A teeny, very important, tidbit from Barbara Ross in yesterday’s Daily News:
Landlords who did not give downtown tenants rent refunds for the days that Hurricane Sandy made their apartments uninhabitable are the target of a new class-action lawsuit filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
In the first statewide class-action suit growing out of the storm, the litigants said state law requires apartments—and co-ops—to be habitable, and that means they must have electric power.
“You can’t charge rent for the days when you’re without power,” said attorney Barbara Hart of White Plains.
This is called a “warrant of habitability,” and it applies to all of us, even us shareholders in co-ops. Indeed, it is a factor in my own lawsuit, although in my case it was the Skush-O’Brien Board of Directors, not Sandy, that caused the problem.