100-Year-Old Upper East Side Woman Faces Eviction, Reports Say

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — A 100-year-old woman who has been living in the same rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side for five decades is facing eviction, New York 1 first reported.

Justa Lopez' landlord claims she's no longer living at her $150 a month two-bedroom apartment on First Avenue and East 78th Street, but the woman said she's been recovering since breaking her hip last year, NY1 reported.

Lopez broke her hip when she slipped on the living room floor of her apartment, she told the New York Post.

“The floor is bad, it tilts down and I lost my balance. I’d been asking them for years to do something, [and] they ignored me," she told the Post.

Lopez spent a stint in the hospital, then at a nursing home and is now recovering at her daughter's Long Island home, NY1 reported. The centenarian has never missed a rent payment, but was served with an eviction notice in July, NY1 reported.

Lopez has filed a lawsuit against her landlord, Paley Management Corp., to squash the eviction and get them to fix her living room floor, according to multiple reports. Lopez' lawyer Dov Treiman told the New York Post that the landlord's eviction is financially motivated.

In Lopez's apartment building a similar two-bedroom unit that is not rent controlled can fetch as much as $2,700 per month, the lawyer told the Post.

"She doesn’t deserve to be shuffled off and dismissed," Treiman told the Post. "Just because she’s 100 doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a right to an apartment."

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