The Rent Guidelines Board Tuesday voted in favor of rent hikes between 2 to 5 percent for a one-year lease and 4 to 7 percent for two-year leases. A final vote won’t happen until June, but the preliminary numbers have historically set the goalposts: annual adjustments have fallen within these ranges since 2004, when the board began using them.
“The result of the latest reporting only serves to reinforce an unequal economic standing between landlords and tenants. Through its limited scope, this reporting causes unnecessary panic, potential demoralization, and ultimately a false sense of relief if the board goes with anything lower than the reported high end number.”
Seventeen previously rent-stabilized apartments in Cristina Ramirez’s Harlem building haven’t been registered with the state since 2018. Her legal team says her case is illustrative of the need for greater enforcement of New York’s rent laws.
The initiative will invest $10 million to repair stabilized units that have sat empty, and turn them over to tenants with rental assistance vouchers—what the administration described as a “creative way” to boost the city’s affordable housing stock and increase options for voucher holders, who often facing discrimination from landlords and brokers.
“We think we’ve identified over 1,500 421-a buildings that are out of compliance with the rent stabilization laws,” said Aaron Carr, executive director at watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative. “Whether you’re a tenant or a taxpayer you should be up in arms about this.”
The latest vacancy data now mirrors pre-COVID figures following a “pandemic-height outlier,” according to New York State’s affordable housing agency. The number of empty apartments also matches the vacancy rate prior to landmark 2019 tenant protections that landlords blamed for the spike in empty units last year.
“It is somewhat common for landlords to attempt to circumvent the legal approval process to alter rent-stabilized apartments by cutting out the middleman.”
City Limits rounds up the latest housing and land use-related events, public hearings and upcoming affordable housing lotteries that are ending soon.
The owners of three buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens are accused in the suit of falsely registering initial rents with the state Division of Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) in order to charge tenants more money than legally permitted at renewal or on new leases.
“Many homeless New Yorkers are working and could afford rent stabilized rents—yet landlords have been warehousing rent stabilized apartments.”
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