The owner of the Imperial Court Hotel, at 307 West 79th Street, has been issued with fines amounting to $290,000, The Real Deal first reported.
The basis of these fines come from illegal short-term rentals, which a group of permanent tenants first sued the hotel owner for in 2016. Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal has been trying to get the hotel to stop offering short-term rentals since 2007, the publication states.
According to The Real Deal, the parties reached an agreement this week. All short-term rentals will be stopped, and the owner of the hotel, Michael Edelstein, will pay $290,000 in fines.
Linda Rosenthal said she would demand the city and state re-regulate the apartments so that they could be rented out to permanent tenants.
A decade fighting & we won! Imperial Court’s reign of terror is over! Huge shoutout to @GoddardRiv + tenants like @RichardAmelius for their fearlessness.
We can’t stop now: we still have 99 units of vacant affordable housing to recapture.
I’m looking at ? Mr. Edelstein. https://t.co/blb934Q6BR
— Linda B. Rosenthal (@LindaBRosenthal) August 10, 2020
Featured images via Google Street View
So we live in a bizarro world where elected officials okay secretive deals to turn entire hotels into homeless daycare centers, endangering nearby residents, but sue to prevent hotels from renting to paying customers.