Bruce Cholst

For New Yorkers accustomed to living stacked on top of each other, the annoyances of such close quarters — late-night noise, wafting smoke and invasive aromas — are all too familiar. But until now, condo dwellers had few legal remedies for coping with unruly neighbors.

While co-op residents technically lease their apartments and can be evicted, condo boards lack legal standing to remove unit owners, no matter how offensive their behavior may be. But attorneys at the Manhattan law firm of Rosen Livingston & Cholst are trying to change that, in a first-of-its-kind effort to give condo boards “a fighting chance to enforce order in the community,” said attorney Bruce Cholst. [more]

From left: Abe Haruvi, 58 East 3rd Street, and buildings 54 and 50 on the same street (credit: PropertyShark)

More than 100 tenants and community activists gathered outside of an East Village apartment complex on Monday evening to protest the landlord, who is allegedly forcing his tenants to move out within 60 days. The Village Voice reported that the protest took place outside of 58 East 3rd Street, one of the buildings where tenants say they received the landlord’s notice. Tenants who live in building numbers 50 and 54 say that they also received the same notification. [more]

338 Berry Street

A group of Williamsburg artists who were appealing eviction from the live-work loft at 338 Berry Street lost their 16 month-long legal battle yesterday, the Brooklyn Paper reported. There are seven remaining tenants in the building, between South 4th and South 5th streets, and they claimed that a 2010 revision of the Loft Law, which extended rights and rental protections to residents living in illegally-converted industrial lofts, should have included their homes. [more]

Two Brooklyn tenants are suing their landlord, saying their eviction from the apartment they share due to pet ownership is invalid, the New York Post reported.

Susan Kane and Tom Fletcher, residents of a rent-stabilized building in Sunset Park, claim their landlord, Sahit Hadzovic’s bid to evict them is about rent, not their two cats, bird and goldfish, the Post said. [more]

Courtney Love is asking a Manhattan Housing Court judge to throw out landlord Astor Street Partners’ bid to have her evicted from the $7.5 million townhouse she’s renting at 250 West 10th Street, according to the New York Post, and has had her lawyer file a motion requesting the matter be dropped.

While last week it was reported that Love was facing the boot for allegedly causing more than $100,000 worth of damage to the building’s interior and owing $54,000 in back rent, her attorney is arguing that his client is up to date on rent and has actually made some improvements to the property during her 10-month stay, at a rent of $27,000 a month.
… [more]

Soho Properties CEO Sharif El-Gamal and a rendering of Park51 community center

A Manhattan judge has granted 51 Park Place and developer Sharif El-Gamal a so-called Yellowstone injunction blocking Consolidated Edison from evicting the developer from the prospective Muslim community center building for allegedly violating a default notice issued Sept. 14, the New York Law Journal reported, giving El-Gamal 20 days to pay up or challenge Con Ed.

As previously reported, Con Ed, which owns a substation on the western half of the property where the developers want to build a community center, ordered the Soho Properties CEO and Park51 developers to pay $1.7 million owed in back rent in October and threatened to evict the team behind the controversial mosque, near Ground Zero. … [more]

The New York State Office of Court Administration legally sells the names of everyone who is sued over eviction in housing court to private companies, which then compile the information and sell it to landlords looking to avoid renting to troublesome tenants, the New York Times reported. But there is one key problem with the information; it does not include whether or not a tenant was evicted after the case was tried.

The omission of who won or lost the case has a damaging affect on tenants, who often decide to move out rather than face landlords in court and have their names blacklisted.

“I don’t have a problem with providing more information as to the disposition of a case,” said Joseph Strasburg, the president of the Rent Stabilization Association, noting that it would make sense to include whether a tenant won or lost in the case…. [more]

A group of tenants in a 20-unit Chinatown rental apartment building claim that their new landlord, KBK Associates, is improperly evicting them, according to the New York Daily News. The residents at the Henry Street building, which sold for $2.6 million in August, claim they were given fewer than two weeks to vacate their apartments, and say that the landlord doesn’t have the legal grounding to remove them. One resident at the building, Wi Lian Jiang, said that KBK has accused him of keeping too many tenants in his apartment, even though he said only he, his wife and his son live there…. [more]

The number of residential evictions in Queens rose by more than a
quarter last year while the volume was flat or decreased in other
boroughs, according to the most current city data obtained by The Real Deal. In Queens, 4,401 households were evicted in 2008, a 27 percent increase
from a year earlier when there were 3,467, data from the city
Department of Investigation reveals. By evictions, The Real Deal is
including what are technically called “evictions” as well as “legal
possessions.” The Department of Investigation uses both terms to describe the return
of the property to the control of the landlord, although both are what
are commonly understood to be an eviction.
… [more]

Lawyers, judges and tenant advocates say more middle-class New Yorkers
who were once able to pay their rent are now facing eviction after
losing jobs. “There’s definitely an uptick of people who were basically
very good rent payers until the economic downturn,” said Todd Nahins, a
lawyer who represents owners of luxury residential buildings and has
been negotiating payment plans for tenants in arrears. No one knows
exactly how many middle-class tenants are facing eviction since the
city’s housing courts do not keep data on the income level of
litigants. Overall, court records show that the number of cases filed
citywide for nonpayment of rent jumped about 19 percent in the first
two months of 2009 from the same period last year…. [more]