N.Y. Landlord-Tenant Wars Spur Both Sides to Seek Help

"The systematic nature is what's new," said Benjamin Dulchin, the deputy director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which represents nonprofit housing groups. "This is not harassment as an aberration, but harassment as a business model."

Advocates point to landlords such as Pinnacle Group, which took steps to evict about a quarter of its 21,000 tenants over the last several years.

Among them was Karen Flannagan.

A 54-year-old insurance claims examiner, she and her daughter moved in with her mother in 1997, after her father died. When her mother died in 2004, the landlord asked her to show documents proving she had been a resident in the Harlem apartment for at least two years, and therefore had the right to inherit the rent-controlled place.

She says she complied, but Pinnacle launched eviction proceedings anyway. She was called to court about 10 times over more than a year, she said, always producing the same documents such as tax records and her driver's license to prove that she lived there.

"It amounts to harassment," she said. "I'm still trying to get over the death of my mother, and every day I'm worried I'm going to come home and have a padlock on my door. Most people would get tired of this and move out."

Pinnacle dropped the case several years ago and subsequently said in a statement that it regretted any inconvenience it had caused Flannagan. She is now part of a class-action federal racketeering lawsuit against the landlord.

Kenneth K. Fisher, a former city councilman and attorney for Pinnacle, said that the company certainly makes mistakes. "But the claims it has engaged in widespread or deliberate harassment is simply bogus," he said.