One of Boston’s most notorious landlords just bought more than 100 units in Somerville
Anwar Faisal is the landlord for more student-rented apartments than almost anybody in the city.
He and the companies he owns were also subjects in The Boston Globe’s 2014 Spotlight team investigation called “Spotlight Campus,” which dove into the world of delinquent landlords.
The Globe wrote:
“Anwar Faisal is one of the giants of the student apartment rental business in Boston — maybe the biggest of them all. Few, if any, landlords own and rent more units to students; few, if any, have a longer rap sheet of offenses against state sanitary and building codes; and no one better exemplifies the city’s ineffectiveness at policing chronic offenders like him.
He’s gotten rich at this game, his business footprint growing with the rollicking expansion of the city’s student population. He lives in a secluded mansion in Brookline and can get away from it all on a private island off Fairhaven held in his wife’s name. His tenants, meanwhile, enjoy rather different amenities: doors without working locks; heat that doesn’t work; vermin of every vintage.”
Despite his history of complaints and lawsuits, Faisal has just purchased more than 100 apartments in Somerville, The Somerville Journal reported. The units are in two adjacent buildings on Summer Street in the Spring Hill neighborhood.
The Journal reported that Faisal plans to “keep rental prices stable for veterans, disabled, elderly or people on social security currently living in the buildings, but will raise the rents to market rate of its existing working professional tenants.”
The tenants in his new buildings have recently been informed of Faisal’s ownership. Some of them are concerned about what might happen, while others say Faisal’s ownership has been off to a good start.
“He seems like a piece of work,” Cameron Lownie told the Journal. He has lived at 157 Summer Street, one of Faisal’s new buildings, since August. “This is a gorgeous building that had been maintained really well and it would be a shame to see it lose any of that.”
Read the full Somerville Journal story here.
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