Ask Real Estate
By Ronda Kaysen
A Well-Connected Tenant
I live in a co-op building with some rent-regulated tenants. One of them happens to work for a city agency that deals with housing. He routinely uses his position to file complaints against the building, circumventing our internal system for making repairs. His actions tarnish our building’s reputation: Now our building has a list of complaints with the city, even though management would have resolved those problems immediately if he had come to it directly, as other tenants do. What can we do?
Upper West Side
"No matter how you slice it, the correction of violations is ultimately a building owner’s responsibility,” said Lucas A. Ferrara, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and a Manhattan real estate lawyer.
Rent-regulated tenants are not usually bound to the terms of the shareholders’ proprietary lease, so your neighbor is probably not required to follow your building’s internal process for making requests for repairs, said Bradley Scott Silverbush, a Manhattan lawyer who represents landlords.
He is merely exercising his rights as a rent-regulated tenant. By doing so, he is protecting his health and safety and perhaps that of his neighbors as well.
But the city does have a conflicts-of-interest rule that applies to all employees. If you think your neighbor might somehow be misusing his position by, say, making frivolous, unsubstantiated complaints to harass the co-op, you could file a complaint with the city’s Department of Investigation or the Conflicts of Interest Board.
But before you do so, you might want to check with legal counsel at the agency where he works to find out more about its official policy regarding employee conduct.
“If the conduct is unreasonable, and falls outside the scope of what the agency permits, you may have a legitimate complaint,” Mr. Silverbush said.
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A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2016, on page RE9 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Contractor Does Harm
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