: 1245343501

A portion of the lawsuit filed by 10 tenants in several apartment buildings owned by Vantage Properties has withstood the company’s legal challenges and will move forward. At issue is whether Vantage has been harassing its tenants to move out of their apartments to get a higher turnover on its rent controlled properties.

The plaintiffs accuse the company of baseless non-payment-of-rent proceedings, arbitrary refusal to accept on-time rent, and bogus non-primary-residency claims. Vantage has strenuously denied all charges and has said it is merely following the laws that forbid subletting and defending its legal rights as a property owner.

The decision, available online under index No. 105197/2008 through the New York WebCrims Web site, was issued May 26 and does not cast ultimate judgment on the facts of the case. The court was asked whether the charges should be thrown out before the trial, and “must liberally construe the [tenants’] complaint, accept as true all the facts alleged in the complaint and accord plaintiff [also the tenants] the benefit of every possible inference.”

Under those stipulations, New York County Supreme Court Judge Martin Shulman dismissed the tenants’ claim to hold Vantage president Neil Rubler and director Robert Odell personally liable in the case.

Judge Shulman also threw out the claim against Vantage as a consumer protection issue, arguing that the tenant/landlord relationship was fundamentally not a consumer relationship. The judge went on to say the statute was inapplicable because while “[i]t may be quite true that Plaintiffs were frustrated, aggravated, emotionally distressed and/or even fearful about Defendants’ activities… they were not fooled.”

“To reiterate,” the Judge wrote, “there is not a single allegation in the [complaint] that Plaintiffs were actually deceived and suffered an actual injury therefrom.”

The judge did permit the lawsuit to go forward based on Local Law 7, better known as the Tenant Protection Act, which passed the City Council in 2008.

The judge said Vantage tried to “implicitly characterize Plaintiffs’ argument as a torch and pitch fork mob mentality response to Defendants’ right to pursue its contractual and statutory remedies for substantial lease breaches.” He said the company had argued that these 10 isolated cases out of over 4,000 tenants in their portfolio did not constitute a pattern of harassment. The judge disagreed, arguing that such an interpretation would make a single tenant “incapable of pleading, let alone prevailing, on a harassment cause of action.”

Having settled the business at hand, the Judge then went on to write, “This court cannot conclude this part of the discussion without a final comment.[…] [W]ithout charging Defendants with discriminatory conduct, the [complaint] and Plaintiffs’ counsel’s papers highlight the fact that Plaintiffs are Spanish speaking immigrants or persons of color. Perhaps this group of tenants was selected ‘to be especially sympathetic and appealing.’”