Incentra Village House, a mid-19th-century boutique hotel in Greenwich Village once billed as Manhattan’s first gay inn, advertises itself as a cozy place to sleep in one of New York City’s most famous neighborhoods. A stay in one of its dozen rooms, decorated with antique furnishings and artwork, can cost upward of $400 a night.
But in a lawsuit filed on Monday, city officials said that Incentra is actually an illegally converted apartment building that was not approved to be a hotel. The building also lacks proper fire alarms and sprinklers, among other fire safety violations, the city asserted.
The lawsuit was the first the city has filed in connection with Local Law 18, which went into effect in 2023 and essentially banned short-term rentals of less than 30 days unless the host is present. Airbnb and associations representing tech companies vigorously fought the law; the number of listings posted on booking platforms plummeted after it went into effect.
Incentra has been fighting the city to stay open for the past few years, according to the lawsuit. One room, named the Stonewall Room in a nod to the Stonewall Inn, was an “illegally created unsafe cellar room,” the lawsuit says. It was accessible only by a rickety staircase, and one guest said it had “no means of escape, should anything happen.” The city aims to shut the hotel down, collect thousands of dollars in fines and force the owner to fix the violations.
As of Monday afternoon, Incentra’s website was still up and rooms appeared to be available.
Francisco Augspach, a lawyer representing the owners of Incentra, said the company disputes the allegations and that it has “a long history of providing a safe, comfortable and affordable place to stay in the face of prior decades of otherwise widespread discrimination.”
“This lawsuit represents an unwarranted attack on the continuing operation of a lawful, pre-existing historic inn that has been serving the Greenwich Village community for many decades,” he said.
The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, is one of the latest examples of the city’s continuing fight against illegal short-term rentals. City officials said Incentra’s rooms had been accessible to guests on platforms like Airbnb and TripAdvisor.
City officials and housing advocates have long complained that units in such hotels are unsafe, and that they remove apartments from the housing stock at a time when the city is facing its worst housing shortage in more than 50 years.
“With a vacancy rate of a mere 1.4 percent, New York City cannot afford to have housing units siphoned off for illegal short-term rentals,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement announcing the lawsuit on Monday.
Local Law 18 requires property owners to register with the city in order to rent out homes on a short-term basis to one or two guests. Such rentals are legal only if the host is present during the stay and the guests can access the entire place.
To collect fees associated with the short-term stays, booking companies like Airbnb must check that the host’s registration application has been approved by the city. Platforms could be fined up to $1,500 for transactions involving illegal rentals.
Before the law went into effect, the city estimated there were roughly 10,800 Airbnb listings that were illegal short-term rentals. City officials said on Monday that since the law took effect, it had approved more than 3,000 registrations for legal short-term rentals.
Some homeowners say the city is unfairly prohibiting them from doing what they want with their homes. Hotel prices are high, and many housing advocates have pointed out that the law has not made the city more affordable.
In an online post last week, Airbnb said that the city’s new law “has driven up prices for residents and visitors, hurt small businesses and local resident hosts, and handed more power to hotels.” The company is pushing the city to loosen the restrictions.
Incentra, which is made up of two townhouses, had been listed by Lonely Planet as the first gay inn in Manhattan, according to a 2012 New York Times article that featured it in a list of gay hotels. “The overall experience felt like renting a small apartment,” the article said.
In 2023, after changes in state and city rules allowed for stronger enforcement of hotel and housing regulations, the owners of Incentra — which was legally classified as an apartment building — were told that they would not be able to operate it as a hotel, city officials said.
The owners, according to the city’s lawsuit, still lobbied various city agencies to let Incentra stay open in violation of Local Law 18.
In February, Incentra filed its own lawsuit against the city, which is pending. The suit says that records from the 1960s prove that Incentra is allowed to be a hotel and that the city’s “ongoing bureaucratic machinations” have hurt the business and it is at risk of closure.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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