Housing Update: Landlord Lawsuit Challenges Entire Stabilization System

Sign up for our Mapping the Future newsletter to receive housing updates—including the latest news, statistics, tools for tenants and homeowners and affordable-rental lotteries—in your inbox weekly. Here are some of the headlines from this week’s update:

From City Limits

Loft Law regulates the conversion of commercial and manufacturing buildings for lawful residential use. It forces landlords to bring illegal living spaces up to safety codes. An update, which passed earlier this year, has left a sour taste in the mouths of all parties involved.

Picture the Homeless, a homeless-led grassroots organization is raising money to keep the doors open. The organization briefly shut its doors in June after missing an insurance payment. It is a unique space for homeless individuals to organize and be heard.

Tenants in a Bushwick apartment building filed a lawsuit last week to highlight ‘reprehensible’ conditions in their building. Four units in the building sit unoccupied and un-repaired after a 2008 fire. Water regularly floods through the ceiling and the walls.

From Around the City:

The city will spend more than $260 million over nearly nine years to house 253 families at the two newly constructed buildings on Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue—a cost of about $10,000 a month per apartment, Gothamist reports. The city has struggled to explain why. 

A group of Brooklyn brownstone residents has filed a lawsuit seeking an annulment of the city council’s decision to up-zone a site on Flatbush Avenue, allowing for the development of an 840-foot skyscraper, the Brooklyn Eagle reports. 

The Blackstone Group said it would pause apartment renovations and other planned work at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in response to the changes to the state’s rent regulation system, Crain’s reports. The new rules dramatically limit the rent increases landlords can charge tenants to cover the costs of renovations and repairs.

The real estate industry is striking back against tighter rent laws. Two real estate trade groups filed a lawsuit Monday arguing that the state’s entire rent regulation system is unconstitutional. “We’re going into the court system clearly with an eye of getting to the Supreme Court,” one group’s leader said. The Times has the story. 

A federal judge ruled that an incident reporting system for individuals with mental illness in the City’s supportive housing program is inadequate and must be expanded, ProPublica reports. The ruling comes after a report last year revealed complications faced by many residents who transferred into special program. 

A city practice of awarding 50 percent of affordable apartments to residents in the neighborhood they were created perpetuates segregation and allows less integration, a professor of sociology says in a new report. Curbed breaks it down. 

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