Matter of Davis v. Dinkins

In Matter of Davis v. Dinkins, 206 A.D.2d 365, the Appellate Division reversed a lower court decision which had held that the arrangement to shelter homeless residents made between the City and the Kennedy Inn, a Queens hotel, constituted an oral lease. The Appellate Division held that the agreement was not a lease, as the central characteristic of a lease is the surrender of absolute possession and control of property to another for an agreed-upon period of time, and that the agreement between the City and the hotel did not include an obligation to rent a particular number of rooms, or to rent for a particular time, and the City was not obligated to pay for rooms which were not occupied, nor was the hotel obliged to keep a certain number of rooms available for the City. The dissent in Matter of Davis argued that there was an oral lease, as evidenced by the agreement to make a certain number of rooms available at a set daily rate, the fact that the hotel evicted certain commercial tenants to create room for special-assistance programs for the City clients, and that the projected occupancy was not merely temporary or revokable at whim (206 A.D.2d at 368-370).