My friend on the upper west side , she was rent stabilized and when the building went coop in the late 1980s , she bought her apartment at the insider price . The older rent controlled husband and wife in the apartment directly below hers did not buy , they stayed at the cheap rent controlled rent . The husband dies in @1996, the wife gets sick in 2002, and moves to New Jersey to live with her daughter, but her grandson jumps into her now empty bed. The managing agent for the original still owner of the apartment take the grandmother to court for non primary. The grandmother via a free legal aid lawyer that the grandson found initially claims he’s in the apartment to help out the grandmother. She’s in outpatient rehab in nj and will be back living in the apartment soon. Then they change the story and he claims succession rights saying he’s been in the apartment for three years , living there and helping his grandmother, there was a trial , he had almost no paper trail to the apartment. 5 residents , including my friend testified that they never saw him and his grandmother together . He had a free legal aid lawyer or some kind of community center low fee cheap lawyer.

You tell me who are the gamers of the system and who represents them for free. A complete waste of court time for this scammer. My friend was a bit reluctant to testify but the grandson was a complete ahole. Everyone in the building hated him. He asked people to testify for him and no one knew who he was. They all knew the grandmother. He was responsible for her leaving to get her bed empty. He was a deadbeat .

Succession claims are the tenant’s burden to prove precisely because the landlord would not have enough information to know whether the relative has stayed with the tenant long enough to be entitled to succeed. Even if the tenant has a valid claim, they apparently never sought to be named as a co-tenant on the lease, despite claiming to have lived there for 2 years.