In NYC, Even Dead Tenants are Hard to Evict

Every landlord has a dead tenant story.

“Remember the lady in 4C with the handwritten notes on the lease?” one recently asked his attorney, Noah Levenson. “Awful smell coming from her apartment. We think she’s dead and decomposing. What do we do?”

Levenson gave his standard answer:

“Don’t go in. Call 911. Tell them you think there’s a corpse.”

When someone dies in a home, the police stay with the body until an authorized entity removes it. Usually it’s a funeral home called by the family. But for a tenant without any relatives to step up, the Office of Medical Examiner does the deed.

For the landlord, that’s the easy part. The hard part is getting the apartment back.

Living tenants are notoriously hard to evict in New York City. But tenants who don’t have any family can cling to their apartments long after they are dead.

In a city with a housing emergency and many rent-stabilized buildings in financial crisis, this stinks — figuratively and literally. The unit can easily sit empty for a year or more, providing no affordable housing and generating no rent.

And because it remains sealed for months, the stench of death lingers. No one can go in even to open a window, let alone burn coffee grounds or disinfect the place. Neighbors have to live with the odor.

“It’s basically like a crime scene,” Levenson said in an interview. “They’re protecting the estate. They don’t want the landlord rummaging through their property.”

The government doesn’t know if there are stacks of cash under the mattress for an heir or nothing but junk. But it should at least be possible to flip on an exhaust fan, spray some Lysol and dispose of rotting food.

Instead, the police tape remains across the door.

“Then the real work starts,” Levenson explained on LinkedIn. “You chase every emergency contact. Every cousin. Every ‘niece.’ Every number ever scribbled in the file.”

For a tenant with no assets, getting a relative to take on this burden is a long shot. So the landlord has to do it. That means hiring a lawyer to go to Surrogate’s Court, create an estate for the dead person and get a public administrator appointed to represent it.

Levenson has a Bronx case that went nowhere for more than a year while everyone waited for the court to bring in the public administrator.

That office then had an investigator go through the apartment. No last will and testament or anything of value was found, and it was determined that the tenant lived alone.

The public administrator looked for a next of kin and filed letters with the court documenting the search. This took months, as it always does.

That’s when the owner gets the unit back, right? Not necessarily.

In a case like this in Manhattan, Levenson recalled, the administrator did hand over the keys at that point. But in the Bronx, the administrator refused. Levenson had to file an eviction case against a ghost.

No one opposed the eviction, obviously, but it still took the owner forever to get the unit back.

“Eventually you get an eviction in housing court,” Levenson said. “In the Bronx, you’re looking at a warrant backlog of months and months.”

Uncontested cases don’t get priority in housing court. It’s first-come, first-served.

The lawyer serves a 14-day notice and waits 10 days for the other party to answer. Then he applies for a warrant, which Levenson said “sits in warrant court purgatory” for a while. Ultimately the city marshall schedules a visit to unseal the apartment.

“My biggest frustration isn’t even with the housing court,” the attorney said. “It’s with the public administrator. It just adds to my frustration of vacant apartments that cannot be put on the market.”

Meanwhile, the unclaimed body sits in cold storage for a year before being shipped to Hart Island for burial at the potter’s field.

“Only in this city can a tenant pass away, go to the morgue, sit on ice for a year and still delay giving the landlord possession back,” Levenson said.