The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500.
“We know that our building is not rent controlled and this was something we were always worried about happening and there is no way we can afford $9,500 per month," Yumna Farooq said.
Hmm, so it doesn’t look like there’s a rule against evicting someone for no reason, unless you can prove discrimination, which is mildly surprising to me,
but there is a cap on the amount they can bump up rent without special permission in many types of units. Based on that the landlord doesn’t have a leg to stand on unless they switch to just openly telling the person to leave, but IANAL.Edit: Oh wait, it says it’s a brand new unit that this doesn’t apply to. RIP.