*Editor’s Note: Following the publication of the below article, the New York State Legislature signed into law the Housing Stability and Rent Protection Act, which impacts this article in the following way: No longer is the statutory notice to cure a three-day notice. All notices by statute must now be 14 days.
Tenants often successfully use a landlord’s failure to comply with notice requirements of a lease to seek dismissal of summary proceedings. See Parkchester Apts. Co. v. Walker, 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 738, at *2 (Civ. Ct. Bronx Cty. 1995) (dismissing non-payment petition because landlord failed to prove that proper predicate notice had been served, which the court held was a jurisdictional prerequisite to a non-payment petition). It is important for tenants to know, however, that, depending on the language of their lease, they may not be able to rely on the notice period provided in conditional limitation provisions as a defense in a non-payment proceeding. This is true even if the only notice provision contained in the entire lease is that found in the conditional limitation provision. Rather, a landlord can elect not to enforce a conditional limitation related to non-payment of rent and instead, commence a non-payment proceeding upon only the three-day notice required by New York’s Real Property Actions and Proceedings Laws (RPAPL), leaving tenants a shorter window to respond to landlord’s claims.
