Opinion: Ground Lease Co-Op Tenants, Trapped By Their Landowners

“Lawmakers up in Albany have already proposed legislation to protect ground lease co-op residents around the state. We need standard rights and protections and New York has the chance to grant them.”

As longtime New York City residents, my wife and I have spent nearly three decades planning for our retirement. Hailing from modest means, both children of Puerto Rican immigrants, we believed if we worked hard, we’d have a chance to retire in peace. Now, as we near our seventies, instead of enjoying the retirement we’ve long planned, we fear eviction.

Our building, like others across New York, is a ground lease co-op, which means while we own our apartment, we lease the land beneath us from landowners. For all 324 families who live here in Carnegie House, this means paying for all building expenses—taxes, utilities, and maintenance—while our landowners collect rent and contribute nothing.

Right now, our lives are held hostage by greedy real estate developers exploiting our co-op building and demanding an unimaginable rent increase that would drain our savings, destroy our security and leave us without a home by next March. As ground lease co-op residents, we’re among New York’s last major class of “unprotected tenants,” with few regulations in place to shield us from exploitation. We need New York to step up and save us by passing protections for thousands of families like ours. 

In the late 1990s, after years in a New Jersey condo, my wife and I moved to Carnegie House, an affordable Manhattan co-op. We had passed a rigorous vetting process and secured a mortgage, thrilled to finally be closer to work. Owning an apartment here meant our equity would eventually support us in retirement. But all of that changed in 2014, when Carnegie House’s original landowners sold our building to a new set of greedy, real estate moguls committed to taking over our co-op. 

As we inched closer to our retirement, it became clear that our new landowners were eyeing the upcoming lease renewal in March 2025 as a golden opportunity to price us out and dissolve the co-op. While our board has worked to negotiate in good faith for a more reasonable rent increase—one that will keep us from losing our homes come next March—the only counter offer from our landowners to date remains extreme: an immediate sixfold rent hike.

Our building would need to win the lottery multiple times over to afford a rent hike like this, making it clear that they have no qualms about potentially displacing hundreds of families. Because we’re ground lease residents without any legal framework to keep our landowners accountable, we’re basically left at their mercy. 

And we’re trapped. Local banks have stopped lending money to interested buyers, advising them in great detail about the land lease renewal and the diminishing returns of purchasing an apartment here. All of us existing Carnegie House residents have effectively become owners of a co-op we can no longer sell, beholden to a land lease that will likely surge enough to displace our entire building. 

The shock has rippled through every part of our lives for years on end. For decades, my wife and I have paid into what we originally thought was a safe, long-term investment and sticking to the financial plan we devised when we first moved. It all seemed simple enough. I would work until age 65, sell our apartment and use the equity to purchase a home where we would live out our retirement. 

Instead, I’m still working at 68 years old because the one time we need to most, we simply can’t sell our apartment. We are hostages in our own home, powerless against our landowners. Every day we ask ourselves: how could this be happening to us? The relentless stress and frustration has gradually devastated our health and well-being. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent signing of the ground lease renewal bill offers a glimmer of hope, but it’s not enough. All of us at Carnegie House remain at grave risk of losing our homes. We deserve the same security that other tenants have gained in recent years. Yet thousands of ground lease co-op residents are excluded from these protections. If families at Carnegie House are left to fall, the same could happen to more than 25,000 residents in ground lease co-ops across the state, many of them hard-working New Yorkers who also dream of retiring in peace. 

Our landowners may hold the deed to the land, but our lives, our health, and our hopes and dreams are tied to our homes. As of last year, lawmakers up in Albany have already proposed legislation to protect ground lease co-op residents around the state. We need standard rights and protections and New York has the chance to grant them. 

We’re not asking for special treatment—just the chance to hold onto what we’ve worked for. My wife and I have spent more than four decades working and saving to achieve a stable life, one where we don’t have to face retirement in fear.

The families of Carnegie House have an urgent request for our electeds: fight for the rights of ground lease co-op residents. Don’t let us be sacrificed to the avarice of our landowners. Act during the next legislative session and pass the ground lease co-op bill to help us secure our futures.

Tony Santiago is a longtime resident of Carnegie House.