David Griffiths, whose wife Katy is pregnant, was told that the lease on his Queens apartment would not be renewed. As a result, the couple moved from a "luxury tower" to a "Brooklyn walkup," according to the New York Times.
No matter how luxurious the tower, I bet it has an elevator, which beats the heck out of a walkup. Especially when you are pregnant. Oh, and after you have the baby. Ever try getting a stroller, a kid AND groceries up five flights of stairs? It's really fun. And by "really fun" I mean "a recipe for back injury."
So why was the couple tossed out, with the landlord requesting that they… never… return? Because Mr. Griffiths said unkind things online about the landlord, Rockrose Development Corporation. (Allegedly. He was evicted for this reason allegedly.)
Griffiths claims that a Rockrose employee told him, "Dave, we understand that you’re not happy living here, so we made the decision for you." Rockrose denies this, although they do admit that they decline to renew about 10 tenants every year for being, well, annoying. Rockrose's senior vice president for marketing, Sofia Estevez, uses the words "hothead and a troublemaker." (Non-rent regulated apartment dwellers do not have to be offered lease renewals; it's only the person paying $300/month for an Upper West Side two bedroom that can't be thrown out – but I digress.) Estevez told that Times that there was no evidence that Griffiths had been a troublemaker, but – and here's the kicker – "that a Rockrose employee does monitor tenant complaints on the Web."
Monitoring customer complaints can be a good thing. For example, Comcast employee Frank Eliason is, as one blogger put it, "helping Comcast suck a little bit less" by responding to complaints via Twitter. But if Rockrose actually declined to renew a lease because of something someone wrote about them online, that's a really bad idea. An even worse idea is telling the tenant that.
There's another part of this, of course, which is that perhaps it's not such a good idea to be posting comments about your landlord online. It may be legal but why bother?
The issue with the wife being pregnant makes it more interesting, since that will probably help the couple get some sympathy votes that they might not otherwise receive. It's one thing for a landlord to tell some dopey 23-year-old to get lost. But a mom-to-be? Watch out. (Note: that is, obviously, not a legal opinion.)
Source: NY Times
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