Under this pre-HSTPA scenario, once a tenant was evicted the owner might have
strong incentive to deny them the opportunity to regain possession, even if it meant
walking away from imminent (or, more likely, soonish) payment of even twenty or thirty
thousand dollars. Post-HSTPA, the value of a vacant apartment is a lot less. Most of the
time it will be rented to the next tenant with a rent increased by only a few percentage
points (HSTPA also eliminated so-called "vacancy increases"). It almost certainly won't
be deregulated. Thus, absent other factors (e.g. the tenant is otherwise a nuisance, the
owner has a family member it wants the apartment for, the owner would rather take its
chances with another, heretofore unknown, tenant who might never fall into rent arrears),
much of the time it will probably make sense for the owner to agree to additional
opportunities for the tenant to pay the arrears and maintain the tenancy.
Here, Petitioner makes no specific argument as to why Respondent should not be
restored to possession upon payment of the arrears, other than to basically argue that it
just took too long to get paid. The court is not minimizing this concern (see Matter of
Lafayette Boyton Hsg. Corp., 135 AD3d at 525 ["Since it has no choice but to wait
however long it takes for the rent to be fully paid—here, the landlord waited two
years—without any interest being paid on the unpaid rent, it is in effect forced to
underwrite the tenancy"]). It does take "too long" for owners to get paid in almost every
nonpayment summary eviction proceeding. As noted in footnote one, the timeframes that
parties often agree to for payment of rent are usually completely arbitrary. Unlike
settlements in other civil actions, where presumably the party incurring obligations has