Owen Denoon left his job at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan to become a nurse at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn’s Borough Park in 1989. He said he was still finding his footing in the city after moving from Trinidad and Tobago, and the employee housing Maimonides offered was one of the perks that incentivized him to make the switch.

“It was well known that any new hires that wanted housing, it was readily available,” said Denoon, now 67.

He moved into an apartment in a building Maimonides owned a couple of blocks from the hospital after his hiring and has lived there for the past 34 years. When he retired in late 2020, after surviving the most treacherous phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maimonides let him stay.

Now, at a time when rents across the city are sky-high and homelessness is reaching new peaks, the hospital wants him out.

Denoon is one of at least 38 current and former Maimonides employees who are in the process of being evicted from their apartments by the medical center, according to court filings. Most of the pending cases were filed this year.

Those affected include retirees as well as people with disabilities who are on fixed incomes, some of whom have lived in their apartments for decades. One developed chronic physical and psychiatric conditions while working at Maimonides, according to medical records and human resource documents he shared with Gothamist.

But they’re not going quietly. At least 20 of the tenants have been granted permission to combine their cases in court and make a joint argument against the hospital, according to Legal Aid Society attorneys representing some of this group.

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