Case Story #3

The Doctor Is In.

We all know that a medical intern works long hours. Some hospitals arrange for housing so that their interns can be at their beck and call, within a few hundred yards of the operating room.

One New Yorker maintained a rent stabilized apartment in Manhattan for twenty years. After she graduated from medical school, she interned at a Brooklyn hospital. The hospital provided housing on the campus. She lived by the hospital for three years.

Issue

The landlord claimed that the doctor failed to maintain her Manhattan apartment as her primary residence. The landlord hired an investigator to telephone the doctor and the doctor’s mother. By posing as a bank messenger who had to deliver a check to the doctor, the investigator was able to discover the doctor’s Brooklyn address. The landlord then sued for eviction in housing court, claiming nonprimary residence.

Approach

We first had to resolve whether, under the law, a medical intern qualified as a student. The law protects students, and does not consider them to have abandoned their apartments if they leave town for school. On closer examination, it turns out that a medical intern could not be classified as a student; an internship is certainly part of a doctor’s training, but it is not academic because it happens after medical school.

Instead, we concluded that the medical internship is more akin to being temporarily away from home for business purposes – another noted exception to the primary residence requirement.

Results

We sought an early resolution by laying out our entire case to the landlord’s attorney upon the first court date. After having seen the evidence that the doctor lived in staff housing, and that upon the end of her internship she would lose her right to live there, the landlord cut its losses and discontinued its case. The doctor not only preserved her home, but saved time and money in the early resolution of the dispute.