Elizabeth Hirschhorn, the Brentwood tenant who did not pay rent for her luxury Airbnb rental for 570 days, moved out of the unit on Friday.
I know it’s sexier to paint this as a nightmare tenant story, but there’s way more to the story. She didn’t just move in after an AirBnB stay decide to live there rent free. She had a lease, and there were repairs required in the unit that the landlord refused to do. So she sued him and stopped paying rent to cover the cost of repairs.
Then it turned out the landlord didn’t have a license to rent the unit, so the lease was void.
I don’t know either of the parties personally, so maybe the tenant was being unreasonable. But if you want to be a landlord, you absolutely need to have all of your paperwork in order, and you need to keep the unit in good working order. We should not have any sympathy for an owner who illegally leases a property with mold and unpermitted improvements when his tenant takes advantage of the situation.
In sure it’ll all come out in the court room. It looks like they’re both sueing each other
The story I had heard was that the unit wasn’t legal but she was also preventing him or repairmen from accessing the unit to fix it.
From what I’ve read of this story, I have no sympathy for either of them.
I have even less for someone who buys a property with the intent to rent it out.
NYC recently banned short term rentals, but prior to that, our immediate neighboring apartment was an AirBnB for about two years and let me tell you it was absolute hell to live next to. The other five apartments in the building all suffered. It literally brought us together.
The host was never there, and the guests very frequently trashed the place, loitered in the hallway, and held parties on work nights. There was SO MUCH indoor smoking. They would constantly keep us up all night since their party room was next to our bedroom. On various occasions drunk guests would try to force their way into our apartment. We once had to call the cops on a bunch of minors who rented it out to throw a rager (I hate doing this because ACAB, but we had work the next day and warned them multiple times, plus they were underage drinking). We also had to call the cops a few times over domestic disputes that got violent. One time, the guest went into the basement and flipped the breakers for the whole building because his power wasn’t working (likely the host wasn’t paying his bills). We CONSTANTLY had strangers follow us into the building, pester us to let them in, or buzz us shitfaced drunk at 3am. This all just scratches the surface of what happened, believe me when I say it was a literal nightmare.
We reported it to the city a million times and they neglected to do anything because they really couldn’t. The Airbnb was bringing in $500/day, enough to pay the $3000/month rent easily, so they had more rights than any actual tenant in the building. This one host also “ran” five other airbnbs in the area.
I have absolutely ZERO sympathy for land leeches. I actively spite Airbnb hosts. And fuck Airbnb for worsening the housing crisis for profit (for a time, there were more airbnbs than apartments for rent).
