In 2019 the newly elected, left-leaning, State Legislature passed the Housing Stability Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which literally turned almost a half-century of landlord and tenant law on its head. This law was clearly designed to help tenants and to make it more difficult for landlords to commence or follow through on any type of eviction proceedings. Notwithstanding the chaos that it created in NYC’s Housing Court, which was already struggling with an overwhelming caseload, no one could predict that in March 2020, the entire NYS court system would come to a grinding halt with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In time, as the courts slowly became operational to a degree, the methodology of dealing with cases in every court was permanently altered.
In a new effort to protect tenants from eviction as the world was coping in virtually complete lockdown, the woke Legislature, in its “infinite” wisdom, passed legislation that would indefinitely prevent landlords from either moving forward with matters commenced pre-pandemic or initiating new ones.
