Last year, Alice Liao did something some New Yorkers have only fantasized of doing: She sued her former landlord to get her security deposit back.
Liao said her landlord, Ches Parnes, owed her and her roommate $4,400 after they moved out of a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in September 2023. She added they left the apartment “spotless.” After winning her lawsuit in April and enlisting the help of a city marshal, Liao and her roommate said, they still haven’t received any money.
There are no official estimates for how often landlords wrongly withhold security deposits, but housing experts, regulators and court officials say the problem amounts to millions of dollars. Each year, tenants hand over more than $500 million in security deposits, according to a 2018 estimate by the city comptroller. The state attorney general’s office said it has received nearly 5,000 complaints about unreturned security deposits since the start of 2023 — up from a combined 4,296 in 2021 and 2022
Getting that money back can be extremely difficult. The burden is on the tenant to navigate a lengthy legal process and, if the tenant wins, find the owner’s bank information and hire a marshal to try to seize the cash.
“The tenants aren’t professionals in this space and they don’t have unlimited time and money,” New York University housing law professor Sateesh Nori said. “There’s no accounting for people who give up and walk away.”
He also said lawyers tend to steer clear of the security deposit cases because they’re “too time-consuming” and the payouts too miniscule, leaving many to fight their cases alone in small claims court.
The state’s Office of Court Administration shared data about the number of small claims cases filed each year in Brooklyn, but did not respond to a question about how many involve security deposit disputes. One Brooklyn court official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss court operations, said “roughly half” of the 7,749 lawsuits filed in small claims court in the borough since the start of 2023 relate to landlords withholding security deposits. In many cases, the tenants never end up recovering the money, the official said.
Parnes, the landlord who never returned Liao’s deposit, owns at least eight buildings in the Bronx and Brooklyn through multiple limited liability companies and has racked up his fair share of complaints. Grant Fox, a spokesperson for state Attorney General Letitia James, said the office has received 14 complaints from people who lived in Parnes’ properties. At least three of those who spoke with Gothamist have taken him to court. None have succeeded in recovering the money, even after tenants in two apartments won judgments.
Parnes asked Gothamist for a list of the tenants who claimed they were still owed deposits so he could check his business records. Three days after receiving it, he said he was not sure why he did not return the money. But he added that he should have appeared in court to defend himself.
“Probably most of them, if they didn’t receive it, it’s because I had a reason not to give it to them,” he said.
Two weeks to pay
Security deposits are intended to help landlords cover repair costs if tenants damage apartments, and give renters more incentive to keep the places in good condition. A tenant might also skip out on the last month’s rent, leaving the landlord on the hook for the damages and unable to rent the unit again until making repairs.
But New York law is clear: A landlord either has to provide an itemized list of deductions or return a security deposit within 14 days after a tenant moves out.
If that doesn’t happen, the tenant has a solid legal case to collect the cash, though one that is not easily enforced.
Liao, 32, said she and her roommate kept their Greenpoint apartment in mint condition, never even punching a nail hole in the wall. Instead, she said, they used heavy-duty tape to hang picture frames.
After moving out at the start of September 2023, they repeatedly asked Parnes for their deposit back, according to emails shared with Gothamist. Parnes told them he had mailed a check on Sept. 18 of that year, one email shows. Liao and her roommate followed up a week later saying they still had not received it.
A small claims court judge eventually awarded them their deposit, plus $269.54 in interest and fees after Parnes failed to show up to the March hearing.
Once the landlord has the security deposit in hand, it becomes extremely hard for the tenant to recover it.
In June, Liao hired a city marshal to serve a “bank levy” on Capital One, where her own bank records showed Parnes had deposited her rent payments while she lived in the apartment. But in August, a representative for the city marshal notified Liao that Capital One “could not locate the debtor or any funds,” according to an email shared with Gothamist.
The marshal’s representative then wrote to Liao suggesting she contact a debt collection agency, hire a private investigator or pay an attorney to serve subpoenas in order to identify other assets Parnes might have.
Liao estimates that she has spent roughly 30 hours organizing documents and attending court dates, along with $300 in fees, in her attempt to recover the $4,400.
“I was very angry at the beginning,” she said. “Now it’s more like a justice, principle thing. … It just feels so wrong and like I can still do something.”
Earlier this month, Alex Glasper, 28, also won a judgment against Parnes. The judge awarded Glasper half the $2,500 she and her roommate paid when they moved into a two-bedroom apartment that Parnes owns on Chauncey Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2022, plus $106 interest.
Glasper said she was counting on the money to help cover her credit card bill after paying movers and a higher monthly rent when she signed a lease for a one-bedroom down the street in July 2023.
“I was really struggling because I just felt like I couldn’t catch up to the moving expenses,” she told Gothamist outside her old apartment building earlier this month. “I was paying them down and paying them down and then paying interest and it was like a nightmare. All because I didn’t have the money.”
The attorney general is here to help — to a degree
Security deposits are capped by law at no more than one month’s rent, but they can still constitute a large chunk of a tenant’s income, especially in a city where median asking rent was $3,600 a month in November, according to data from listings company StreetEasy. A 2018 comptroller’s report found the cost of a security deposit and first month’s rent accounted for more than 10% of median household income for tenants in 15 community districts, including Greenpoint and Bed-Stuy, where the tenants who sued Parnes were living.
Attorney General James encourages tenants who believe their landlords have wrongly withheld their security deposits to file complaints through her office’s website. Officials from the attorney general’s office send notices to landlords and attempt to mediate disputes.
Fox, the spokesperson for James, said her office has helped tenants recover more than $2 million over the past two years, but he refused to say how many tenants who applied for assistance actually got their money back.
Alice Liao and her roommate sued their former landlord, Ches Parnes, after they moved out of this building in Greenpoint.
Christopher Werth
All of the tenants who spoke with Gothamist said they submitted complaints to the attorney general, but were told Parnes did not respond to the office’s notices. Numa Briet, who shared the Greenpoint apartment with Liao, said James’ office was “quite frankly useless, except for sending us a letter saying [they] couldn’t do anything.”
Nori, the housing law professor, said the experiences reveal the uphill battle many tenants face when they try to get their money back.
“Once the landlord has the security deposit in hand, it becomes extremely hard for the tenant to recover it, even if there are avenues,” said Nori, who is developing an app to help New Yorkers document their apartment conditions and coordinate with their landlord to return their security deposit.
The situation can be especially hard for renters who move out of the city and can’t easily make it to small claims court to litigate their disputes.
Azu Roma, 42, said she’s not giving up, even after moving to New Orleans nearly two and a half years ago. She said she is still trying to get a $2,725 security deposit after she left the same Greenpoint building where Liao and Briet later lived.
Roma said she did not know Liao and Briet until Gothamist began contacting tenants.
Roma said she took care of the apartment and she shared texts from Parnes agreeing to send her the money after she left. In the weeks that followed, she contacted him at least 17 times by text, email and phone, even arranging to meet him at his Brooklyn office while she was in town for work, according to records she shared with Gothamist.
But Roma said Parnes canceled the meeting, telling her he was visiting family outside the city, and never delivered the money.
She sued in Brooklyn small claims court and traveled back from New Orleans for a hearing in February 2023. But, as Roma recalled, Parnes told the court he had a death in the family and couldn’t attend.
A few weeks before a rescheduled appearance, the court sent Roma a notice terminating her case because it could not reach Parnes by mail at the addresses Roma had provided, according to a document shared with Gothamist. She sent the court voter registration information, property records and other information with Parnes’ address. But her case was never reopened.
“What’s infuriating about it is that he’s lying about it and avoiding the court, avoiding the attorney general, and that’s all working out for him,” she said.
Parnes said he found an email notifying Roma that he would mail her a check but was not sure why he didn’t pay her in the end.
“I didn’t lie,” he said, adding he would mail Roma a check the next day if he knew her address.
Back to the beginning
Liao is still trying to get her money back.
Last week, she returned to small claims court in Downtown Brooklyn.
She said she suspected the bank couldn’t locate Parnes’ account because she did not include his full legal first name in her lawsuit. She filled out a form asking a judge to amend Parnes’ name on the order granting her the money.
An hour and half after walking through the doors, she received a new court date.
“It’s such a long and drawn out process and every time there are these nuances that drag it on even further,” she said. “You think it’s going to be a straightforward process, but it’s just a headache.”