How far would you go to get rid of an awful stench in your $5,850-a-month apartment that your landlord says doesn’t exist?

The answer, according to David Gobaud, is pretty far. His insistence of a lingering smell in his unit has led to an usual legal standoff with his landlord, who has done extensive work in the apartment and says there is no such odor. Neither side is budging, turning the situation into a “he says it smells, he says it doesn’t smell” dispute.

The 42-year-old tech worker has not only sued the owner in housing court, he's purchased a set of blueprints of his building, snaked a flexible camera cable behind his kitchen cabinet like he was giving it a colonoscopy, and created a standalone website dedicated to what he describes in court documents as "a strong trash or garbage odor" that he believes is wafting into his one-bedroom apartment in a Midtown luxury high rise called The Epic.

Gobaud's unit on the 46th floor is located next to a trash compactor room and garbage chute, and he suspects that “foul-smelling” fumes are coming through an electrical outlet opening in the wall behind his kitchen cabinets.

“The apartment unfortunately smells like hot garbage or the subway,” Gobaud told Gothamist. “There's a draft of warm, smelly trash and mechanical air constantly entering the apartment.”

But the landlord says no one from his company’s management team has noticed the smell after repeatedly entering the unit.

“My team has been in the apartment and have not noticed any smell, as well as no resident prior to you have complained about the smell,” Hal Fetner, CEO of the company Fetner Properties, wrote in a July email to Gobaud. “Candidly, I am very proud of the actions my team have taken to accommodate you, and it is unfortunate that we cannot satisfy your needs.”

Gobaud’s complaints trace back to move-in day in June, when he said he first noticed a strange scent in the apartment. He filed a repair request through the building’s tenant portal the next day, the first of at least 10 such requests, according to court documents. He then began making complaints to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and by email to the property management team and Fetner, the company CEO.

In its court response, Fetner Properties — which owns the building through a related limited liability company — said it has “repeatedly investigated, repaired, replaced, cleaned and otherwise accommodated the copious number of complaints” Gobaud has filed since June, including patching holes in the kitchen, replacing the refrigerator and sealing gaps around the bathroom plumbing.

“It appears,” they wrote, that Gobaud “is trying to use this court to posture for a rent abatement.”

Haberman sent Gobaud a letter last month threatening to sue him if he continued to “publicly besmirch the landlord’s good name and reputation” through his website.

Gobaud denies the accusation that he is in it for a discount and has not removed the website. He and the landlord say he has continued to pay his rent each month.

He said he has also spent hundreds of dollars to buy those structural plans from the Department of Buildings and the borescope camera that he fed behind his kitchen cabinet to get a peek at the openings in the wall, including around his microwave’s electrical outlet. He also bought a digital infrared thermometer that he’s used to measure the heat coming out of the wall that he shares with the garbage room.

Gobaud said building staff have fulfilled most of his requests for repairs, cleaning and new appliances but he believes a smell is still coming through the electrical outlet opening in the kitchen wall.

The countertop in his small, spartan kitchen is covered in building plans and packets of apartment photos, some taken using his scoping camera, that he submitted as exhibits in his court case.

Fetner Properties has expressed exasperation with Gobaud’s ongoing complaints. In court papers and letters to Gobaud, Fetner and its attorney have highlighted the extensive work the company has done to satisfy him and threatened to countersue him for libel based on the website he created to detail his concerns with the building.

“We're at a point where the landlord is just so frustrated, and you now have a tenant who's dropping probes down areas where nobody can see and is taking temperature readings with laser thermometers and trying to make a case that there's still a problem,” Fetner’s lawyer David Haberman said in an interview. “The landlord's gone so far above and beyond that it's enough already.”

The plans appear to show a riser shaft between his unit and the garbage room. He removed a light switch plate cover to show a Gothamist reporter how the air circulated from behind the wall and out of the light switch opening. He said the smell worsens in the heat, especially in the morning before he turns on the air conditioning unit mounted near his window.

The problem is more than just “shoddy” spackle or paint jobs, he said.

“If it's just cosmetic, who cares?” he said. “But when it's so cheap there's holes that leak in fumes, I think that matters.”

The company and its attorney counter that there is no gap between the compactor room and the apartment, and that the trash chute is encased in concrete preventing odors from escaping.

Tenants in luxury-branded New York City rentals routinely encounter unexpected indignities, like water leaks and cheap construction, they say they pay too much to endure. Hundreds of newly built apartment complexes are rife with housing code violations, a Gothamist analysis found.

But the 460-unit Epic doesn’t fit that bill.

The building’s website describes The Epic as “the next generation of green NYC luxury rental apartments.” Available apartments reach $11,350 for a three-bedroom on the 50th floor.

Even at that price, all of the units are rent-stabilized in exchange for a property tax break that the company received.

The rent for Gobaud’s apartment could rise to $9,226.76 for a future tenant. The landlord is instead charging a so-called preferential rent of $5,850 — less than legally allowed but more in line with comparable apartments in the area.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has received just four complaints from other tenants in the building since April 2025. It has four open violations, including three for the failure to display certain building information and inspection dates earlier this year. The agency has not issued violations in Gobaud’s unit.

Veteran tenant attorney Sam Himmelstein said the case is “unusual.”

Tenants who sue their landlords in housing court typically point to violations issued by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Himmelstein said tenants do sometimes hire independent experts to confirm problems like odors or loud noises and show the evidence to the court, but they can be expensive.

He said the outcome of Gobaud’s case could test the limits of what renters can expect the court to do without documented violations from city agencies.

“These cases… are much harder for housing court to process,” Himmelstein said.

Gobaud is undeterred.

He said he likes the apartment and its location and has no intention of moving out. His sunlit living room faces north, offering panoramic views of Midtown’s forest of skyscrapers. He turned down an offer to break his lease and leave given the cost and strain of finding an apartment in New York City. He said he moved in after the owner of his last apartment, two blocks away, notified him of an upcoming 10% rent hike.

Gobaud asked the landlord in an email for permission to post a flyer on a building bulletin board to see if neighbors have the same problems — a request the company denied last month in a letter Gobaud shared with Gothamist. Gobaud said he next plans to go door-to-door along the line of apartments located next to the trash chute to ask tenants if they smell the same odor.

Fetner spokesperson Barbara Wagner said the company has “gone beyond what is reasonable to satisfy this resident, who continues to persist with complaints and court filings.”

“Our question is, to what end is he continuing this for, despite there being no validity to his claims?” she said in a written statement.

Gobaud said the answer is simple.

“ I just want the fumes to go away,” he said.