@Ronald Starusnak - Good for you for demonstrating basic human compassion and at least trying to puzzle through a particularly prickly situation. Placing business above any sense of humanity is a failure of the soul. And who wants to do business with someone who has an ugly soul?
On the flip side, @Karen Margrave brings up an excellent point with regards to discrimination: New York State's (aspirationally-named) Human Rights Laws include a restriction on housing discrimination based on age. Discrimination includes, under these laws, providing unequal services to tenants based on their protected class status (such as age).
Therefore, if you're willing to provide extra services (e.g. setting up a soon-to-be-former-tenant with social services) to one tenant, then you'd better be willing to provide that service to all tenants, lest you find yourself on the wrong side of a discrimination lawsuit.
How does that play out in a real world worst-case scenario?
You think you're doing a good thing by offering, before upping her rent, to help the elderly lady in Unit 6 apply for Section 8 or get her in contact with Social Services. A year from now you have a 23 year old tenant in Unit 11 who you inform "rents are going up!" You don't offer her any Section 8 application help or to connect her with Social Services. And, what's more, she's friends with the elderly lady who lives in Unit 6. They get to talking and 23-year-old learns about the special treatment the elderly woman in Unit 6 got from you. She's savvy and doesn't want to leave her apartment. So she talks to an attorney or the local legal services clinic run by Syracuse University Law School (I did Tenant rights for Greater Boston Legal Services while I was at Boston U. School of Law, so it's not an unreasonable scenario), and they tell her about housing discrimination and how she can't be treated differently just because she's 23 and Unit 6 is 89.
Now you find yourself on the wrong side of a discrimination lawsuit, housing this angry tenant and paying her rent AND damages. NOT GREAT, RON. NOT GREAT.
The unintended consequence of non-discrimination laws is that they sometimes lead to scenarios like this - where you have identified an elderly person as weak or in need of additional help but are required by law to treat her as any other tenant.
In other words...it's a pickle.
--break--
That said, and not to be the fun police here because I am a fun guy... (I tried to upload the Kawhi Leonard laughing gif here but I'm not sure if it worked)
but I've got to say that I'm a little disappointed by the levity with which many users (not you, Ron) are treating this situation. While I can understand gallows humor to help process or mentally manage traumatic events, these are human beings that Ron is talking about. Potentially losing your home around the holidays is pretty traumatic. Laughing at their circumstances doesn't seem funny, it just seems cruel. If this were happening to my Grandma and I presented these facts to a group of unknown business people and they made a bunch of Werther's Original jokes, I would (1) be forgiven for thinking that landlords are the awful stereotypes the media and lawmakers often make them out to be, (2) be justified in hating them forever, (3) also be justified in probably punching them in the face, and (4) probably get away with it because I'd demand a jury trial and as soon as the comments of the punched party got out, the jury wouldn't sympathize with that person either and would let me go.
Again, not trying to be the fun police. It's just that some of those comments about a potentially vulnerable population seemed gross. Maybe I'm just being sensitive, but then again people might be acting a little bit like jerks. We report, you decide.
OK! Non sequitur!
@Diane G. - ahhh...the typical mistake of the non-native NYer...assuming that the rest of the state is the city. New York City has rent control. New York State does not have universal rent control. New York City is a city within New York State that contains about half of the state's population. Conversely, about half of the state's population does not live in New York City (or even particularly like it). NYC laws, despite what they try to do in the state legislature, do not apply to the rest of New York State. Common mistake to make. Also, go Bills.
