I’m A Goin’ To Stay Where You Sleep All Day Where They Hung The Jerk That Invented Work In An Illegal Conversion Unfit For Any Person . . .

The good news is you can get out of paying rent. The bad news is, uh, you get a cash settlement when you’re finally kicked out . . . sounds like a plan:

Two musicians and a yogi have lived rent-free for two years in a Brooklyn loft. No, they’re not living with their exasperated parents or beleaguered girlfriends. They are among the masses of New Yorkers living in illegal apartment buildings, and they stumbled onto the big advantage of residing outside the law: You don’t have to pay rent.

Like a lot of young people, they moved into a place they could barely afford and lived together in a one-room loft. After a couple of years and a little research, they realized that landlords like theirs who rent out apartments in buildings not meant to be residences cannot legally collect rent, sue for back rent, or evict someone for nonpayment of rent. Thus began a long, free ride.

. . .

In 2002, brothers Jamal and Puge Ruhe and their friend Kevin Courtney moved into a lumbering, boxy building at 170 Tillary Street in DUMBO. Although their landlord offered them residential space, the old building was registered and taxed as a factory, and officially their lease was commercial. Other artists and musicians had accepted similar arrangements over the years and subsequently transformed their austere lofts into cozy apartments. But included in their bohemian existence was the daily drama of a poorly maintained building that was never intended to house people.

“When it rains, it pisses in over here,” says Puge Ruhe as he motions to a corner of their loft. “We have clumps of stuff falling from the ceiling. . . . There are no fire escapes in here. We would die if there was a fire.”

After a year of leaking roofs, soaked furniture, and a locked freight elevator that was only occasionally available for use, the landlord raised their monthly rent from $1,850 to $1,890. “As musicians living on the fourth floor, we need the elevator [to move our equipment],” says Jamal Ruhe. “So that was a primary instigator in our being pissed enough to risk getting thrown out of our apartment.” The roommates balked at the thought of paying even more for their crumbling space and decided that they would neither sign the new lease nor acknowledge the rent increase. They waited for the building manager to say something, but as Jamal Ruhe recalls, “Nothing happened, and by nothing I mean nothing at all. Not a tenuous nothing, no word from anyone. And that went on for the better part of the year.”

Meanwhile, rumors that at least four other tenants had stopped paying rent made their way around the building. A resident from another illegal loft building told the Ruhe brothers that she lived rent-free for seven years without incident. Inspired by that knowledge, the roommates stopped paying rent altogether in 2004. Again, they were met with silence.

Cool — just make sure the landlord doesn’t burn down the thing . . .