For many U.S. residents, especially immigrants, a run-down apartment could be frustrating and even depressing. Immigrants come to the United States – the country of wonders, where, in principle, all apartments should be clean, beautiful and cozy. Many of them settled in New York, “the capital of the world,” and find peeling parquet, fading paint on the walls, tiles falling off in the bathroom, and markings, like large brown spots on the ceiling, caused by a flood in the neighbor’s apartment.

However, as much as they pester the superintendent or call the building management office, nothing changes. If somebody does something, like change the tiles in the bathroom or paint the walls, their rent will increase inevitably.

Many tenants find what would seem to be a simple solution to this problem: They hire workers or pay the super and repair their own apartments – not living at the mercy of their landlords. On the other hand, a simple solution actually turns out to be quite expensive.

But why pay the superintendent or workers to do work that the landlord is required by law to do for free? Tenants in these circumstances call city agencies or turn to advocacy groups, complaining of the stinginess and second-rate work of the building owners. The more courageous tenants take their landlords to court.

Unfortunately, phone calls and legal proceedings rarely lead to any changes. The forlorn tenants either start looking for a new, more comfortable apartment or decide to make temporarily the best of their unhappy situation, hoping that sooner or later there will be cause for celebration on their street (or, rather, in their apartment).

It appears that this celebration may not be so far off, at least for the tenants of 66,000 apartments in 900 of the city's multi-family buildings, whose owners borrowed money from two large banks – New York Community Bank and Citigroup – when they bought their buildings. A few days ago, Housing Here and Now, a coalition of banks and housing advocacy groups, announced that they had signed an unusual – even unprecedented – agreement under which both banks will use their leverage as lenders to pressure landlords into repairing their buildings. Advocates hope that they will be able to use this new weapon effectively in the fight against negligent landlords. Under pressure from the banks, it is possible that the landlords will not only paint the walls of apartments and repair broken boilers in buildings, but will also spruce up many run-down neighborhoods.

New York Community Bank, which holds the loans on the majority of the multi-family buildings, is considered to be one of the largest banks to give loans to building owners. It operates a whole network of branches including Queens County Savings Bank and Roslyn Savings Bank.

Citigroup is also a large and respectable company. Both banks have an interest in maintaining their reputations, and apparently this is exactly what compelled them to come to an agreement with advocacy groups.

Under this agreement, a bank that receives an application for a mortgage on a multifamily building is required to collect as much information as possible about the landlord applying for the mortgage. By studying records from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, as well as from Housing Here and Now, the bank will be able to determine if the landlord has ever violated the housing code. The banks will be particularly suspicious of landlords who have been sued by their residents as well as landlords who have had accidents or emergency repairs done in their buildings.

Then, the bank will require landlords to fix up their buildings within a certain amount of time or face foreclosure. The bank will develop plans for repairing extremely dilapidated buildings and slightly extend the timeline for making repairs to these buildings. Additionally, the bank will inspect the buildings annually to make sure that all work is being done in accordance with the housing code.

Theoretically, every bank has the ability to foreclose on a building whose landlord continually violates this code and shirks away from repairing his or her buildings. In practice, though, banks have almost never exercised this right, and landlords rarely have trouble. The agreement gives hope that the latter will more frequently and readily use the authority given them to force landlords to get their properties into shape.

It appears that many other banks will follow in these footsteps. Recently, representatives of 18 banks operating in New York met with managers at New York Community Bank and Citigroup to discuss the groundbreaking agreement. Diana Taylor, the state superintendent of banks, sent letters encouraging them to follow the path of the "pioneers."

The New York State Comptroller, Alan Hevesi, called the agreement between Housing Here and Now and the two banks serious and historic.

"This is a big deal," he said at the press conference announcing the agreement. "It’s an agreement that brings the banks in as partners in maximizing the potential for landlords to clean up buildings. This is serious mostly for tens of thousands of tenants in the city who have not been able to get landlords to respond to the problems that they live with every single day."

The campaign that led to the historic agreement began last summer when Housing Here and Now released a list of the city's ten worst landlords. But not even this stigma could force the worst ten to take any measures. That's when Housing Here and Now decided to go after the landlord's money and took aim at the banks.

By January of this year, the coalition had managed to write a detailed report on all housing code violations in 600 of our city's multi-family buildings —that are under the aegis of New York Community Bank. It threatened to impede the bank's impending merger with Atlantic Bank of New York if the bank did not get its clients (the landlords) to fix up their buildings.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who wrote a letter to the president of New York Community Bank, threatening that the New York State Department of Banking would hold hearings on this case and would delay the merger until buildings in a poor state of repair were fixed up.

The large-scale campaign to protect the rights of New York's tenants has made some progress. Does this mean that leaking ceilings, chipped paint and rusty bathroom fixtures will no longer bring tens of thousands of New Yorkers, including Russian immigrants, to despair? Let's hope so.