn’t give us our security deposit,” said Jula Mai, a German music video director who lives in Bushwick and makes clips for European pop acts like Alice Bisi, who goes by the name Birthh. Mai was talking about Deodat Lowtan, who has a long track record of building violations across his real estate portfolio, which includes over 40 buildings in Bushwick.
Late last Friday, an apartment on the top floor of one of Lowtan’s buildings, right above 242 Gourmet Deli (242 Central Ave.), caught fire.
The fire expanded to the adjacent apartment building at 244 Central Avenue, and drew a crowd of some 141 firefighters and EMS personnel, says FDNY. The fire took about an hour to contain and nobody was hurt, besides two firefighters who suffered “minor non-life-threatening injuries.”
It was the beginning of what the Schneps papers called a slew of weekend blazes throughout Brooklyn. Among those briefly displaced were the owners of nearby Full Spectrum Photo Lab (87 George St.), who briefly threatened photographers with a(nother) possible closure. The FDNY says the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Lowtan, however, is an infamous name in beloved landlord circles, where he is ranked 46 among the city’s “worst landlords,” a list handed out by the office of Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Per that ranking, 21 of his buildings clock a total of 609 open violations of the city’s building code. Back in 2020, “a white tenant who formed [a] tenants union” in another of Lowtan’s buildings in Bushwick told the Schneps papers that Lowtan was “ruthless to tenants of color.”
Friday also wasn’t the first fire that has taken down one of his buildings. A 2021 report in BK Reader from Anna Bradley-Smith documented a rally outside of one of his other buildings in the area, demanding that Lowtan repair 336 Starr St. after a fire left a family homeless. They had lived there for nearly three decades. Another family interviewed by Bradley-Smith had their apartment “damaged by a fire just a few weeks after hers.”
“Lowtan, who owns more than 280 apartments in the city, told BK Reader he was not racist, had never harassed or threatened to displace anyone and was in the process of investigating the fires,” Bradley-Smith reports.
Across his properties in Bushwick, the department of Housing Preservation and Development has consistently cited Lowtan for inadequate fire alarms and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, including as recently as June of this year. Other consistent issues include mold, infestations of roaches and mice, and lead paint. Lowtan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mai, who lived for six years in an apartment on the top floor of Lowtan’s building on 242 Central, before moving out recently, reported to me that she wasn’t surprised to see her former home explode in flames.
“Basically, just the entire apartment was falling apart that entire time,” said Mai. “There were weird electrical issues, like the heaters: some of them were way too hot and there was no way to control them. And some of them didn’t work at all. And there was also a period where the stove wouldn’t turn off all the way, and we could smell gas sometimes.”
Unrelatedly, she also complained that “the mailbox didn’t work” and “there was so much water buildup, and it would leak so often.”
Nevertheless, the Bushwick apartment had its appeal.
“It was really cheap. I mean, that was like the main thing,” Mai told me. “There were four of us there and I want to say it was $3,500.”
These days, Mai says, she lives a little closer to downtown Bushwick, near Market Hotel (1140 Myrtle Ave.).
“I got more money and I decided to move into a place that was a bit more above board.”
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