Ahmet Nejat Ozsu won’t budge. Because for 15 years, he has lived in the same apartment — a one-bedroom with an enviable private deck on the top floor of a building on the Upper West Side.
The 52-year-old Ozsu’s refusal to leave his Manhattan apartment is preventing a global real estate development investment firm from moving forward on a $70 million condo deal involving his building.
Ozsu says he is legally entitled to continue living in his apartment for 15 years. However, his new landlord, the Naftali Group, disagrees and is now suing Ozsu and his lawyer for more than $25 million in response to their resistance and defense of it.
“He has a legal right to stay on the premises under ERAP,” Ozsu’s attorney, Adam Leitman Bailey said referencing the New York State’s pandemic-era Emergency Rental Assistance Program, under which Ozsu may be allowed to live in the unit for another full year or more.
Naftali accuses Bailey mounted a media war when a quick settlement deal didn’t come through, inviting reporters into Ozsu’s home to force the developer’s hand.
“Unable to quickly extract the seven-figure payout he expects, his lawyers … have turned what should be a dispute settled according to the law into a multi-national media circus,” the complaint contends.
“[The attorney have] taken the disreputable practice of holding out for payouts to new lows.”
The developers also argue the filtration system was necessary to rid homes of construction dust and Ozsu crossed a line when he tried to get a worker arrested for installing it, the lawsuit shows.
“For ten minutes, Bailey demanded an arrest in front of the beleaguered employee,” the complaint states. “For ten minutes the police officers refused, telling Bailey that his demand to arrest Plaintiffs’ employee was ridiculous, before finally leaving with no arrest being made.”
Ozsu now demands a one million payout in order for him to leave his current home and find another place to live. To add insult to injury, he was unemployed from October 2021 to March 2022 and needed time to build up a savings account, so he would have enough cash to find another place to live on the expensive island of Manhattan.
Under normal circumstances, Ozsu might have already been evicted from the building at 215 West 84th Street. His apartment is not rent-stabilized, and like many of his neighbors, he was on a month-to-month lease that the new landlord was not obligated to renew.
But until recently, Ozsu, a freelance software engineer, was unemployed. In January, Ozsu applied for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a state program created during the pandemic to help tenants pay overdue rent.
In most cases, a tenant cannot be evicted while their application is open. If Ozsu’s request for aid is approved, he could be entitled to stay in the apartment for at least another year — time he says he’ll need to build up savings from a job he began in March to meet the income requirements of other rental buildings.
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Sources: AWM, Daily Mail