June 2024 Insights
By Eileen O’Toole, Esq., Contributing Editor
The 2024 New York State Budget Bill, enacted into law on April 20, 2024, includes provisions for funding the addition of Housing Court staff and at least one Housing Court judge. This is welcome news for practitioners, who have reported continued delays in the calendaring and processing of cases, as well as in the issuance of court decisions. While stating that delays have eased, the Housing Court itself has cited staff reductions that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic as a primary reason for the delays.
As perhaps an indicator of a post-pandemic era, on April 3, 2024, the New York Court system’s Chief Administrative Judge issued Administrative Order No. 143 of 2024 (LVT #33262), which rescinded a number of pandemic era directives issued by the Court in 2020 and 2021. In connection with Housing Court proceedings, the addition of a specific notice, typically on yellow paper, that respondents in eviction cases may have “special defenses and protections,” need no longer be added to a Notice of Petition in a summary proceeding.
In Eisner v. Zaim (LVT #33256), the court reminded parties of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on building operations and landlord-tenant relations where tenants argued unsuccessfully that the owner had delayed notifying them of its intent to withhold a portion of their security deposit in violation of GOL §7-108 and therefore should refund the full deposit with double damages. Among other things, the court pointed out that Executive Orders had tolled statutes of limitation concerning that law’s requirements during the time in question.
In Watertown Assets LLC v. Tazewell (LVT #33249), another case concerning timing requirements, a Kings County court ruled that five days must be added to serve a 14-day rent demand due to service accomplished by “nail-and-mail.” In that case, the rent demand was affixed to the tenant’s apartment door and mailed to him one day before the 14-day notice compliance date. The court compared the facts of this nonpayment case to those involving a 10-day notice to cure where, in 2004, New York’s highest court had ruled in ATM One, LLC v. Landaverde that an additional five days must be added to the cure period to allow for mailing of such notices. Notably, however, the Landaverde case involved only service by mail and not, as in Watertown Assets, service by both mail and by affixing a copy to the tenant’s apartment door.
Another sign of the times, some DHCR cases involve aspects of a more general movement away from gas and certain types of fuel oil used in residential buildings. In two cases (LVT #33227, #33228), the DHCR approved (as it generally does) owners’ requests to replace gas stoves with electric stoves in tenant apartments. In order to compensate tenants for presumably increased utility costs, the approval of such required service modifications for rent-regulated tenants did include a permanent rent reduction based on a utility allowance for cooking gas established by HUD. Separately, the DHCR denied an MCI rent increase (LVT #33239) to an owner who replaced fuel tanks because the new tanks used #4 fuel oil and NYC already had a law in place requiring owners to convert from #4 fuel oil to either #2 fuel oil or natural gas by 2030.
The amendment of certain provisions of the Rent Stabilization Law and Code in late 2023 may raise questions concerning whether applicability is retroactive. The DHCR appears to have addressed one such question in Matter of 826 Marcy Avenue LLC (LVT #33223), a case concerning an owner’s application for RSL exemption based on substantial rehabilitation of a building. In that case, the work in question was performed in 2018, the application was denied in July 2023, and the owner’s PAR was denied in May 2024. In any event, the DHCR noted in this decision that prior DHCR Operational Bulletin 95-2, rather than the new Operational Bulletin 23-3 that replaced it in November 2023, was applied to the facts of the case because it was the Operational Bulletin that was “effective at the time of completion of the work at issue.”