Santander Moves to Foreclose on East Village Landlord's Four Walk-Ups

Santander Bank has filed pre-foreclosure actions against four East Village walk-up buildings tied to landlord David Jacobson, alleging the ownership entities have not made a mortgage payment since the middle of 2024 on debt the bank says has ballooned to roughly $50M in principal, fees and interest.

Why it matters

The debt did not start at Santander. Signature Bank originated the loan in 2017; after Signature’s 2023 failure and FDIC receivership, the paper moved to an acquirer and Santander acquired it in 2024 via distressed-debt vehicle SIG RCRS A/B MF 2023 Venture LLC, the entity listed as plaintiff in the Manhattan Supreme Court filings. That chain, failed regional bank to acquirer to foreclosure plaintiff, is the same pipeline that has produced a wave of 2026 multifamily distress across the city as the last cohort of pre-2022-rate loans comes due against buildings whose rent-stabilized income never grew to match.

The four buildings, 441 East 12th Street, 199 Avenue A, 346 East 13th Street and 520 East 14th Street, are prewar walk-ups totaling roughly 118 apartments, some rent-stabilized, in a corridor still dense with the small ground-floor bars and restaurants that define the neighborhood’s identity. Crain’s reporting on the case ties it to one of the area’s longer-running bar tenants; we could not independently confirm that detail because Crain’s own page returned a bot block (HTTP 403) when we tried to pull it directly, so we are not naming the bar here until we can verify it against the lease or ACRIS record rather than a borrowed characterization.

The numbers

Santander’s claim of roughly $50M spans four properties rather than one, which matters for how this resolves: a lender working a multi-building pre-foreclosure package has more room to negotiate a partial cure, a receiver, or a piecemeal sale than it would on a single asset. We attempted to pull the ACRIS mortgage, assignment and lis pendens documents directly to confirm the exact principal and recording dates; the ACRIS document-search token endpoint returned HTTP 503 on both attempts this run, a service outage rather than a dead end, so the underlying instruments are confirmed to exist in the public record but not yet in hand.

What’s next

We have queued the ACRIS pull for when the token endpoint recovers and are identifying the specific NYSCEF foreclosure index number to track the case’s next filing. For more on distress moving through the city’s multifamily stock, see our New York market coverage.