May Insights

By Eileen O’Toole, Esq., Contributing Editor

Courts continue to grapple with whether to vacate stays of eviction proceedings based on respondent ERAP filings in a number of cases with varying issues.

In Papandrea-Zavaglia v. Arroyave [LVT #32047], a Brooklyn housing court discussed other recent rulings where courts had considered whether to lift automatic ERAP stays and outlined that, in each case, a court should consider the regulatory status of premises, the nature of the cause of action, the relationship between the tenant and landlord, whether the applicant met the basic criteria for ERAP assistance, and whether the equities favored the landlord. In this case, involving an unregulated, two-family building, the landlord’s refusal to participate in the ERAP program, and the inequities of causing the landlord to vitiate the grounds for its holdover by accepting rent, persuaded the court to lift the stay pending the outcome of the tenant’s ERAP application.

In Zheng v. Guiseppone [LVT #32041], a Staten Island housing court refused to apply an ERAP stay post-eviction where tenants had only recently filed their application. The court noted that tenants owed no rent under a court-ordered settlement agreement and therefore weren’t covered by the ERAP statute. And any landlord-tenant relationship had been severed by execution on the eviction warrant.

In another decision by a Suffolk County court, Kristiansen v. Serating [LVT #32052], a different tack was taken where the landlord also refused to participate in the ERAP program. Noting that ERAP would cover up to only 15 months of the tenant’s rent arrears, totaling $48,000, the court retained the stay of proceedings for that amount but lifted the ERAP stay in connection with the landlord’s claim for $12,800 that wouldn’t be covered by an ERAP award. The court gave the tenant a limited time to pay the $12,800 in order to avoid a judgment and issuance of an eviction warrant.

And, in Laporte v. Garcia [LVT #32053], a Bronx housing court upheld the ERAP stay for a roommate whom a tenant sought to evict in a holdover proceeding.

Some other recent decisions reinforce long-standing principles, with notable results. For example, in Matter of Sonnai Industries, Inc. [LVT #32026], the DHCR ordered a landlord to refund $219,000, including treble damages, to a rent-stabilized tenant in a rent overcharge proceeding. The ruling was based on the long-standing ruling of New York’s highest court in Cintron v. Calogero (2010), that an outstanding rent reduction order froze a rent-stabilized rent during the overcharge lookback period until the rent was restored by subsequent DHCR order, no matter how old the rent reduction order was.

In Matter of Kips Bay Tenants Association [LVT #32017], a decision approving landlord’s installation of new boilers and burners for MCI rent increases, the DHCR discussed at some length the evolution of its current policy that a Con Edison steam heat system had a 50-year useful life.

And in Matter of Various Tenants [LVT #32016], the DHCR ruled that a terra cotta rainscreen recladding system qualified as a major capital improvement.