The Chinatown landlord accused of brutally beating an armed vagrant is being hailed a hero by locals — who say the area has devolved into a lawless cesspool because of the city’s soft-on-crime policies.
Manhattan building owner Brian Chin, 32 — who passionately spoke out against crime when a homeless man murdered one of his tenants in 2022 — was charged with felony assault for the Saturday attack that left a street person with serious injuries.
“Brian is a great guy. He’s like our local community activist, leader — he wants our neighborhood to be clean,’’ said a landlord whose family has owned a building on Chrystie Street, near where the incident occurred, for more than 40 years.
“He wants the [local Sarah Roosevelt] park for kids to be what it was intended for — not open-air drug-dealing and homeless people sleeping on the benches,’’ the source told The Post on Monday.
“And we’re deeply grateful for that.”
The source suggested that the lefty City Council’s policies — such as those aimed at springing jailed defendants early and making it harder for cops to stop and frisk suspects — are to blame for the quality-of-life mayhem.
“Everything ‘Broken Windows’ solved has been undone — it’s like the Wild West now,’’ the man said, lamenting the loss of the law-enforcement strategy that prosecutes small crimes in an effort to prevent larger ones down the road.
Insurance broker Shirley Wu works above the Grand Street subway entrance where Saturday’s bashing took place — and next-door to Chin’s building, where Christina Yuna Lee, 35, was fatally stabbed by vagrant Assamad Nash during a random sex attack and burglary two years ago.
“People around here are scared of the homeless because of what happened to Christina Lee,’’ Wu told The Post.
“After Christina was killed, we installed an intercom, and we don’t buzz people in unless we know who they are. We didn’t even lock the door downstairs before that, now the door is always locked.
“I don’t know what caused [Saturday’s] attack, but if it was Brian, I can understand why he would be angry with the homeless after what happened to Christina,’’ Wu said.
“Once in a while, the police or outreach come to take them to a shelter, but they’re always back the next day,’’ she said, as two apparently homeless men rattled Dunkin Donuts cups on the corner of Grand and Chrystie street begging for change.
The vagrant who Chin is accused of attacking had been sleeping on a sidewalk at Chrystie and Grand when Chin kicked him three times, telling cops the man had been harassing people earlier, authorities and police sources said.
The two men then got into it a few minutes later, with the homeless guy breaking a chair and allegedly swinging at Chin with a piece of it with a nail sticking out of it, video shows.
Chin allegedly pushed the guy to the ground and repeatedly punched him in the head and apparently kicked him, according to footage.
Chin was arraigned on the assault rap and released without bail Sunday. He and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
Police sources have said the vagrant will be charged with menacing once cops can ID him, noting he had no identification on him and is intubated and hasn’t been able to tell them who he is yet.
The Post’s landlord source said some of the area’s homeless rampantly shoplift and harass residents to get money for drugs.
“We have a huge fencing problem, where the vagrants shoplift from Target down the street and sell [the swiped goods],’’ the source said.
“So now we have this whole circle of life where everything is self-sustaining … and the police can’t do anything about it because all of this has been decriminalized.
“Christina Lee was one of Brian’s tenants. It gave all of us PTSD — we all look over our shoulders,’’ the source added. Some of the homeless “come into the hardware store, steal. The lightbulb store, they’ll break things. They’re trying to terrorize.
“If you don’t give them a dollar, they go nuts. … It’s America but makes a Third World country look better than us,’’ the landlord said.
As for Chin, “On Chrystie, he makes sure if there is something out of the ordinary, he’ll try to shoo people away,’’ the source said.
“For the most part, it works,’’ the man said. “But when vagrants need money they go back to the subway — and unfortunately he sees the worst of it every single day being by that subway because that’s where his tenants have to go.
“We tell the police, but they can’t do anything about it. Local government plays a big hand in this.
“We’re on our own.’’
— Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer
