Then, in the 2009 case of Drost v Hookey (25 Misc 3d 210 [2009]), a judge of the Suffolk County District Court held that{**40 Misc 3d at 635} the prior case-by-case analysis in licensee proceedings as to whether or not a "family relationship" existed among the parties should be abandoned for a more bright-line approach whereby all persons residing together in some sort of family relationship, without the benefit of a landlord-tenant relationship, should be classified as licensees of the titled owner unless a specific statutory "opt-out" could be identified by the respondent. In that case, the respondent was the petitioner's former girlfriend with whom he had lived for approximately three years. No children were involved. The court, relying upon Blake v Stradford and Morone v Morone, decided that respondent, whom petitioner had no legal obligation to support, was a licensee and, without a statutory "opt-out" such as a right to support from the petitioner, could be evicted as such via the vehicle of a RPAPL 713 (7) licensee proceeding.
This same approach was adopted by the court in Piotrowski v Little (30 Misc 3d 609 [2010]), a same-sex partner case from the Middletown City Court, where this "objective" analysis regarding the existence of a statutory opt-out from licensee status was preferred. This court cannot agree. This court prefers the analysis of Judge Stephen L. Ukeiley, author of The Bench Guide To Landlord & Tenant Disputes in New York (2011), where at page 39 he writes: