Court found that DOB letter of objection exception to the Multiple Dwelling law was no longer valid. On March 17, 2016, New York Appellate Court reversed a Lower Court’s Decision and thus denying Grand Imperial LLC’s Petition for a Letter of No Objection to rent its property for shorter than the legally required time period. Grand Imperial LLC owns a Single-Room Occupancy building, located at 307 West 79th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with predominantly affordable housing units. (more…)
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman speaking at New York Law School, March 18, 2014. Image credit: New York Law School
Upper West Side developer must pay $540,000 dollars in settlement costs. On June 6, 2016 New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced reaching a settlement for $540,000 with 165 West 91st Street Holdings, LLC for the loss of two rent-controlled apartments in an Upper West Side building, while it was being converted into a condominium, as a result of prohibited agreements to buy-out tenancy rights. The LLC owns an apartment building at 165 West 91st Street in Manhattan. (more…)
Zoning resolution prohibited apartment dweller from placing illuminated “Peace” sign in 17th floor window. In 2010 Brigitte Vosse placed an illuminated “Peace” sign in the window of her seventeenth-floor condo in The Ansonia at 2109 Broadway in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Department of Buildings fined her $800 for violating a zoning ordinance restricting illuminated signs in her neighborhood at heights above forty feet. Vosse argued that the City placed a content-based restriction on her speech, citing an exemption in the Zoning Resolution for flags, banners, or pennants of a civic, philanthropic, educational, or religious nature. Vosse also argued even if content-neutral, the regulation was an unreasonable “time, place, and manner” restriction on her speech.
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Court agreed DHS met their burden under the Fair Share Criteria. In 2012 the Department of Homeless Services opened Freedom House, a 200-family homeless shelter at 316-330 West 95th Street in Manhattan’s Upper West Side on an emergency contract. When the emergency contract expired, then-Comptroller John C. Liu declined to register the permanent contract. A community group, Neighborhood In The Nineties, filed an Article 78 petition to enjoin the Comptroller from registering the contract. Neighborhood argued their area, located in Manhattan Community Board 7, was over-saturated with support housing and to add more would violate the Fair Share Criteria.
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Developer sought to extinguish deed restriction on Upper West Side property. The City, through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Asset Sales Program, sold 330 West 86th Street in Manhattan to the building’s tenants. Because the property had been designated as an Urban Development Action Area Project, the deed stated that the tenants could only rehabilitate or conserve the existing dwellings, or construct new dwellings permitted by existing zoning laws. The deed also required the tenants to remove all building code violations and hazardous conditions. The tenants, rather than correcting the violations, sold the property to 330 West 86th Street LLC, a developer who allegedly sought to demolish the building to construct a high-rise apartment building. (more…)
