Landlord Harassment of Commercial Tenants

Last month, we considered the problem of landlord harassment of commercial tenants, looking first at a law that recently went on the books in New York City to provide a private right of action by tenants against offending landlords; known as the Non-Residential Tenant Harassment law, it is codified as Chapter 9, Title 22 of the New York City Administrative Code. We also began discussion of a case out of bankruptcy court, In re Lansaw v. Zokaites, 2015 Bankr. LEXIS 106 (2015) (affirmed in Zokaites v. Lansaw, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33118 (W.D. Pa., Mar. 15, 2016), which deals with one landlord's bad behavior toward his commercial tenant. As discussed last month, in Lansaw, the tenants (and bankruptcy petitioners) complained of certain harassment that occurred prior to the filing of their bankruptcy petition. They failed to obtain relief on those claims, however, as the court found that the landlord's behavior pre-petition, though reprehensible, fell short of crossing the line into lawlessness. Let us turn now to the court's analysis of the landlord's post–bankruptcy-petition behavior.