Daily Archives: February 5, 2018

Babysitter accused of stealing jewelry from victims in Stuy Town

By Maria Rocha-Buschel

Police arrested a woman last week who had been hired by Stuyvesant Town residents as a babysitter for allegedly stealing jewelry from their apartments.

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Stuyvesant Town

Police said that 29-year-old Simone Spencer had been hired by two different families in Stuyvesant Town and the victims noticed that items, including thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, had gone missing from the apartment during the period that she worked for them.

One of the victims told police that Spencer started working for her family as a babysitter last March. She said that she was certain specific pieces of jewelry were still in her apartment in August, but she noticed on January 14 of this year that a number of items had gone missing, including a Louis Vuitton wallet, a Cartier watch worth $5,240 and an 18-karat gold and diamond ring valued at $6,500, as well as a Tiffany & Co. gift card. She told police that the only people that had access to her apartment during this period were her husband, her two small children and Spencer.

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Study shows where tenants are freezing the most in their apts.

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The “bomb cyclone” hits New York City on January 4. (Photo by Maria Rocha-Buschel_

By Sabina Mollot

With temperatures that now feel downright tropical in comparison to the deep freeze of last month, it may be hard to imagine that the first week of the year was a record breaker for heat complaints.

However, according to a study conducted by RentHop, an apartment listings service, the “bomb cyclone” on January 4 contributed to 30,000 complaints being made by New Yorkers during the first week of the year about a lack of heat in their homes. The study was based solely on complaints made to 311 and the number was about the same as heat complaints during the first week of the year from the previous three years combined.

The study also noted that neighborhoods with the most complaints were less expensive ones and many were also high-complaint areas last year. The study also came up with a formula that “de-dupes” or ignores duplicate complaints (more than one from one address on the same day) and also “normalizes,” taking into account that some neighborhoods are bigger than others by calculating complaints per 1,000 units. The study also determined which apartments were priciest by looking at the average asking rents of one-bedroom apartment listings in 2017. In doing so, RentHop found that Erasmus in Brooklyn had the most complaints in its’ “de-duped, normalized” formula at 117.5 that week, higher than the previous year’s 79.9 complaints. One-bedroom apartments in this area go for $1,750. There were 1,516 actual complaints.

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