Last spring, Epifania Nuñez started receiving notices from her landlord saying she was behind on rent for her Bed-Stuy apartment. “I knew that I didn’t owe anything,” says Nuñez, a home attendant and mother of five who has been in the rent-stabilized apartment since 2004. But Nuñez is a Section 8 tenant, and her landlord, Jay Zed LLC, had failed an annual inspection, which resulted in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development suspending payment for the portion of her rent that’s covered by the city. (Documents attached to the case reference open violations like issues with the front-door lock and defective smoke detectors.) By law, Section 8 tenants can’t be evicted over this, but her landlord kept sending bills and messages of nonpayment all the same. “The landlord was very adamant about me paying the rent,” says Nuñez, whom I spoke with through a translator. She worried she’d be evicted for a situation that really had nothing to do with her. “It was very stressful.”
Nuñez’s landlord ended up taking her to housing court, and the lawyer making the case against her was Christina Smyth, one of Mayor Eric Adams’s appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board. As part of her work on the case, Smyth submitted a rent ledger that, whether Smyth realized it or not, clearly showed Nuñez paying the portion of the rent she was responsible for and, in fact, getting overcharged by the landlords since the summer of 2021. When the Legal Services lawyers representing Nuñez pointed this out, Smyth doubled down on the petition, claiming Nuñez was $5,230 behind on rent. The case was ultimately dismissed. In the end, it turned out the landlord actually owed Nuñez $3,055 in rent credit.
According to Nuñez’s lawyers, this was something of a pattern for Smyth, whose firm does debt-collection work for owners. In a federal lawsuit filed at the end of May in Eastern District Court, they identified at least three other cases in the last few years in which Smyth’s firm sued tenants for the Section 8 portion of the rent that they did not owe. In Nuñez’s case, Smyth also failed to include in the lawsuit that Nuñez was a Section 8 tenant, which is legally required. Legal Services believes there are likely more — overall, Smyth’s firm filed 200 lawsuits seeking rent in 2023. Nuñez’s suit alleges that her landlord and Smyth violated the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act by “systematically” filing lawsuits against tenants for rent that they don’t owe. “These debt collectors treat New York City’s housing courts like the Wild West,” says Emma Caterine, a consumer-protection attorney at Ahmad Keshavarz, who is also representing Nuñez in federal court. ”They just take advantage of judicial chaos.” (Smyth didn’t respond to requests for comment; Jay Zed LLC could not be reached.)
Cases like the ones Smyth took up against Nuñez are legally baseless, but often, the threat itself is the point. Many tenants, afraid of losing their housing, will just pay. At one point, Nuñez considered entering into a payment plan with her landlord to stop the notices. It “would have left me with barely anything,” she says. (Smyth, who pushed for higher increases of stabilized rents earlier this month, cited financial hardship for landlords as the reason: “Advancing a rent adjustment in line with inflation is the bare minimum.”) Nuñez’s lawyers see this practice as a form of tenant harassment and a de facto debt-collection mill. “It is a pretty damning fact that a Mayor Adams appointee of the Rent Guidelines board is involved in efforts to wrongfully get money from people, or evict people, who are primarily working class,” says Amanda Perez, attorney at Legal Services NYC. The issue, instead, is with the landlords: The nonpayment is a matter of “their client’s own failure to maintain the rental units properly,” Perez adds. But the burden still ends up with the tenants. ”How many tenants end up signing up for a payment plan or paying money that they don’t actually owe just to avoid eviction court?”
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