He Won’t Leave His Home. The Landlord Is Renovating Around Him.

Eric Abrams struggles up the stairs with his cane, one step at a time.

When he reaches the fifth floor, he ducks through a plastic zipper door and hobbles down the hall to his tiny, cluttered room. There is no water in his wash basin. He had been using space heaters as the weather turned cold, but recently received a new heater, as ordered by a court. The noise and dust have largely abated since a partial stop-work order took effect, though the roaches remain.

Mr. Abrams, 64, is the last remaining holdout tenant in his single-room-occupancy building in Manhattan, where he arrived 21 years ago through a city housing program. For three years, his most recent landlord, Klosed Properties, has been trying, unsuccessfully, to relocate him as it overhauls the entire building. He has rejected or ignored every proposal as unsuitable, resulting in an acrimonious standoff that has left him nearly alone in a construction site.

The company says it now has no choice but to renovate around him.

“This is the worst situation I’ve ever seen,” said Robin LoGuidice, Mr. Abrams’s lawyer. “And I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

These kinds of stalemates can happen in New York, where developers seeking to raze or renovate buildings collide with obstinate tenants. “There is no obligation for the tenant to move,” said Andrew Scherer, who is a professor at New York Law School and the author of “Residential Landlord-Tenant Law in New York.” “The tenant holds a lot of the cards. There are solutions that could work, but it is a matter of voluntarily agreeing to those.”

When Klosed Properties bought 230 West 101st Street, a.k.a. 2651 Broadway, for a bargain-basement $15.5 million in late 2021, Mr. Abrams was one of five single-room occupancy tenants living there. (Another resident has since been relocated from the third floor to the ground floor through an agreement with Klosed.) The seven-story, 126-room building, which includes three ground-floor retail spaces, was being used primarily as an unauthorized hotel. The city sued the owner at the time, Hank Freid, accusing him of multiple safety violations and of illegally using several buildings he owned as short-term rentals.

Klosed Properties specializes in “underperforming assets and opportunistic investments,” according to its website. “Being able to find solutions for even the hairiest assets has afforded Klosed the ability to find value in places other investors are missing.”

It has yet to find a solution for this one. Even as Mr. Abrams refuses to leave, the company plans to redevelop the site into a conventional rental building with 52 units. As required by the city’s 2008 building code, the upgrades must include a larger elevator that can accommodate an ambulance stretcher. The old elevator has been taken out of service. A makeshift staircase has been built specifically for Mr. Abrams’s use before a new one can be added.

The company has filed two lawsuits against Mr. Abrams, including one for access to make repairs in his unit, with the threat to evict him if he doesn’t allow it. He has filed one in return.

“We just want to get the work done,” said James Marino, a lawyer representing Klosed Properties. He declined to comment further, and representatives for the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Initially, Mr. Abrams said, he was courted by the company. “They wooed me through a nine-month period of due diligence,” he said. “We were in a protracted due-diligence honeymoon and I thought they would never do me wrong. I was transparent from the beginning about what my issues were. I carry a lot of neediness.”

A legal-aid lawyer representing him at the time, Jonathan Saxton, spent a year grappling with doctor consultations, landlord negotiations and unreturned messages to Mr. Abrams, according to court papers. In a letter to the court requesting to withdraw from the case and suggesting the appointment of a guardian, Mr. Saxton wrote that Mr. Abrams “faces significant physical, mental and emotional challenges which impair his cognitive abilities and decision-making processes.”

Mr. Abrams claims that Klosed Properties offered no reasonable alternative accommodations for his disabilities. “They knew they would push me over the edge and I would have some behavioral outbursts, which I did,” he said.

In court papers, the company says it has done all it can to accommodate Mr. Abrams. The documents outline assorted offers: a hotel room with a $15-a-day meal stipend; a makeshift one-bedroom on the ground floor of his current building; and a few “objectively superior” one-bedrooms in a nearby Manhattan Valley building owned by Klosed where he could live for free. Or, if Mr. Abrams preferred, he could return to his original but upgraded spot.

The needed changes to accommodate his mobility issues would include an entrance from the bedroom to the bathroom with 36 inches of clearance, a curbless shower, grab bars, an automated apartment door, and a wheelchair ramp and automated doors at the building’s front entrance.

Mr. Abrams has declined each offer, or failed to respond. In court papers, Klosed Properties said that he “simply refused to move.”

At one point, according to confidential correspondence provided by Mr. Abrams, Klosed Properties offered him a buyout of $500,000 for the surrender of his tenancy rights. Mr. Saxton sought $2.5 million. But money isn’t especially meaningful, Mr. Abrams said, because he feels he has no suitable place to go and could lose his Medicaid benefits, which come with restrictions on income and assets.

Mr. Abrams admits to hoarding tendencies. Overflow possessions, including his winter clothes and cleaning supplies, once lining the hallway outside his room, have been moved to a locked storage closet, he said.

Ms. LoGuidice, who took over as Mr. Abrams’s lawyer, said that shutting down the elevator constituted harassment, as did locking up those belongings and removing fire safety systems. “It’s like something out of ‘The Shining,’” she said. “What happens if there is a fire?”

The stairs are “narrow, flimsy and nonfireproof,” she wrote in court papers. “This action is simply another weapon in their arsenal designed to rid them of their elderly, disabled and inconvenient tenant.” The company countered in court that the “conditions alleged are not dangerous to life, health and safety.”

Mr. Abrams — sometimes gregarious, sometimes withdrawn — once worked as a catering chef, he said, but suffered from multiple addictions, along with some small strokes and long Covid. He was also a tenant activist, speaking out against his former landlord, Mr. Freid. “We all lived in squalor,” he said of that period. “I’ve been traumatized over and over and have always been treated as a second-class tenant.”

Today, the building lacks a front-door staff. “I am not allowed an emergency key,” Mr. Abrams said, adding that he cannot buzz people in, including his home health care aides.

Ms. LoGuidice’s plan is to obtain interim repairs to make Mr. Abrams safe, and to negotiate for an elder-law attorney and monetary compensation to fit his needs, as well as for assistance in moving. Displacement is, she admits, a harrowing prospect. “No matter what his mental condition is or how challenging he can be to deal with,” she said, “this is a life-threatening situation.”

All three lawsuits remain active and unresolved. The next court date is scheduled for Dec. 16.

Recently, Mr. Abrams went for a walk-through at another nearby building owned by Klosed Properties, a 1969 high-rise with central air and a doorman. The one-bedroom on offer has a balcony and a view of the Hudson River. “I don’t want to be forced into decisions under duress,” he said. “I would live my final days here boxing up and processing 21 years of stuff, not including roach eggs, and I want to do that with dignity.”

Mr. Abrams has expressed a willingness to relocate there if the unit is made fully accessible. “It’s a possibility,” Ms. LoGuidice said. “It’s a complex negotiation.”