NY Renters’ Hurricane Sandy Class Action Lawsuit Tossed

A group of New York property management companies have escaped a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Manhattan tenants who were seeking reduced rent based on claims that the landlords violated their buildings’ warranty of habitability following Hurricane Sandy.

On Dec. 10, Justice Shirley Kornreich of the New York Supreme Court dismissed the case, ruling that a class action lawsuit was not proper for this situation because there are too many different factors at issue.

“The question with which this court must grapple is how the vehicle of a class action can be used when so much of the damages sought — and <i>damages</i> are really all that is at issue — turn on fact specific inquiries, based on myriad variables such as where each building is located, how badly it was affected by the Storm, what mitigation efforts were made by the landlord, the terms of each tenant’s lease, and so much more,” Kornreich wrote.

Each property addressed the inhabitability issue differently — some provided copious services to offset the inconvenience of not having electricity and some did not.

“Though plaintiffs correctly aver that certain factors such as electricity outages, can be determined on a class-wide basis because they can be gleaned from publicly available data, there is simply no way to make class-wide determinations about landlords’ mitigation efforts or the effects of the outages in each area or, for that matter, each building,” the Justice wrote.

Even “the smallest possible class — a class comprised of tenants in a single building — may be no more viable than any other possible class,” she wrote.

However, the Justice did agree to let plaintiffs who live in the same building to bring an amended complaint before the court for consideration to be filed in 20 days by plaintiff Briana Adler, who lives in a luxury apartment complex in Manhattan. Adler claims that she went six days without electricity in her apartment during and following the storm.

The other two plaintiffs — Perri Steiner, who lived in the Stuyvesant Building, and Lauren Shoenfeld, who lives in the Washington Irving House, both in Manhattan — had their proposed lawsuits dismissed entirely because they vacated their homes during the time that the services in their apartment buildings were limited, and were, therefore, not subject to the conditions they complain of.

The judge said that the plaintiffs cannot file lawsuits against the listed property managers that were named as defendants in the case because they are not the landlords and cannot be held responsible for the warranty of habitability.

As non-landlords, the Justice also ruled that Ogden Cap Properties LLC, Solil Management LLC and Sol Goldman Investments LLC couldn’t be held responsible for the unjust enrichment allegations either.

The plaintiffs are represented by Barbara J. Hart, Thomas Skelton and Scott V. Papp of Lowey Dannenberg Cohen & Hart PC and the Law Office of Harold M. Hoffman.

The NY Hurricane Sandy Renter Class Action Lawsuit is Adler, et al. v. Odgen Cap Properties LLC, et al., Case No. 650292/2013, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York.