Eric Abrams struggles up the stairs with his canejackpot master slots, one step at a time.

When he reaches the fifth floor, he ducks through a plastic zipper door and hobbles down the hall to his tiny, cluttered room. There is no water in his wash basin. He had been using space heaters as the weather turned cold, but recently received a new heater, as ordered by a court. The noise and dust have largely abated since a partial stop-work order took effect, though the roaches remain.

Mr. Abrams, 64, is the last remaining holdout tenant in his single-room-occupancy building in Manhattan, where he arrived 21 years ago through a city housing program. For three years, his most recent landlord, Klosed Properties, has been trying, unsuccessfully, to relocate him as it overhauls the entire building. He has rejected or ignored every proposal as unsuitable, resulting in an acrimonious standoff that has left him nearly alone in a construction site.

The company says it now has no choice but to renovate around him.

“This is the worst situation I’ve ever seen,” said Robin LoGuidice, Mr. Abrams’s lawyer. “And I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

These kinds of stalemates can happen in New York, where developers seeking to raze or renovate buildings collide with obstinate tenants. “There is no obligation for the tenant to move,” said Andrew Scherer, who is a professor at New York Law School and the author of “Residential Landlord-Tenant Law in New York.” “The tenant holds a lot of the cards. There are solutions that could work, but it is a matter of voluntarily agreeing to those.”

When Klosed Properties bought 230 West 101st Street, a.k.a. 2651 Broadway, for a bargain-basement $15.5 million in late 2021, Mr. Abrams was one of five single-room-occupancy tenants living there. (Another resident has since been relocated from the third floor to the ground floor through an agreement with Klosed.) The seven-story, 126-room building, which includes three ground-floor retail spaces, was being used primarily as an unauthorized hotel. The city sued the owner at the time, Hank Freid, accusing him of multiple safety violations and of illegally using several buildings he owned as short-term rentals.

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