Word: courtly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When new owners took over an apartment building in the New York City borough of Queens, they promptly set about filing eviction notices, suing nearly half of the building's tenants - some of them multiple times - within the first 16 months. That amounted to 965 court proceedings against 2,124 apartments, compared with just 50 court proceedings in the final year of the previous owner. The complaints alleged that the tenants were subletting illegally or had not paid their rent or security deposits, even though the tenants often had records proving otherwise. To the tenants, it seemed as though every...
...this process, the report explains, the investor-owners were helped by the fact that many transitional neighborhood tenants were new (and possibly undocumented) immigrants, whose lack of English fluency and legal representation put them at a disadvantage in housing court, where deals are typically hammered out with owners' lawyers before ever reaching the judges. Those actually executing these orders were often conflicted about it. "Having a large property owner as a client is great for the volume of work, but if you ask me about it morally or ethically, well, I'd rather not say," admits a housing court attorney...
...rent increases are chucked in favor or whatever the market will bear. The prospectus offered by the lead investors, Tishman Speyer and Larry Fink's asset-management fund BlackRock, imagined evicting 50% of rent-regulated tenants in just a few years. But tenants fought back and won in a court decision that also undercut plans for using city tax abatements to further sweeten returns on apartments pushed into luxury decontrol. The upshot, according to a recent Deutsche Bank analysis, is that the property, purchased in late 2006 for $5.4 billion, "would fetch less than $2 billion if sold into...
...legislators see the request for cash as the latest in a series of asset grabs by Argentina's Peronist government and a populist play ahead of next year's elections. When President Fernandez used an emergency decree to order the seizure of assets last month, opposition members obtained a court injunction to stop them...
...television series this fall. Critics have long said the trial was bungled, claiming that a 1966 bilateral treaty (SOFA), which outlines the legal rights and responsibilities of U.S. soldiers in South Korea, hinders investigations into crimes committed by American servicemen and their families in South Korea. In 1998, the court dropped charges against Patterson, handing him an 18-month prison sentence for possessing an illegal weapon and destroying evidence, from which he was released early in 1999 as part of a widespread amnesty the government granted to 2000 convicts. The court found Lee guilty of murder, sentencing him to life...