Most tenants experience an eviction case as something that happens to them. The landlord files, the tenant defends, and if the tenant is lucky, the case is dismissed and the ordeal ends. The tenant breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. But that framing misses something important: a tenant in an eviction proceeding is not only a defendant. A tenant can go on offense, raising claims of their own against the landlord—and those claims do not necessarily die when the landlord's case does. They can outlive it, proceed to trial on their own, and result in real relief for the tenant, long after the eviction itself is gone.
A New York decision shows exactly how this works. In Sammy Group LLC v. Collins, a landlord brought a nonpayment case against a tenant, Justin Collins. The tenant did not just defend. In his answer, he raised counterclaims—for harassment, for breach of the warranty of habitability, and for rent overcharge. The landlord's petition was dismissed. But the tenant's counterclaims survived that dismissal and went to trial on their own. And at that trial, the tenant won: the court found the landlord had committed harassment, directed the city's housing agency to record a harassment violation against the building, enjoined further harassment, imposed a civil penalty, and separately awarded the tenant relief on his habitability and overcharge claims.
The decision, Sammy Group LLC v. Collins, 2026 NY Slip Op 51134(U), was issued on July 24, 2026, by the Civil Court of the City of New York, New York County. It is a clear illustration of a principle tenants should understand: the end of the landlord's eviction case is not necessarily the end of the dispute. A tenant's properly asserted counterclaims can continue, and a tenant who comes to the eviction with claims of their own can emerge not merely having avoided eviction but having won affirmative relief against the landlord. The case also carefully illustrates the different roles that injunctions, penalties, and compensation play—and why a tenant cannot necessarily recover twice for the same underlying harm.
This guide walks through what happened, how counterclaims survive the dismissal of a landlord's petition, how the loss of essential services can support both a habitability claim and a harassment claim, the distinct functions of the different kinds of relief the court granted, and why the court declined to let the tenant recover twice for the same problem.
The case began the way countless New York landlord-tenant disputes begin: the landlord filed a nonpayment proceeding against the tenant, seeking unpaid rent and, ultimately, the tenant's removal if the rent was not paid. But the tenant's response was more than a simple denial. In his answer, the tenant asserted counterclaims—affirmative claims against the landlord, brought within the same proceeding. He claimed the landlord had breached the warranty of habitability by failing to maintain the apartment in livable condition; he claimed the landlord had harassed him; and he claimed he had been charged rent above what the law allowed, a rent overcharge.
At some point before trial, the landlord's petition—the nonpayment case itself—was dismissed. That might have seemed like the end of the matter. But it was not, because the tenant's counterclaims remained. The court proceeded to try those counterclaims over the course of several trial dates. The evidentiary record included official housing-code violations recorded against the building, emails documenting problems with gas and electrical service, and testimony about interruptions of essential services. This was not a case resting on the tenant's say-so alone; it was supported by documentation and an official record of conditions.
On that record, the court found for the tenant on his claims. It found that the landlord had committed harassment in violation of New York City's tenant-harassment law. As a result, it directed the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development to place a Class "C" harassment violation against the building—the most serious category of violation. It enjoined the landlord from further harassment. And it imposed a civil penalty of $2,000, which was the low end of the penalty range the law provides for harassment, payable as the law directs rather than to the tenant.
Separately, the court awarded the tenant relief on his habitability claim, including a rent abatement that reflected the periods during which conditions—among them a lack of cooking gas—made the apartment less than fully habitable. And it awarded the tenant relief on his overcharge claim, having determined the legal regulated rent and found that the tenant had been charged more than the law allowed.
One further ruling is especially instructive. The tenant had received a rent abatement for the gas condition as part of the habitability award. He also sought to recover for that same gas problem as compensatory damages under the harassment claim. The court declined to award it twice. It had already compensated the tenant for the lack of gas through the habitability abatement, and it found no basis in the record to award a separate, additional sum for the same harm under the harassment banner. The tenant recovered fully for the gas problem—but once, not twice.
The foundational lesson of Sammy Group is procedural, and it is one many tenants never learn: a tenant in an eviction proceeding can bring their own claims, and those claims have a life independent of the landlord's case.
When a landlord brings a nonpayment or holdover proceeding, the tenant files an answer. An answer can do more than deny the landlord's allegations or raise defenses. It can assert counterclaims—affirmative claims the tenant has against the landlord, litigated within the same case. Common tenant counterclaims include breach of the warranty of habitability, harassment, and rent overcharge, which are precisely the three the tenant raised in Sammy Group. By pleading them in the answer, the tenant turns the proceeding from a one-way attack into a two-way dispute, in which the tenant is seeking relief too.
The crucial point is what happens to those counterclaims when the landlord's underlying petition goes away. A tenant might assume that if the landlord's case is dismissed, everything in the proceeding ends—that dismissal wipes the slate clean. That is not how properly asserted counterclaims work. A counterclaim is the tenant's own claim; it belongs to the tenant, not to the landlord's case. When the landlord's petition was dismissed in Sammy Group, the tenant's counterclaims did not vanish with it. They remained pending, and the court went on to try them on their own, over several trial dates, eventually granting the tenant relief. The dismissal of the landlord's case ended the landlord's effort to collect rent and evict; it did not extinguish the tenant's independent claims.
This is a genuinely important feature of how these cases work, because it means a tenant who has been harassed, who has suffered uninhabitable conditions, or who has been overcharged does not lose the chance to be made whole simply because the eviction case falls apart. The tenant's claims stand on their own footing. A landlord cannot escape accountability for harassment or overcharging by having its own petition dismissed, if the tenant has properly raised those matters as counterclaims. The dispute continues on the tenant's terms.
For a tenant, the practical lesson is twofold. First, an eviction case is an opportunity to assert your own claims, not merely to defend. If the landlord has harassed you, let the apartment fall into disrepair, or overcharged you, those are claims you can raise as counterclaims in the very proceeding the landlord started. Second, you should not assume that the dismissal of the landlord's case ends everything—if you have properly pleaded counterclaims, they can proceed, and you can still obtain relief. Raising the counterclaims in the first place is what preserves this possibility, which is a strong reason to answer an eviction case thoughtfully and completely rather than treating it as purely defensive.
A striking feature of Sammy Group is that the same underlying problem—the interruption of essential services like gas and electricity—figured in two different claims at once. The loss of services supported the tenant's habitability claim, and it also formed part of the basis for the harassment finding. Understanding how a single set of facts can feed two distinct legal theories is valuable, because the two claims protect different interests and offer different kinds of relief.
The warranty of habitability is the tenant's guarantee that a residential apartment will be fit to live in—maintained in a condition fit for human habitation, free of conditions dangerous to health and safety. When a landlord fails to provide essential services such as gas for cooking or working electrical service, the apartment falls below that standard, and the tenant is entitled to relief, typically a rent abatement reflecting the reduced value of the apartment during the period the condition persisted. The habitability claim is fundamentally about the condition of the apartment and compensating the tenant for having to live with a deficient home. It does not depend on the landlord's motive; even an innocent failure to provide services can breach the warranty.
Harassment is different in focus. New York City's tenant-harassment law targets landlord conduct intended to cause a tenant to give up their rights or leave—and that conduct can include the interruption or discontinuance of essential services. When a landlord cuts off or fails to restore services as a way of pressuring a tenant, the deprivation is not just a habitability problem; it is a tool of harassment. The harassment claim is about the landlord's conduct and its purpose—the use of deprivation as pressure—rather than merely the condition itself. That is why the same loss of services can matter twice: once as a condition that made the apartment uninhabitable (habitability), and once as conduct used to pressure the tenant (harassment).
In Sammy Group, the record of gas and electrical problems and interrupted services did double duty. It supported the habitability claim, which yielded a rent abatement for the periods the apartment lacked proper service. And it contributed to the finding that the landlord had harassed the tenant, which yielded the harassment-specific relief—the violation, the injunction, and the penalty. The facts overlapped, but the claims addressed different wrongs: the diminished habitability of the home, and the landlord's harassing use of that deprivation.
For a tenant, the lesson is to recognize that a single bad situation may give rise to more than one claim. If your landlord has cut off or failed to restore essential services, that may breach the warranty of habitability and, depending on the circumstances and the landlord's conduct, constitute harassment. Raising both can be appropriate, because they protect different interests and offer different remedies. But—as the next sections explain—the fact that one set of facts supports two claims does not mean you get paid twice for the same loss. The claims are distinct in what they address, and the relief is calibrated so that compensation is not duplicated.
Sammy Group is an unusually clear teaching case on the different kinds of relief available, because the court granted several forms at once and each does a different job. Tenants often lump all remedies together as "winning," but injunctions, civil penalties, and compensatory awards serve distinct functions, and understanding the differences clarifies what a tenant actually gets from each.
An injunction is forward-looking. When the court enjoined the landlord from further harassment, it was not compensating the tenant for past harm or punishing the landlord with a payment; it was ordering the landlord not to do something in the future. The function of an injunction is preventive—to stop the wrongful conduct from continuing or recurring. For a tenant still living in the apartment, an injunction can be among the most valuable forms of relief, because it is aimed at protecting the tenant going forward, backed by the court's authority to enforce it if the landlord violates it. It does not put money in the tenant's pocket; it changes what the landlord is allowed to do.
A civil penalty serves yet another function: public enforcement and deterrence. The $2,000 penalty the court imposed for harassment was set within a statutory range the law provides, and it is a sanction for violating the harassment law—a consequence imposed to punish and deter, vindicating the public interest in harassment-free housing. Critically, a civil penalty is generally payable as the law directs (here, in the nature of a penalty under the housing-harassment enforcement scheme), not as compensation to the tenant for the tenant's personal losses. The penalty reflects the seriousness of the violation and the policy of discouraging harassment across the board, not the measure of what this particular tenant lost. The court's choice of $2,000—the low end of the available range—reflects the court's calibration of the penalty to the conduct, which is a matter within its discretion.
The recording of a Class "C" harassment violation against the building is related to this enforcement function. It places an official mark on the building's record—the most serious category of violation—documenting the harassment finding in the city's housing records. This is not compensation to the tenant either; it is part of the regulatory consequence, flagging the building and the landlord's conduct in the public record.
Compensatory relief is the category that actually makes the tenant whole for losses suffered. The rent abatement on the habitability claim is compensatory: it reduces the rent the tenant owed to reflect the diminished value of an apartment that lacked essential services, compensating the tenant for having lived with the deficiency. The overcharge award is likewise compensatory in nature (with an enhancement where overcharging is willful): it returns to the tenant money that should never have been charged. These are the awards that address the tenant's own losses.
Seeing these functions side by side clarifies the full shape of a tenant's victory. The injunction protects the tenant going forward. The penalty and the recorded violation punish and deter the landlord and serve the public interest. The compensatory awards—the abatement and the overcharge recovery—make the tenant whole for actual losses. A tenant who understands these distinctions can appreciate what each piece of relief does and can set realistic expectations: not every favorable ruling puts money in the tenant's hands, and the parts that do are the compensatory ones, calibrated to actual loss.
The most subtle and instructive ruling in Sammy Group is the court's refusal to let the tenant recover twice for the gas problem. The tenant had already received a rent abatement for the lack of cooking gas as part of the habitability award. He also sought to recover for that same gas deprivation as compensatory damages under the harassment claim. The court declined, finding that it had already compensated the tenant for that harm and that there was no separate basis in the record for an additional award for the same loss.
This reflects a bedrock principle that runs throughout the law: a plaintiff is entitled to be made whole for a harm, but not to be paid more than once for the same harm. The principle is sometimes called the rule against double recovery. Its logic is that compensation exists to restore what was lost, and once the loss has been fully compensated, awarding a second recovery for the identical loss would be a windfall—a payment exceeding the actual injury. The point of compensatory damages is to make the injured party whole, not to multiply the recovery each time the same facts can be fit under a different legal label.
The gas deprivation in Sammy Group illustrates the principle cleanly. The same facts—the lack of cooking gas over a period of time—supported both the habitability claim and, as conduct, the harassment claim. The habitability abatement compensated the tenant for the diminished value of living without gas. If the court had then also awarded compensatory harassment damages for the very same gas deprivation, the tenant would have been paid twice for one injury. The court avoided that by recognizing that the gas harm had already been compensated through the abatement and declining to duplicate it under the harassment claim. The tenant was made whole for the gas problem—fully—but only once.
It is important to be precise about what this does and does not mean, because it is easy to misread. It does not mean the harassment claim was worthless or that overlapping claims are pointless. The harassment finding still produced the injunction, the civil penalty, and the recorded violation—relief the habitability claim could not provide. What the court declined to do was award duplicative compensatory damages for a loss already compensated. The distinct, non-duplicative relief flowing from the harassment claim stood. Only the double-counting of the same compensable harm was disallowed. In other words, the tenant got everything each claim uniquely offered; what he could not get was to be paid twice in compensation for the single underlying gas deprivation.
For a tenant, the lesson is to understand how overlapping claims actually pay out. Raising multiple claims arising from the same facts is often sensible, because different claims offer different remedies—an injunction and penalty from harassment, an abatement from habitability, a monetary return from overcharge. But where two claims would compensate the identical loss, a court will generally allow recovery for that loss only once. The value of bringing multiple claims lies in the different kinds of relief each provides, not in multiplying the compensation for a single harm. Expecting to be paid twice for the same injury, under two labels, is not how it works—and a realistic understanding of this keeps a tenant's expectations grounded in what the claims can actually deliver together.
It helps to translate the case into the situation of an ordinary tenant, because the pattern in Sammy Group is one many renters could find themselves in.
Imagine your landlord files a nonpayment case against you, claiming you owe back rent. Meanwhile, you have been living with real problems: the cooking gas has been out for months, there have been electrical issues, and you have come to feel the landlord is letting things deteriorate or cutting off services to pressure you. You have emailed about the problems repeatedly, and the city has recorded violations against the building. You could simply defend the nonpayment case and hope it gets dismissed. But Sammy Group suggests a more complete approach.
In your answer, you could raise counterclaims: breach of the warranty of habitability for the uninhabitable conditions, harassment if the landlord's conduct was aimed at pressuring you out, and rent overcharge if you have reason to believe you have been charged more than the legal regulated rent. These are your own claims against the landlord, brought inside the same case. If the landlord's nonpayment petition is later dismissed—as it was in Sammy Group—your counterclaims do not die with it. They remain, and they can proceed to trial, where you can win affirmative relief.
The evidence you have been accumulating is exactly what matters. The emails documenting the gas and electrical problems establish the conditions and the timeline. The city's recorded violations provide official corroboration. Your testimony about the interrupted services ties it together. On that kind of record, a court can find habitability breaches and, if the conduct warrants, harassment. You might then obtain a rent abatement compensating you for the periods without gas, an injunction barring further harassment, the recording of a serious violation against the building, a civil penalty against the landlord, and a recovery on any overcharge.
But you would also understand the limits. The civil penalty is not a payment to you; it is a sanction serving the public interest. And you could not recover twice for the same gas problem—if the abatement already compensates you for the lack of gas, you will not also get a separate compensatory harassment award for that identical loss. What you get is each claim's distinctive relief, with compensation for any given harm counted once. That is a realistic and still very substantial outcome: you avoided eviction, you were compensated for the conditions and any overcharge, and you obtained forward-looking protection and official accountability against the landlord.
The reason the hypothetical tracks the case is that the case is the hypothetical, lived out. A tenant facing a nonpayment case raised his own claims, saw the landlord's petition dismissed, took his counterclaims to trial, and won a package of relief—compensation, an injunction, a penalty, and a recorded violation—while the court carefully avoided paying him twice for the same harm. The pattern is available to many tenants: answer the eviction with your own claims, preserve the evidence, and understand what each form of relief does.
Knowing the case is one thing; using it is another. Here is how a tenant can apply the lessons of Sammy Group.
Treat an eviction case as an opportunity to assert your own claims, not only to defend. If your landlord has let the apartment become uninhabitable, harassed you, or overcharged you, those are counterclaims you can raise in your answer to the landlord's proceeding. Raising them is what preserves your ability to obtain affirmative relief within the case, and it transforms the proceeding from a one-way attack into a dispute in which you are also seeking something.
Plead your counterclaims properly and completely. The reason the tenant's claims survived in Sammy Group is that they were properly asserted in the answer. Counterclaims that are not raised are lost; counterclaims that are raised can proceed on their own even if the landlord's case is dismissed. Given the stakes, this is a strong reason to prepare your answer carefully, ideally with legal help, rather than filing a bare denial.
Understand that the dismissal of the landlord's petition need not end your claims. If your counterclaims are properly pleaded, they have independent life. Do not assume that because the landlord's case went away, you have lost your chance for relief—your claims can continue to trial, and you can still win.
Build and preserve your evidence. The record in Sammy Group included emails about the gas and electrical problems, official housing-code violations, and testimony about interrupted services. Document conditions as they occur, with dates; report problems to the city's housing agency so violations are officially recorded; keep all communications with the landlord; and note the timeline of any service interruptions. This documentation is what turns claims into provable ones.
Recognize when a single problem supports more than one claim—and how the relief combines. A loss of essential services may breach habitability and, depending on the landlord's conduct, constitute harassment. Raising both can be appropriate because they offer different remedies. But understand that you will be compensated once for a given harm; the value of multiple claims is in the different kinds of relief—abatement, injunction, penalty, overcharge recovery—not in double payment for the same loss.
Set realistic expectations about what each remedy does. An injunction protects you going forward; a civil penalty punishes and deters but is not paid to you; a recorded violation marks the building's record; and compensatory relief—abatements, overcharge recovery—is what makes you whole for actual losses. Knowing which remedies put money in your hands and which serve other functions keeps your expectations grounded.
Get knowledgeable help. Asserting counterclaims, proving harassment and habitability, and litigating an overcharge are legally involved, and the procedural point about counterclaims surviving dismissal is exactly the kind of thing a tenant attorney can ensure is handled correctly. Many legal aid organizations and tenant-rights groups across New York assist tenants with eviction defense and affirmative counterclaims, and given the stakes and the complexity, that help is well worth seeking.
Several intuitive but mistaken beliefs keep tenants from using the tools Sammy Group illustrates, and the case speaks to each.
The first misconception is that a tenant in an eviction case can only defend. Not so. A tenant can assert counterclaims—affirmative claims against the landlord—within the same proceeding. Harassment, breach of the warranty of habitability, and rent overcharge are all claims a tenant can bring in the answer, turning a defense into an offense.
The second misconception is that if the landlord's case is dismissed, everything in the proceeding ends. It does not. Properly pleaded counterclaims belong to the tenant and have independent life. In Sammy Group, the landlord's petition was dismissed, yet the tenant's counterclaims proceeded to trial and succeeded. Dismissal of the landlord's case ends the landlord's effort to evict, not the tenant's own claims.
The third misconception is that one problem can support only one claim. The same loss of essential services supported both the habitability claim and the harassment finding in Sammy Group, because the two claims protect different interests—the condition of the home versus the landlord's harassing use of deprivation. A single set of facts can ground more than one claim.
The fourth misconception is that every favorable ruling means money for the tenant. It does not. An injunction orders the landlord's future conduct; a civil penalty punishes and deters and is generally not paid to the tenant; a recorded violation marks the building's record. Only the compensatory awards—abatements, overcharge recovery—put money in the tenant's hands.
The fifth misconception is that raising the same facts under two claims means getting paid twice. It does not. A tenant is compensated once for a given harm. The court in Sammy Group refused to award the gas deprivation a second time as harassment damages after it had already been compensated through the habitability abatement. Multiple claims add value through their different remedies, not through doubled compensation.
The sixth misconception is that a civil penalty is the tenant's reward. The penalty serves public enforcement and deterrence; it vindicates the public interest in harassment-free housing and is set within a statutory range by reference to the conduct, not the tenant's losses. The tenant's own recovery comes from the compensatory awards, not the penalty.
The procedural principle at the heart of Sammy Group—that a tenant's counterclaims survive the dismissal of the landlord's petition—deserves to be understood in its broader significance, because it changes the strategic posture of tenants facing eviction in a way that reaches far beyond this one dispute.
Consider the alternative world, in which a tenant's claims lived or died with the landlord's case. In that world, a landlord who had harassed a tenant, let the apartment decay, and overcharged the rent could neutralize all of it simply by having its own petition dismissed or by withdrawing it. The tenant's grievances would evaporate along with the landlord's case, and the tenant would be left having "won" only in the narrow sense of not being evicted—still uncompensated for the conditions, still overcharged, still subject to the harassment. The landlord would face no consequence for the underlying wrongs, because the forum for addressing them would have closed. That arrangement would give landlords a perverse incentive: bring aggressive cases, and if the tenant fights back effectively, drop the petition to extinguish the tenant's claims along with it.
The rule that counterclaims survive forecloses that maneuver. Because the tenant's claims are independent, a landlord cannot erase them by abandoning its own case. The tenant who has been wronged gets to press the wrong to judgment regardless of what happens to the landlord's petition. This is what makes the counterclaim a genuine instrument of accountability rather than a mere adjunct to the defense. It ensures that the eviction proceeding, once started, becomes a forum in which the landlord's conduct can be examined and sanctioned, not just the tenant's alleged nonpayment.
There is efficiency in this as well. Rather than forcing a tenant to bring a separate lawsuit to recover for habitability breaches, harassment, or overcharges—a separate action with its own cost, delay, and complexity—the counterclaim lets the tenant resolve everything in one proceeding. The same evidence about the same conditions, the same landlord, and the same tenancy supports both the defense and the affirmative claims. Consolidating them is sensible, and the survival of the counterclaims means the tenant does not have to start over elsewhere if the landlord's case ends first.
The broader lesson for tenants is about posture. A tenant who thinks only defensively—"how do I avoid eviction?"—may win the narrow battle and lose the chance at everything else. A tenant who thinks in terms of the whole relationship—"what has this landlord done to me, and what am I owed?"—can use the eviction proceeding as the vehicle to address it all. The counterclaim strategy reframes the tenant from a target reacting to the landlord's move into a party with claims of their own, claims that do not depend on the landlord's willingness to keep the case alive. That reframing is available in a great many eviction cases, and Sammy Group is a vivid demonstration of how much it can yield: a dismissed petition, and then a full trial on the tenant's terms, ending in compensation, an injunction, a penalty, and a recorded violation against the landlord.
It bears repeating that this power depends on raising the counterclaims properly in the first place. The survival principle protects claims that were asserted; it does nothing for claims the tenant never pleaded. That is why the moment of answering an eviction case is so consequential. It is the point at which a tenant decides whether to be merely a defendant or also a claimant—and, as Sammy Group shows, that decision can determine whether the tenant walks away merely not evicted or walks away made whole, protected, and vindicated.
It is worth being candid about the scope of a decision like Sammy Group LLC v. Collins. It is a trial-level Civil Court decision resolving particular claims on a particular record. It applies existing law—the warranty of habitability, the city's tenant-harassment provisions, and rent-regulation rules—rather than announcing new law, and its value lies in how clearly it illustrates the procedural and remedial principles at work: counterclaims surviving the dismissal of the landlord's petition, a single set of facts supporting multiple claims, the distinct functions of injunctions, penalties, and compensation, and the rule against double recovery.
What the case does not do is guarantee a particular outcome in a different situation. Whether counterclaims succeed depends on the facts and the evidence; whether conduct amounts to harassment depends on the circumstances and the landlord's purpose; and the amount of any abatement, penalty, or overcharge recovery depends on the specifics of the apartment, the conditions, the rent history, and the record. A tenant with weaker evidence, or a landlord whose conduct does not cross into harassment, could see a very different result. The point of understanding the case is to understand the mechanisms it illustrates, not to assume your facts will produce the same awards.
What is reliable, because it reflects settled principles, is the framework the case applies. A tenant can assert counterclaims in an eviction proceeding, and properly pleaded counterclaims can survive the dismissal of the landlord's petition and proceed to trial. A loss of essential services can support both a habitability claim—yielding compensation such as a rent abatement—and, where the landlord's conduct warrants, a harassment claim—yielding an injunction, a civil penalty, and a recorded violation. Those different forms of relief serve different functions: prevention, public deterrence, and compensation. And a tenant will generally be compensated only once for a given harm, so overlapping claims add value through their different remedies rather than through duplicated compensation. Those are the tools the case puts on display.
The deepest lesson of Sammy Group LLC v. Collins is a reframing of what an eviction case is. It is natural to see such a case as the landlord's weapon and the tenant's burden—something to survive and escape. But a tenant who comes to the proceeding with claims of their own changes its character entirely. The dismissal of the landlord's petition, which looks like the end, can be the beginning of the tenant's own case. The counterclaims the tenant raised do not depend on the landlord's case; they stand on their own, and they can carry the tenant from merely avoiding eviction to winning affirmative relief against the landlord.
For you as a tenant, that means an eviction notice is not only a threat; it is also an occasion to assert what the landlord owes you. If you have lived with uninhabitable conditions, been harassed, or been overcharged, those are claims you can raise—and if you raise them properly, they can outlast the landlord's effort to evict you. The loss of essential services that made your home unlivable may ground both a habitability claim and a harassment claim, each offering different relief. You may win compensation for your losses, an injunction protecting you going forward, and official accountability against the landlord. What you will not get is paid twice for the same harm—but you will get, from each claim, what it uniquely provides.
A tenant is not only a defendant. New York law lets tenants bring their own claims inside the eviction proceeding and pursue them to judgment, even after the landlord's case collapses. The first step is understanding that the dismissal of the landlord's case is not necessarily the end of the dispute—and that, properly prepared, it can be the moment the tenant's own case truly begins.
