New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced yesterday that he intends to sue Vantage Properties for harassing hundreds of tenants in rent-regulated apartments in Queens and Manhattan to get them to vacate so it could rent them out as "market-rate" units.

Mr. Cuomo's office sent a notice to Neil Rubler, the president of Vantage, that his office would file a lawsuit in five days unless the harassment was stopped and Vantage paid damages to tenants and agreed to a monitor of its future rental activity.

"Landlords who illegally harass tenants to boost their bottom line do great harm to the fabric of the city," Mr. Cuomo said, assign that "Their underhanded tactics displace longtime residents from their homes and exacerbate the acute affordable-housing shortage."

In an article in yesterday's edition of The New York Times, Charles V. Bagli wrote that "Vantage issued a statement Thursday evening saying it looked forward to demonstrating to Mr. Cuomo its commitment 'to serving its residents and to the future of affordable housing in New York City.'"

The article also noted that Vantage's financial partner, "Apollo Real Estate Advisors, also issued a statement expressing regret that Vantage had not yet reached an agreement with the attorney general 'incorporating best practices and other tenant protections, which we fully support.'" The article added that Apollo's statement also said that "We expect that Vantage will work with Attorney General Cuomo's office to get this matter resolved quickly."

Vantage spent more than $2 billion at the height of the market in 2006 and 2007, buying about 125 buildings with more than 9,500 apartments in Queens, Washington Heights and Harlem, according to the article, adding that "Vantage, like the Pinnacle Group, the Praedium Group and other private equity firms, paid top dollar for rent-regulated buildings in working-class neighborhoods and wrapped them in inordinately large mortgages."

Most of the legal notices Vantage sent to its renters were "deceptive and misleading representations," the attorney general said in the letter, and the article said that "investigators point out that 86.2 percent of the termination notices filed by Vantage at one complex, Savoy Park in Harlem, were resolved in favor of the tenants."

Benjamin Dulchin, the executive director of the Association of Neighborhood Housing, was quoted in the article as stating that "The Wall Street type of competition and profit seeking of private equity financing is causing an epidemic of tenant harassment," adding that "Vantage and their financiers are jeopardizing economic diversity and long-term stability of our neighborhoods."

In a May 9, 2008 article in The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson wrote that "In a group of buildings in Queens with 2,124 apartments, Vantage has filed almost a thousand cases in housing court against tenants since October 2006, according to Robert McCreanor, director of legal services at the Immigrant Tenant Advocacy Project of the Catholic Migration Office in Sunnyside."