Real Estate Scion is Holdout Against Artists in Soho Drama

The classic Soho loft drama begins in the 1970s with artists moving into buildings that no one else wants.

Then the neighborhood gentrifies, and the artists battle real estate professionals trying to oust them from properties that have become extremely valuable.

That story is playing out at 36 Greene Street, but with an ironic twist: The holdout renter, Alexander Riguardi, isn’t a peer of Patti Smith but a commercial real estate broker who arrived five years ago. The landlords seeking to oust him were the original tenants.

Riguardi is the son of Peter Riguardi, JLL’s New York region chairman and president. His landlords are Antonio Morello and Donato Savoie — the founding architects of Studio MORSA — and artist Theodosius “Ted” Victoria. They purchased the five-story, five-unit building in 1977 from the estate of Westchester landlord Anna Donovan.

City records show they paid $75,000. Today it would sell for about $15 million.

But only if they can get Riguardi out.

Humble beginnings

The three men had scratched together $27,000 in the late 1970s and got a mortgage from the seller for the $48,000 balance. Victoria, the artist, who was less than a decade into what has been a 60-year career, signed for the buyers. Their monthly payment was $379.

Five years later, in 1982, the state passed the Loft Law, allowing owners of Soho lofts to collect rent while converting them to legal residences. The law also locked in low rents for tenants, but let landlords deregulate units if they could buy out the occupants.

Soho at the time was a gritty, even dangerous industrial area. No one anticipated that it would become among the most coveted neighborhoods in the city, or that the Loft Law would spur intense, protracted landlord-tenant disputes and a cottage industry of lawyers.

One reason was that the statute allows tenants to pay little or no rent until the owner gets a certificate of occupancy and gives them tools to stall the process for years. They can challenge renovation plans and submit their own, using delay as leverage to maximize buyouts.

Loft owners, if they can get through these headaches, also have the potential to make a killing. Soaring demand to live in Soho, which has supercharged rents, pushed owners to create as many free-market units as possible.

The three owners of 36 Greene Street avoided this madness, in part because they were their own tenants. Morello and Victoria registered 36 Greene Street in February 1983 with the newly created Loft Board, triggering a timeline for them to get the building up to code and obtain a certificate of occupancy. Savoie amended the filing that September.

After that, things went sideways. One year ran into the next without the owners doing the renovations and paperwork needed to get a residential certificate of occupancy.

In 1996, they had a brush with disaster: The building was pulled into the city’s tax lien sale. It was released a year later, and in 1999, the owners finished paying their $48,000 mortgage.

In 1982 and again in 2000, their ownership entity was dissolved, suggesting disagreements among the three partners. Each dissolution was later annulled, state records show.

One problem lingered: The owners, despite having two architects and a successful artist among them, never legalized the building.

In 2006, the Loft Board brought a case against 36 Greene for being out of compliance with the Multiple Dwelling Law. The owners settled the case in 2007, paying a $10,000 fine and agreeing to a new legalization timeline — which they did not meet.

Most surprisingly, the owners apparently did not realize the risk of renting Apartment 3 to Alex Riguardi in 2020. Tenants are famously well protected by New York laws, and none more so than those in regulated loft apartments.

Riguardi’s unit spanned the entire third floor of the elegant brick building at the corner of Grand Street — prime Soho. Morello had the young broker pay half the $7,250 rent to him and the other half to the LLC that owned the building.

The lease provided the landlords an immediate revenue boost, but would come back to haunt them.

The holdout

Riguardi was nothing like the original tenants of 36 Greene Street or other starving artists of 1970s Soho, a raw neighborhood that had lost its manufacturers to the scourge of deindustrialization.

As a Michigan State freshman in 2014, he and two classmates had created an app to drive inebriated Hamptons and Jersey Shore partiers home. The effort earned them a feature story in the New York Post but petered out a couple of years later. Riguardi’s road to riches, like his father’s, would be in real estate, albeit by a route he never expected.

Riguardi began his career in traditional fashion for kids who can tap into a parent’s network. He landed summer analyst positions in 2016 and 2017 at JPMorgan and Tishman Speyer, the kind of gigs that are much easier to get if you have connections.

Alex’s father certainly had connections. Peter had followed his own father into the business at GVA Williams Real Estate in 1983, co-founding what would become Colliers International in 1994 and joining JLL in 2002.

Alex joined his father’s firm upon graduating in 2018 and had been promoted twice by the time he leased the full-floor unit at 36 Greene Street from Morello.

This was late 2020, when the market was still reeling from Covid, and Morello was not convinced that the 24-year-old could pay the $7,250 rent on his own. Riguardi, however, had something that Soho tenants of the 1970s lacked: a wealthy father to guarantee the lease. Dad hand-wrote his address on the agreement as 212 Fifth Avenue, a Nomad condominium where units fetch more than $10 million.

Nine months later, his son would purchase a summer home, nabbing a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a heated pool on 1.3 acres in East Hampton. Alex Riguardi paid $1.65 million for a property that today would fetch nearly $2.2 million, according to Trulia.

Riguardi had no idea that his Soho lease would soon be worth more than that. The deal with Morello, unbeknownst to its signatories, was a golden ticket. The only question was when it could be cashed in.

The answer came late last year when the owners decided to punch their own ticket.

Time to sell

The three men, now in their 70s or 80s, had watched their building appreciate more than they could possibly have imagined. It had 69 feet of frontage on Greene Street and 20 on Grand Avenue, four full-floor apartments and a ground-floor commercial space in one of the city’s richest retail corridors.

Except for the fact that one or more of them still live in the building, there was no reason to wait any longer. It was time to sell.

They hoped to find a condo developer who would pay $15 million or more, but to get that price, they would need to deliver the building empty. That meant Riguardi had to go. Morello served him with the required 90-day notice that his lease would not be renewed.

Riguardi’s experience was in commercial real estate, not tenants’ rights, so he did not initially realize the tremendous leverage he enjoyed. But he knew enough to consult a knowledgeable attorney, something Morello apparently failed to do before leasing the unit.

Riguardi’s lawyer, Gregory Byrnes, had his client apply to the Loft Board for status as a protected loft tenant, an obscure but enormously consequential designation. The application was dated Feb. 28, the final day of Riguardi’s lease.

If granted, it would entitle the silver-spooned JLL broker with the Hamptons house to stay in his $8,400 apartment for just a few hundred dollars a month. Eat your heart out, Zohran Mamdani.

Because the owners had never bought out a previous occupant of the third floor, they cannot charge its tenant anywhere close to what Riguardi was paying. Instead, it would be what the unit went for when the building was registered in the 1980s, plus three increases totaling 20 percent.

The new rent might be $600 or less, according to people familiar with the situation. Riguardi has asked the Loft Board to come up with a number.

Then, after the building gets a certificate of occupancy, Apartment 3 would become rent-stabilized, subject only to the minimal increases allowed each year by the Rent Guidelines Board. Riguardi and his descendants could, in theory, remain in the low-rent unit for the rest of this century, forcing a developer to work around them.

Rent-free living

Technically, Riguardi can live there rent-free until the owners legalize the building, because the owners missed the deadline to do so. Protected-rent status would also entitle Riguardi to claw back about 95 percent of the approximately $450,000 he has paid his landlords.

The owners, who belatedly tapped Loft Law attorney Michael Bobick to represent them, have challenged Riguardi’s application for protected status. Their filing notes that he arrived 38 years after the Loft Law took effect and did not provide proof of rent payments or that 36 Greene Street was his primary residence. The non-renewal notice, they say, establishes that Riguardi no longer resides in the building with the owners’ consent.

The Loft Board is not likely to be persuaded.

Although loft tenants’ protections were geared for 1980s occupants in unfinished buildings, not trust-fund kids paying $8,400 a month, Riguardi appears to qualify. That would entitle him to reimbursement for rent overcharges, and more importantly, the right to stay in Apartment 3.

As a legal occupant, Riguardi could drag out the legalization for years — something loft tenants have mastered by objecting to landlords’ renovation plans. As a commercial broker for a publicly traded brokerage, it might not be in his professional interest to do so, but the potential is there.

The owners of 36 Greene Street would have to start virtually from scratch because, after registering the building as a loft, they never registered any tenants or filed a narrative describing how they would bring it up to code.

The lawyers for both sides declined to comment.

The owners have no interest in keeping Riguardi in place, but did ask what it would take to buy him out. He came back with a number close to $4 million. It’s a bitter pill that the owners don’t want to swallow.

“It’s fundamentally unfair for who he is,” said one person familiar with the situation, calling it “legal extortion.”

But the key word is “legal.”

At first blush, it does seem unfair that the folks who nurtured a building for half a century, from near worthlessness to trophy status, must now cede millions of dollars of their gain to a five-year tenant who comes from money.

And it certainly makes no sense that someone who, on his own free will, has been paying $8,400 a month should have his rent reset to $600 based on what people paid in 1983.

On the other hand, real estate operates by rules, no matter how arcane. Had the owners followed them, none of this would have happened. Savoie, Morello and Victoria never took the basic step of registering Riguardi or other tenants, if there were any.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone didn’t give them guidance … to make sure their paperwork was all in order,” said one real estate executive.

Because the building is in a residential zone, R7X, they had another option as well: “At any point in the 40 years, they could have … deregistered it with Loft Board and gotten a residential C of O,” the executive said.

These were not naive newcomers, but grizzled New Yorkers and longtime Soho residents. Two were architects — partners with three decades of experience. They had plenty of time to legalize their building and no tenants standing in their way.

Until now.

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