There is a lady in New York who has been a tenant in a loft, but has paid no rent since 2003. How come? Didn’t the landlord try to collect rent and failing that evict her? That would seem to be the rational view of the world anywhere but in New York where ownership of residential rental property is not quite a criminal activity, but isn’t deemed entitled to serious legal protection either. See No Eviction After Renter Didn’t Pay for Nine Years, N.Y. Times, June 7, 2012. Click here.
In 1982, New York enacted a law allowing the rent of lofts for residential purposes, provided the landlords brought them up to proper fire and safety standards. Seems fair enough. But some landlords — including the one in this case, according to the Times — haven’t done so. So you’d think that the city would enforce that law and make sure that lofts failing to meet those fire and safety standards could not be rented. Right? Wrong. It appears that they are being rented and that law is not really being enforced by the city. So in this case, the enterprising tenant moved into a loft, and later stopped paying rent because of the aforementioned landlord failure to bring her loft up to code. That was in 2003, and that, according to the Times, enabled her to save herself a tidy $60,000 in forgone rents while continuing to live in that loft while obligated to pay a mere $600 per month (which she hasn’t paid for nine years). What a deal!
But when the landlord sued, the New York Court of Appeals held that she could not be evicted for nonpayment of rent.
So let’s pause for a moment, and see what’s going on here. The purpose of these fire and safety regulations is to protect the lives and property of inhabitants of lofts. No compliance with the law — no certificate of occupancy. But here, the court’s ruling perpetuates the opposite: it assures that the tenant will live in what according to New York law is an unsafe loft. Weird, man. If you are interested in landlord tenant laws. you might want look on the internet for somewhere that might be able to help you. You need to bare in mind that laws are different in each state, so just be careful. For example if you’re in Flordia , you could check out landlord/tenant law in florida, however if you were in New York, the laws could be slightly different.
We have no sympathy for landlords who won’t bring up their premises to minimal levels of safety prescribed by law. But how does it make sense to require the landlord to continue exposing his tenants to the very hazards that the law bans and plainly intends to abate?
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Follow up. For another N.Y. Times story on this case — this one of the human interest variety — click here . We learn from it that the landlord’s jutification for the long delay in bringing the lofts up to code has been the tenants’ “nitpicking” of everything he tried to do. True? We don’t know. But what if it is?