Rent stabilized apartments have been memory holed

 

 

THE CITY 

 In December, THE CITY highlighted a sizable decline in the number of registered rent-stabilized apartments across the city, even after a new state law prohibited removing units from the rent regulation rolls in most cases. Now a tenant advocacy group is using city property records to detail, down to the individual building, where landlords may be failing to report stabilized apartments to the state.

The nonprofit group JustFix shared with THE CITY records of 44,470 buildings that reported rent-stabilized units on their property tax bills in the last few years. The city Department of Finance says it gets that information directly from the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (HCR), which requires property owners to annually certify the number of rent-regulated apartments in their properties.

Very few rent-regulated apartments should have had their registrations disappear after June 2019. That’s when former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which ended landlords’ ability to remove apartments from rent-stabilization except under rare circumstances.

Yet since then — even as affordable-housing programs have created thousands of new rent-stabilized apartments — the number of units registered with the state has declined sharply.

For tax year 2021, landlords registered 803,216 units as rent-stabilized. That’s down from 869,220 as of the same date in 2019. 

During that time, about 4,000 units left rent stabilization legally, after landlord tax breaks expired. Meanwhile another 10,000 units were added through these tax programs, annual reports from the city Rent Guidelines Board show. 

The reports also show that about 900 remaining rent-regulated units in buildings once converted to condominiums or cooperatives have legitimately left the rolls, as longtime tenants moved out or died. 

It’s also not uncommon for landlords to file their state registration paperwork late — meaning that some of the 10,400 buildings that show a drop to zero rent-regulated units in their 2021 tax bills will eventually get back on the rolls.

But another roughly 3,100 buildings reporting a decline in the number of rent-stabilized apartments since 2019 still have one or more stabilized units registered — meaning that late registrations don’t explain the drop. 

In one Brooklyn building recently profiled in THE CITY that dropped from 12 registered rent-regulated apartments in 2019, to six in 2020 and 2021, tenant rent histories provided by HCR show apartments appear to have exited from rent regulation even after the 2019 rent law should have prohibited their removal.

THE CITY created an interactive map that lets readers search by address and see every apartment unit that was registered with the state as rent-stabilized in 2019 but no longer is.

This data release comes days after a federal appeals court struck down a challenge, brought by landlord groups, seeking to have the entire rent-regulation system ruled unconstitutional — a decision that landlords are now hoping to bring before the Supreme Court.