Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in New York

There are several ways you can have the room mate removed from the lease. The most preferable way you would do this is to have your room mate sign a notarized surrender of lease letter. Then you would present the letter to the landlord with the hope and expectation that the landlord would remove you from the lease.

However under the terms of the lease you and your room mate are both jointly responsible for the terms under the lease. Therefore the landlord is getting nothing in return for removing the room mate under the lease. The solution here would be to either find a new room mate that the landlord is willing to accept as a co-tenan under the lease, or have the landlord keep some of your room mates security in consideration of being removed from the lease.

At the end of the first paragraph, I meant that the landlord would remove YOUR ROOM MATE from the lease.