If I’m Injured In My NYC Apartment, Can I Sue My Landlord?

If you have been serious injured in your apartment or in your apartment building, your landlord may be liable for your accident and responsible for your medical bills. Your landlord has a responsibility to keep your building safe and a responsibility to fix any dangerous conditions that he is aware of. In most cases, if a landlord was aware of a problem (an unlit hallway, a broken railing, a slippery staircase, a cracked sidewalk) and did not fix the issue even though the fix would be relatively easy, he may be negligent and you could sue for New York City premises liability.

Here are a few examples in which a landlord may be responsible for a New York personal injury:

· The radiator cover in a young couple's Queens apartment is broken and they complain to their landlord several times. When their toddler falls onto the exposed radiator and badly burns himself, the landlord must pay damages.

· A large Manhattan apartment building does not shovel the snow and ice from the sidewalk in front of its entryway even though the storm was two days before. When a tenant slips and falls on the ice and breaks his arm, he sues the building owner for his injury.

· An apartment building owner is told several times by several different Bronx tenants that a second-story porch railing is broken. Instead of hiring a professional, the landlord quickly nails a shoddy two-by-four in place of the broken railing. Because the fix was not done by a professional, when someone leaned on the railing and received a head injury when the railing broke, he was able to successfully sue the landlord.