“We’ve won now, and we’re going to win again!” an impassioned Elissa Krauss told more than 200 of her neighbors in the P.S./I.S. 89 auditorium last month. It was the first time that the tenants of Independence Plaza North—the 1,331-unit development along Greenwich Street—had met en masse to get the details of a judge’s recent ruling that their apartments had been wrongly deprived of rent stabilization protections.

“This fight is far from over,” said Krauss, an IPN activist who helped shepherd the tenant association’s five-year-old lawsuit against landlord Laurence Gluck. In that suit, the tenants claimed they are entitled to rent stabilization protections because Gluck was still receiving a tax abatement tied to the Mitchell-Lama rent stabilization program more than a year after ending IPN’s participation in the program.

On Aug. 30, State Supreme Court Judge Marcy Friedman ruled for the tenants, declaring that the rents were illegally increased. If her decision survives an appeal filed by Gluck, more than 170 residents at IPN who have formally claimed to have been overcharged thousands of dollars since 2004 could see their money refunded, and hundreds more could have their rents reduced as well as stabilized.

“We’re looking down the mountain at the work we still have to do,” the tenants’ lawyer, Seth Miller, said at the Sept. 21 meeting, referring to the appeal.

“We’re confident that on the merits, we’ll win,” said Ed Rosner, the longtime IPN tenant who first discovered that Gluck was receiving the illegal tax breaks.

Gluck stopped taking the tax breaks in 2006 and paid back the money he’d been discounted, and city housing officials agreed to change his tax record to indicate that the breaks stopped on the same day as the termination of its Mitchell-Lama participation. Gluck’s attorneys argued that the city’s action freed the landlord from any obligation to stabilize rents at IPN. In her decision, Friedman disagreed.

“[Gluck’s] claim that [he] never received [the] benefits after the exit date is a mere legal fiction,” Friedman said.

Pending the outcome of his appeal, Gluck had sought to suspend Friedman’s ruling. In court documents, he claimed that “emboldened” residents may stop paying their rent until the appeal is decided, leaving him without a way to pay his mortgage on the property. But Gluck withdrew that motion for a "stay" on Sept. 30.

For tenants who were in the complex when an agreement with Gluck was reached in 2004, rents now are either federally subsidized through a Section 8 voucher program or set at below-market rates that are tied to rent stabilization increases. If Friedman’s decision is upheld, the majority of the complex’s apartments would be recognized by the state as rent stabilized, offering additional protections, according to the tenant association.

Whether rents are reduced, Rosner said, will probably be determined by when a tenant began living at IPN, as  well as whether and when the tenant filed an overcharge complaint with the state’s Department of Housing and Community Renewal. In all cases, Miller said, tenants must be active participants in correcting their rent levels by filing an overcharge complaint. “It’s not something you can just sit on the couch and wait for to happen,” Miller said.

Rosner said a second suit could be in the works to secure rent stabilization for market-rate tenants who leased their apartments after April 2006, when Gluck stopped taking the tax breaks.

That case and the tenants’ defense against Gluck’s appeal, he said, should take much less time to play out than the original lawsuit.

“The sooner it’s over, the sooner we can get those overcharges back,” Rosner said, “and all the other protections that we’re entitled to.”