Court Opinion

ID: 9520690
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:46:53.877788+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:46:38.263004
License: Public Domain

R.S. Smith, J.
(dissenting). The Rent Regulation Reform Act of 1997 amended the Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 to provide: “Where the amount of rent set forth in the annual rent registration statement filed four years prior to the most recent registration statement is not challenged within four years of its filing, neither such rent nor service of any registration shall be subject to challenge at any time thereafter” (Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 [Administrative Code of City of NY] § 26-516 [a]). Today, the majority upholds a challenge to the amount of rent set forth in a registration statement, although the challenge was brought more than four years after the registration statement was filed. If I had written the statute, I would now be wondering what words I could possibly have used to make my meaning clearer.
The majority tries to reconcile its holding with the statute on the theory that the lease containing the challenged rent (entered into more than seven years before the challenge was brought) was in violation of public policy and “void at its inception” (majority op at 181). Therefore, the majority reasons, “the rent. . . was . . . illegal, [and] the 1996 rent registration statement listing this illegal rent was also a nullity” (majority op at 181). This approach destroys the effectiveness of the four-year time limitation, which has no point unless it protects illegal rents against challenge. If a rent is not illegal, a challenge will fail anyway and the four-year limit is unnecessary.
Plainly, the true basis for the majority’s holding is the outrageousness of the landlord’s conduct in this case. This is apparent from the torrent of adjectives—“fraudulent,” “willful,” “egregious,” “unscrupulous,” “fictitious,” “exorbitant,” “dishonest”—that the majority finds room for in a single paragraph (majority op at 181). Every one of the adjectives is deserved, but none of them justifies ignoring the statute. Statutes of limitations and similar enactments must, by their *183very nature, sometimes protect outrageous conduct. Many wrongs greater than the one done in this case have gone unremedied because the victim did not seek a remedy promptly enough. Here, the subtenants’ remedy was to challenge the rent established by the 1992 lease within four years, and nothing prevented them from doing so. If the landlord had somehow tricked them into delaying their lawsuit, the landlord might be equitably estopped from relying on the lapse of time, but nothing of that sort happened.
Indeed, the subtenants who brought this case are less the landlord’s victims than its coconspirators. The subtenants agreed to pay some six times the legal rent for the apartment in question, and to make the false representation that it was not their primary residence, for the obvious reason that they could not get this highly desirable apartment any other way. The real victim of the conspiracy was the unknown person who, but for the misconduct of all the parties to this case, could have rented an apartment in the Apthorp in 1992 for a bit more than $500 per month.
I acknowledge that the subtenants, despite their unclean hands, were entitled to challenge the unlawful rent that they agreed to pay—but they had four years to do so and no more. I see no good reason for the majority’s decision to ignore the four-year limitation so that one wrongdoer may benefit at the expense of another. I would therefore modify the Appellate Division’s order and would hold that the $2,496 rent set forth in the 1996 registration statement may not be challenged.
Judges G.B. Smith, Ciparick, Rosenblatt and Graffeo concur with Chief Judge Kaye; Judge R.S. Smith dissents in a separate opinion in which Judge Read concurs.
Order affirmed, etc.