What the statutes actually require

General Associations Law § 12 and CPLR 1025 together provide the mechanism: an action or proceeding by an unincorporated association is brought by its president or treasurer. The caption reads, in substance, “[Name], as President of [Association],” not “[Association].”

That is a drafting detail with the consequences of a substantive rule. A proceeding captioned wrongly is defective from filing, and while it can be fixed, it has to be fixed — by amendment, by substitution, or by re-filing.

Where a board is most likely to hit this

Four situations, in rough order of frequency:

A holdover or summary proceeding in Civil Court. Exactly what happened here. Condominium boards in New York City bring these against unit owners and their occupants, and the papers are often prepared quickly from a template.

A common-charge lien foreclosure. Real Property Law § 339-aa provides that the lien “may be foreclosed by suit authorized by and brought in the name of the board of managers, acting on behalf of the unit owners” — which is the statutory answer for that particular action, and is not the same thing as suing in the name of the condominium. Our collections and liens page covers the lien route; the caption is worth checking against the statute in each case.

An enforcement action on the declaration or bylaws. Injunctions against alterations, signage, use violations and short-term rentals.

Any claim by an unincorporated homeowners association. Covenant enforcement, assessment collection, claims against a developer. Pascual is the case cited, and it is an HOA case.

What a board can do

Establish, now, whether your association is incorporated. This is a five-minute question and a surprising number of New York boards cannot answer it. Search the Department of State's corporation and business entity database for the association's name. If nothing comes back, you are probably an unincorporated association, and every proceeding you bring has to be brought by an officer.

That single fact has a second consequence worth knowing about. New York's one genuinely HOA-specific statute enacted in 2025 — the requirement of ninety days' written notice before a homeowners association forecloses a lien, at RPAPL § 2010 — reaches only an “incorporated homeowners' association.” So incorporation status determines both how you must caption a case and whether that notice statute applies to you at all.

Have counsel check the caption on every pending matter. Not the merits, not the strategy — the caption. It is the cheapest audit available and it is the one nobody performs.

Ask whether incorporating is worth it. That is a real question with real trade-offs — New York associations commonly incorporate under the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law, which brings a body of governance law with it, and it is not automatically the right answer for every association. But a board that has been operating for decades without knowing which side of the line it sits on should find out and then decide deliberately. Our New York governing statute page covers the statutory framework an incorporated New York association picks up.

The wider point about capacity

This decision sits alongside a cluster of 2025–2026 New York decisions in which associations lost on procedure rather than substance. In one, a homeowners association's default-judgment foreclosure application was denied and a hearing ordered on service, with the court noting that the association's own papers relied on “two different addresses in two different states, utilizing two distinct statutory methods, each of which presupposes that the respective location constitutes Defendant's dwelling place or usual place of abode” — and observing that “The multiplicity of addresses and methods reflected in Plaintiff's own filings does not demonstrate diligence so much as uncertainty.”²

In another, the Second Department affirmed a default judgment and order of reference where the unit owner's bare denial did not rebut the presumption of proper service.³

The pattern, stated at a category level: New York courts will not relieve an association of the procedural requirements that apply to any litigant, and they will scrutinise an association's own papers closely in a foreclosure — because foreclosure is, as one court put it, “a remedy of the highest order.” An association's strongest position in any enforcement matter is a clean file: right caption, right service, right ledger. Our New York foreclosure page covers what the process requires.

We are describing the law at a category level and not predicting any particular outcome. Whether your association's current proceedings are properly captioned is a question for your own counsel and your own documents.