The New York City Housing Authority’s decision to exclude from one of its apartments the son of a 69-year-old tenant upon whom both the tenant and his 5-year-old son depend for “daily living” assistance must be set aside as “shock[ing] to the court’s conscience,” a unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, has ruled.
Both the housing authority and the trial court judge had concluded that the exclusion of tenant Juanita Matos’ 39-year-old son was justified by his guilty pleas in 2007 to charges arising from two separate incidents, one accusing him of stealing a pair of radio speakers from a car and the other of gun possession.
