HIGH COURT REJECTS "OWNER'S USE" CHALLENGE

This decision is so bad that I want to scream. Why are we allowing rich people to take controlled housing from the middle class and poor?

I can't afford to live nowhere else. If I am evicted from my stabilized apt, I leave the City.

Rich people like the Economakkis family can afford to live anywhere they want, but they would rather pay their expensive lawyers to put tenants through years of litigation so that they can bankrupt them AND force them all out.

While we are going to lose more affordable housing, look at the bright side.The landlord will probably turn the apartments it gets back into a lovely office, library, bowling alley, entertainment center, or art studio. Isn't that nice?

What's the buyout offer here? The real one -- not the BS posted on the respective owner and tenant websites? We need to know that before we can begin to guess whether this litigation is about principle or is a smoke screen.

More on this case from yesterday's Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/nyregion/15evict.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th

I read it. Pretty despicable.

Displacing people to create mansions. That makes sense.

While this case makes for great entertainment, I can't imagine a lot of owners buying 6+ unit apartment buildings to convert into single family residences in the future. It just costs too much time, effort and money. The Economakis' kids will most likely be away at college before the litigation ends. The owners will then have to ask themselves if this endeavor was really worth the effort, expense and endless bad press. A quick search shows that a similar building on East 3rd sold for 3.6M last December. That amount of money can buy you a lot of nice places to live.

What never gets written about are the numerous owner use proceedings brought in smaller buildings in the boroughs -- especially Queens and Brooklyn -- against unrepresented tenants. These cases play out under very different dynamics and are probably more indicative of larger ethnic, economic and social shifts in the City.

We must stop the exploitation of the poor. There should be a a law that limits how many apartments landlords can have for this purposes and they should only be allowed to do it once.

If they buy another building they shouldn't be able to clear it out and flip it and keep doing this [DELETED] over and over again.

Meena,

As the Economakis experiment illustrates, owner use cases are inefficient methods of clearing out buildings. Cases like this have little or no relationship to the dearth of affordable housing.

You must represent landlords. (Do you work for this company?)

I keep hearing about the loss of thousands of affordable apartments EACH YEAR because of luxury and vacancy decontrol and because of this owner's use loophole. This has to stop.

No. I work for Cide Hamete Benengeli.

If I told you I represent landlords would that make what I say a canard?

If I said I represented tenants would that make what I say credible?

"The owners will then have to ask themselves if this endeavor was really worth the effort, expense and endless bad press. A quick search shows that a similar building on East 3rd sold for 3.6M last December."

The Economakises also sold a building on east 3rd, across the street from their "new mansion' for 4.75 million at the end of last year. This building was acquired in the same way and at around the same time as 47 e3rd, but this building, at 60 e3rd, was owned by an LLC in which they were the major partners. The building at 47 e3rd was also owned by an LLC, but the deed was transferred, for $0 to the Economakises as the individual owners, which allowed them to bring an owner occupancy proceeding against the tenants. This is public information, available at the city's dept of finance.

60 e3rd st was occupied when it sold for 4.75 million. Though it is very likely that they did not expect the 47 e3rd tenants to take them to court, the price that this building would command "delivered vacant' would make this endeavor "worth it" to them.

How advisable will it be to encourage tenants to challenge an owner who claims a whole building for personal use now? I'm afraid that this ruling has only accelerated a trend that was well underway already.

Ellen:

I am sure the Economakises, being second generation New York City landlords, knew exactly what they were getting into when they undertook to convert the building into a single family residence -- it would take a lot of time and a lot of money with no guarantee of success in the end. Even if the building could be delivered vacant tomorrow, the universe of buyers would be limited because the building has already been altered into some weird combination of private residence and apartment building.

It is almost always advisable to encourage Rent Controlled and Rent Stabilized tenants to challenge an owner seeking their apartment for personal use; there are several defenses to these holdovers and usually a financial incentive for the tenant. But for one case I lost at trial over 20 tenants I have represented in owner use cases either kept their original apartment, got another apartment from the same landlord at the same rent or got bought out.