4 years, $60k in arrears: A portrait of housing court delays at their worst

Edward Kalikow first sued to evict Keith Zaret in November 2020. It took him four years to finally get his tenant out.

Zaret, like so many New York tenants, quit paying rent when Covid hit, then claimed financial hardship when Kalikow, the third-generation head of an eponymous Long Island-based firm, filed for eviction. A statewide moratorium kept Zaret in his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and after a two-year wait his application for rent relief was okayed.

The state doled out the maximum 15-month award. Zaret owed about $20,000 more than that and was still racking up arrears. So his landlord sued again, in a case that has taken just shy of two years to resolve.

Landlord advocates say that the suit reflects the “nightmarish” delays that The LeFrak Organization sued over last year: adjournment after adjournment to allow tenants every chance to find a lawyer or the cash to cover back rent. 

“This is something that is being experienced by landlords across the board in each and every county of the city,” Nativ Winiarsky of Kucker Marino Winiarsky & Bittens, who is representing LeFrak in the ongoing suit, said.

Zaret, court documents signal, was the type of tenant who needed that grace. 

The pandemic served an unspecified financial blow, then his teenage daughter was murdered just months before Kalikow sued him for the second time. A commercial broker, Zaret claims he was waiting on deals to close and the city to approve his request for a One Shot Deal, money that can go toward back rent.

But affidavits submitted by Kalikow’s lawyer Adam Cooper paint Zaret differently. The tenant may have been down and out, but he also knew how to work housing court and for quite some time, succeeded, showing just how badly the system may be broken.

Zaret did not respond to a request for comment.

At first, the delays preventing Zaret’s eviction were typical, Cooper details in court documents. Kalikow waited four months for an intake appointment and another two so Zaret could find an attorney. LeFrak, in its suit, noted lengthy waits for similar reasons.

Then, it was Zaret who started complicating things.

The tenant said he didn’t want a lawyer and wasn’t willing to settle at a March 2023 meeting. The court scheduled a pre-trial for August when Zaret, again, refused to settle. The court then set a trial date for November, where Zaret and his landlord came to an agreement. 

Kralikow won a $60,000 judgment — the arrears Zaret had amassed over years of non-payment — and Zaret negotiated four more months to find the cash on the condition he pay rent through the grace period. 

In March, he fell behind and the court slapped him with an eviction notice.

That’s when the broker got crafty. Unrepresented, he submitted his first order to show cause — a filing that asks a court to take action. In Zaret’s case, he asked to stay his eviction. 

He would ultimately file 13 such orders.

Zaret’s initial explanations for needing more time were reasonable.

He had “deals pending and a job interview,” Zaret wrote in early March. “The stip[ulation] I signed [sic] I was under extreme stress,” he said, referring to the settlement agreement.

“I’m emerging from depression due to murder of my 19 y/o daughter,” Zaret elaborated in another filing soon after.

In April, after Zaret’s case was scheduled for another trial, the tenant submitted a third order, explaining he had gotten a job at Redwood Capital, received “several roommate inquiries for 50 percent of rent” and was working with Queens Community House, Catholic Charities of New York and the city’s Human Resources Administration, which administers One Shot Deals, to secure rent relief.

Ultimately, the court’s patience would run out in July. Zaret submitted three more orders early in the month to pause the eviction. In the first, he claimed he had not paid July’s rent, because “the people who were supposed to pay me went away for July 4th.” 

HRA and the Met Council on Housing, he promised would “come through” with money to cover his back rent before the end of the month. There was no more mention of the pending deals.

“…Almost there,” he wrote.

A civil court judge would deny all three, citing “no proof the arrears will be paid.” Zaret’s eviction was scheduled for August 13th. The tenant, in a hail mary, filed three more orders to show cause in the days before.

The court refused to delay the marshal any longer. Zaret was evicted Tuesday.

It’s hard to parse whether Zaret’s excuses were valid. It’s highly likely, for example, that Covid hurt his business and unthinkable that the death of his daughter in 2022 would not have turned his life upside down.

But his promise that a One Shot Deal, which typically amounts to a few thousand dollars, would make his landlord whole, is improbable at best. His excuses for missing rent — a roommate couldn’t move in because the apartment needed a paint job — and reasoning for needing more time — “I had a funeral today” — also devolved as his filings mounted.

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What the case does lay out is the extent to which housing court will greenlight delays, not just as standard procedure, but at a tenants’ behest and despite the financial hit to the landlord.

Zaret may be long gone but the Kalikows are out $60,000 and unlikely to recover it.