Noah Syndergaard, a star New York Mets pitcher, has had a rough few months. In March, the team announced the 27-year-old All Star would be out until at least 2021 after receiving Tommy John surgery. And now, he’s being sued by his Tribeca landlord, for failing to pay rent on a $27,000-a-month penthouse apartment.
The lawsuit, first reported by the New York Post, accuses Syndergaard of failing to pay rent on the three-bedroom, 2,700-square-foot apartment, for which he signed a lease in February. The landlord, unnamed in the lawsuit and listed as 600 Street LLC, said, Syndergaard “treated the binding Lease like an option,” and is seeking the full $250,000 payment.
Syndergaard never moved into the apartment and has no intention of doing so. Instead, he told the landlord to re-rent the unit, according to the court documents and a statement Syndergaard and his lawyers sent to the Post.
Syndergaard also took the opportunity to blast the landlord on Twitter over the Memorial Day weekend and reminded fans that Major League Baseball is also not currently paying players.
“I fairly, and in good faith, offered to pay 2 months rent (over 50K) to a landlord for a place I was never going to step foot in due to a global pandemic that took a severe toll on the residents of NYC,” Syndergaard wrote on Twitter. “The landlord tries to extort me for 250K while leaking this story to the media, and I’m the bad guy? Yeah, ok. See you in court pal.”
While Syndergaard’s situation is undoubtedly different than most — he earned $6 million last year — he’s not alone in not paying rent in New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. A May survey from The Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP), an association of building owners and landlords of rent-stabilized buildings, found that approximately 25 percent of tenants are not paying rent, when it surveyed 100,000 owners.
“Unless the federal government steps in to help renters and owners in a big way, we are going to see a housing disaster the likes of which we have never seen,” Jay Martin, executive director of CHIP, said in a statement. “Congress must provide financial aid directly to renters and the state must match that with property tax relief for owners or in weeks, not months, we will see buildings going under.”