The 234 Apartment

T wo weeks ago, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge handed down a decision designed to strike fear in the hearts of landlords. Justice James d’Auguste ordered that an independent receiver be appointed to manage two Midtown residential buildings where the landlords allegedly allowed illegal Airbnb rentals to occur. The case, which began when the city sued the landlords in February 2015, has become one of the battlegrounds in a larger war between city enforcement agencies and short- term rental sites like Airbnb. Airbnb, which was recently valued at $31 billion, refuses to release the exact addresses of hosts who break the law by renting their entire apartment for less than 30 days without being present. Without the addresses and names of Airbnb violators , the city mostly targets the owners of buildings that rack up the most illegal hotel complaints from 311 calls and the New York City Department of Buildings. “This entire model—and it was intentional [by the city]—is complaint-drive...

Google Fiber (Photo: Custom) Last week, U.S. District Judge David J. Hale dismissed what became known in Louisville as the " Google Fiber case ," possibly setting a precedent for similar cases across the country. The case was brought by BellSouth Telecommunications LLC , which operates as AT&T Kentucky, because of Louisville Metro Government 's " One Touch Make Ready " ordinance. It passed in February 2016. The legislation gave third- party internet service providers (Google Fiber, specifically) unfettered access to utility poles in the city — including those owned by AT&T — so the companies could run fiber and other cable for their own networks. The city saw the legislation as an important step toward improving Louisville's internet landscape . AT&T sued Metro Government , contending that it was inappropriate and unfair for the city to make such an ordinance because AT&T (BellSouth) owned the poles and therefore controlled the right of w...

Google Fiber won a major coup in its battle to simplify the pole attachment process via the One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky, as a district court dismissed AT&T’s suit against the metro government. Louisville’s OTMR ordinance, which was passed in February 2016, would help ease Google Fiber ’s and other competitors’ movement into the Louisville broadband market by allowing them to move and install their own wiring on poles instead of waiting for AT&T and other service providers to conduct this work. This process, which is known as make-ready, requires new entrants like Google Fiber to wait months for existing providers like AT&T and Comcast to move their lines themselves. RELATED: Google Fiber seeks new sales, operations staff for Louisville, Kentucky AT&T, the incumbent telco in Louisville, filed a suit against Nashville, Tennessee, last year. In the suit (PDF), AT&T argued that the Nashville city council is overstepping its bound...

September 13, 2010 | By Julie Scharper, The Baltimore Sun A former tenant is suing a Cockeysville apartment complex for $100,000 over a bedbug infestation , claiming that the property owners did not properly warn her about and exterminate the blood-sucking insects and that she suffered "scarring and disfigurement" from the bites. The tenant, Amber Croshaw, contends that she suffered "embarrassment, mental and emotional distress, and fear about the presence of bedbugs that affects [her] to this day" as a result of the infestation in the apartment in the Briarcliff Apartments East complex in Cockeysville, according to the lawsuit filed this month in Baltimore County Circuit Court . Dan Smith, chief financial officer for Gebhardt Management Inc., which manages the complex, dismissed the claims as "baseless" and said that workers eradicated the infestation promptly. "We've been in this business for 40-some years. We take care of our problems,...

A Queens landlord 's quest to evict a cigarette- puffing single mom and her disabled daughter has gone up in smoke. For three years, rent- controlled tenant Lynn Blue had a case hanging over her, alleging she was a nuisance who needed to leave the Ridgewood apartment where she grew up. Blue not only smoked, but also had people constantly coming and going and left trash, according to the case filed by landlord Milena Jovic . A Queens jury sided with Jovic in 2015 and Blue said the verdict put her on a verge of a breakdown. The trial judge threw out the verdict, and the landlord appealed. But last week, three appellate judges ruled the trial judge was right to toss the jury decision. It was "like a mountain was lifted off me," Blue, 49, told the Daily News on Friday. "It felt like validation, you know. Somebody heard me." Jovic had accused Blue of smoking marijuana and cigarettes. Blue insisted she only us...

When he was homeless for 13 years along the Springwater Corridor Trail , Jeff Nelson used methamphetamine daily. Another man, who calls himself Gadget and lives on the streets of inner Southeast Portland, says he uses it once a day. Why meth? Both men see the drug as a weapon in the three-season fight against Portland's bone-chilling damp. "It's the antifreeze," Gadget says. "To be serious, it kept us alive, because when there was no place to sleep, you'd walk around all night to keep warm," Nelson recalls. "Heroin is a fucking bad epidemic , but out there on the trail, [it] was meth." Much of Oregon's recent policy conversation about drug abuse has focused on opioid use by people on the margins—especially after Multnomah County filed suit this month against several major pharmaceutical companies for peddling pain pills . Yet in interviews during the past year with roughly 100 houseless people living in camps and on Portl...