Emergency Power to Demolish a Building Properly Exercised

The Second Department determined the city properly exercised its emergency power to demolish plaintiff’s building due to exigent circumstances:

“A municipality may demolish a building without providing notice and an opportunity to be heard if there are exigent circumstances which require immediate demolition of the building to protect the public from imminent danger” … . “[W]here there is competent evidence allowing the official to reasonably believe that an emergency does in fact exist, or that affording pre-deprivation process would be otherwise impractical, the discretionary invocation of an emergency procedure results in a constitutional violation only where such invocation is arbitrary or amounts to an abuse of discretion” … . Here, contrary to the defendant’s contention, there exists a valid line of reasoning and permissible inferences by which the jury could have rationally concluded that the defendant’s determination that immediate demolition of the building was required in order to protect the public from imminent danger was arbitrary … . Rapps v City of New York, 2015 NY Slip Op 02743, 2nd Dept 4-1-15