The Village Voice Revives ‘Worst Landlords’ Feature

The 10 Worst Landlords, started by longtime Village Voice senior editor Jack Newfield in the ’60s, has been reborn, and will appear as a 13,000 word feature, written by student reporters from Newfield’s alma mater Hunter College, in a special edition of the Voice on July 5th.

‘The 10 Worst Landlords’ became a regular feature gracing the pages of the Village Voice through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and appeared in the NY Post after Newfield moved over there.

Now the 10 Worst Landlords has been reborn, researched and written by a group of dedicated graduate journalism students from Newfield’s alma mater, Hunter College. Wayne Barrett, who this winter was the first Jack Newfield Visiting Professor of Journalism at Hunter, supervised the project.

The Voice will devote an entire issue to the 10 worst landlords July 5th, when it runs 13,000 words researched and written by a group of graduate students devoted to using investigative journalism to open a window into the dark side of NY real estate.

“Newfield’s words from the ’80s still ring true. ‘Not all landlords are heartless, not every tenant is victimized,’ he wrote, and not every victimized tenant has a heartless landlord. But the 10 Worst Landlords purpose remains, as Newfield put it, ‘to show what has been done by 10 moral offenders by analyzing code violations and court proceedings, and through interviews with tenants, organizers, and housing officials,’ ” Barrett writes. The Hunter students, working with the city’s DHP and the City Council, identified 10 property owners who, perhaps through greed, venality, indifference, or just plain incompetence — wreak havoc on their tenants and the city.