Housing Court in New York City (a part of the NYC Civil Court) has a reputation of not being a very sympathetic place for landlords. It's safe to say that if you are a landlord in that arena, and you have not followed the myriad rules and regulations concerning substance and procedure with perfect precision, your case can be, and often will be, dismissed, without regard to justice or equity.
I've been in Housing Court both as an attorney and as a litigant - both as a landlord and as and a tenant, and I've seen my share of unfair outcomes. I have seen instances where the perfect compliance required of landlords has not been applied to tenants. Some judges see tenants as the poor, down-trodden oppressed masses with no economic power trying to fight the mighty, wealthy ruling-class landlords, without seeing the serial non-payer and abuser of property that a struggling owner has put his or her whole life into.
It's refreshing, therefore, to see Housing Court cases decided in favor of landlords who do play by the rules. I caught one of these recently out of Brooklyn's Civil Court. The case, 1274 51 Realty LLC v. Gross, was a holdover proceeding against occupants of the owner's premises. The occupants were, technically, licensees, rather than tenants under a lease.
The owner served a "notice to quit", and subsequently a petition. (The former document is a pre-lawsuit notice; the latter is the formal court complaint.) The occupants asked for dismissal of the case on the grounds that the notice to quit did not inform them that the landlord would begin eviction proceedings if they failed to timely vacate the premises and it did not specify a deadline on which their lawful occupancy would terminate.
The court rejected both arguments, noting that no statute required the landlord to include such information in its notice to quit. The notice to quit clearly informed the occupants that their license was revoked, described the premises sought to be recovered and clearly identified the landlord as the entity entitled to possession.
Since the landlord did exactly what the statute required of it, the court allowed summary judgment in the landlord's favor.
The moral of the story is that if you're a property owner in New York City and you follow all the rules, you have a fighting chance against tenants and others who would have judges unilaterally expand tenants' rights vis-à-vis owners beyond what the pro-tenant statutes already allow.
Comments(2)