No Overcharge Where Rent Was Over $2,000 on Base Rent Date

(Decision submitted by William J. Neville of the Manhattan law firm of Mitofsky Shapiro Neville & Hazen, LLP, attorneys for the landlord.)

Landlord sued to evict unregulated tenant after tenant’s one-year vacancy lease expired and after tenant refused to sign the offered renewal leases over several years after that. Landlord claimed that tenant moved into the apartment in March 2010 at a monthly rent of $2,300. Tenant claimed retaliatory eviction, that the apartment was rent stabilized, rent overcharge, and fraud.

The court found no retaliatory eviction since tenant often failed to pay her rent for months at a time, changed the lock on her apartment door and refused access for repairs to clear a violation and after complaining to HPD of insufficient heat. Tenant also claimed that landlord failed to provide a deregulation notice when she moved in, but tenant failed to prove this and no deregulation notice was required for a second deregulated tenant. There also was no proof of fraud. Landlord’s agent credibly testified that landlord spent $60,000 on a gut renovation of the apartment before tenant moved in and showed photographs that documented the work. The apartment had been registered as rent stabilized in 1999 at a monthly rent of $2,000, and then registered as permanently exempt in 2000. There had been eight subsequent tenants before tenant moved in. Even if no individual apartment improvements had occurred and the apartment had been subject to rent-stabilized rent increases all along, the current rent would have been higher than the rent charged to tenant. There was no fraud and no rent overcharge.

64 West 108th Associates v. Burdick: Index No. L&T Index No. 70310/13 (Civ. Ct. NY; 6/26/15; Hahn, J) [6-pg. doc.]