New York City Can Protect Tenants Now

Because, after all, I’m the tenant! You just OWN the place. Who cares what you want?

Please provide an example of government regulation which has equitably rectified an imbalance of supply and demand. I have been a renter, an owner and a landlord in New York City. I left and sold my properties because of abusive tenants and excessive regulation. My capital is now invested in other geographies and earning superior returns with less hassle and cost. My tenants are wonderful and pay on time without destroying the property or making false complaints to regulators. This state of harmony exists because supply is relatively unconstrained and can meet demand. Tenants can pick their landlords and properties while landlords can pick their tenants. There is flexibility and fluidity in the market. Rent control precludes that solution and therefore must employ regulation to try to achieve equitable outcomes. However, regulation is subject to political whims and manipulation in a way that the market is not. Rent control may have had a purpose at one time but does not any longer. No one has the right to live in a specific geography at a cost to others. Trying to freeze the status quo is what dooms cities and countries.

For every bad landlord there are 20 bad tenants that this newspaper will never write an article about. The chronic nonpayers and late payers, the Collyers' cases, the illegal subtenants, the people who don't live in their rent stabilized apartments and have every excuse in the book for not doing so, the tenants who illegally install washers/dryers in their apartments or otherwise illegally alter them, the ones who run illegal massage parlors out of their apartments, sneak pets into no-pet buildings and then claim they are service animals, the ones who bring bedbug infestations into a building or smoke fish in their apartments causing neighboring tenants to vacate, the tenant who illegally wanted to use a fire escape as their personal terrace and bbq spot, the tenants who constantly smoke weed and cigarettes or blast loud music, the multitude of tenants illegally renting apartments through AirBnB, the tenants forging the deceased tenants' name to renewal leases or lying about their relationship to the tenant. i could go on. I've seen all of these multiple times yet the Times will never tell the other side of the story.

We need to look at extending rent control laws to new construction as well as market rate apartments. Too many people are effectively poor due to escalating rents on apartments where they live already. They may have qualified to rent based on income and credit rating --but their landlords are raising the rents according to what they feel the market can bear because they can. Tenants end up spending literally half of their monthly incomes on rent, pushing some into poverty and pushing some out altogether.

Last September, Housing Rights Initiative informed the tenants of my Astoria building that 30 (out of approximately 90) apartments had been illegally destabilized by our landlord over the years. None of us knew that we are legally required to have stabilized leases...or that we had been overcharged and were at risk for facing rent spikes and worse. Housing Rights Initiative held a meeting to inform us of our rights and the legal steps available to us should we want to pursue our rights. Then they matched us with a law firm willing to represent us on contingency (though they also clarified we were free to undertake our own independent legal action.) Weeks ago we filed a class action suit representing those 30 tenants in our building and many former tenants who had been intentionally defrauded by our landlord: 100 in all. Without Housing Rights Initiative, we would have been like thousands of other tenants in New York City: unaware that we are legally supposed to be rent stabilized. According to our attorney, hundreds of landlords in NYC are doing the same thing ours did. New York tenants must mobilize and demand better representation by city government. Thank you, Times editors, for this important article. And thank you, Housing Rights Initiative. https://housingrightsny.org/

Before criticizing, place yourselves in the shoes of these owners! If the City wants to subsidize these appts, do it in honest way, using taxpayers money, not making owners loose money and pretending that everything is fine! Compensate the owners fully! They have rights too!

Did it occur to NYT that rent control is the problem? this is typical government - trying to solve a problem that it created in the first place.

If you can’t swing the rent don’t take the place.....it’s called pay your bills and asking for your rent money is NOT harrassment.

While i cannot say I agree with "rent controlled" apartments as a thing, it is a fact they exist and are protected under the law of NY. Since they are a thing, the landlords need to obey the laws and if they don't like the law, sell the building to someone who will obey the laws. As for these bills, noticeably absent is a simple, effective and useful bill that would alleviate a large part of the enforcement problem as well as the investigation problem. Each rent controlled building and unit should be registered in a central database and a unique identifier assigned to it. The owner, not the shell company or registered agent, but actual owners and their addresses should be required to be in the database. Anytime a construction permit is pulled it must be cross checked against that database. If it is a rent controlled building the application must include the unique identifier and the tenants notified by registered mail, at the owners expense, that there will be construction done. This would go for any real estate transaction, zoning change, or any other permitting action. Since the biggest barrier to investigation and control of the problem is identifying the perpetrators, why are they not passing laws to erase that problem?

The title :"New York City Can Protect Tenants Now", is misleading, as it is followed by :"A package of bills would allow the city to fight harassment by landlords." New York City can not protect tenants "NOW " because these bills have not been passed. IF and WHEN these bills are passed by the City Council, the City will have be able to fight harassment by landlords.

Rent control should be abolished how’s is it legal for the government to require private citizens to subsidize other people’s costs I would like for someone to pick up some of my expenses. If you cannot afford to live in nyc move to an area you can afford. I would like to live in some areas of nyc however I can’t so I live within my means without expecting others to pick up my tab.

None of this would be an issue without rent control. Allow landlords to rent at market rates, and stop restricting new developments. Then they won't be able to treat their tenants like garbage. The only way to solve a housing crisis is to increase supply. Building new housing actually isn't the only way to do that. Rent control sometimes has people stuck in excessively big places, a big market inefficiency. Also make sure property tax is the same percentage for everyone, so millionaires with pied-a-terres might actually rent them out. There's so many empty apartments in the city it's such a shame.

Most highly educated young people will be moving to the City, good luck to the rest of you.

The DOB, as has been apparent for a long time, is the enforcer arm of the REBNY, so of course, let's hire even more stooges because there aren't enough to do the real estate industry's bidding now. These guys have had their palms greased for so long, they can't even hold on to a stair rail, much less inspect it.

Things opponents of The Emergency Tenant protection Act never admit: 1) The rent regulations only go back to the 1970s - not World War 2. All rent regulations were removed in 1972 - leaving a "free market". After two years, the laws had to be restored and expanded by a completely Republican legislature and governor when rents shot up 500% and several building owners murdered renters to empty apartments. 2) Building owners are entitled, under the law, to a 7.5% profit margin. This is why the perennial howls of "illegal taking!!" never survive in the courts. A guaranteed profit of 7.5% is something people in other businesses would sell their souls for. 3) Rent regulated buildings are a highly coveted investment because regardless of the shape of the economy, rents go up; never down. 4) ALL rent regulations sunset when the vacancy rate hits a mere 5%. When that happens, we will have a truly free market with both sides of the equation having equal power. These are never mentioned because doing so makes it all but impossible to portray building owners as victims. https://emcphd.wordpress.com

Just as criminals in NY are not allowed to profit from the stories of their crimes, property owners should not be allowed to profit from forcing someone into homelessness, and certainly not without a high burden of proof that there was truly just cause for an eviction (such as the property being used for human trafficking or the tenant had Jack-hammered the floor).

I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Two people I knew were hounded out of rent stabilized apartments. One had AIDS and couldn't afford market rents. He couch-surfed for a few months at friends' houses but the stress of constantly moving got to him. He contracted pneumonia and died. The other, Bill, was already dying of cancer. The landlord couldn't wait for nature to take its course but insisted that he vacate so she could "renovate" the building. (It was actually in excellent condition.) His partner had to take the landlord to court in order to get permission to stay until Bill died. Allright in New York commented that rent control/stabilization is the most "inefficient" system. And that it creates "unhealthy incentives" by not driving tenants to work harder and earn more money. IMO, efficiency is a highly valued characteristic of machines, not a human value. Are we supposed to run as fast as we can on treadmills so we can enrich landlords like him? I'm not anti-landlord, though--heck, I am one. My policy is to keep rents below market so as to have my choice of tenants, and not raise them unless the rate of inflation makes maintenance impossible. That's the best I can do under our current system. A just society would ensure that its members were provided with decent shelter. It wouldn't give $billions in tax breaks to the world's richest man while thousands went homeless.

If you want to truly protect tenants simply going after "bad landlords" will do little. The real problem is that New York politicians on the state and city level, specifically Bloomberg, and now de Blasio and Cuomo, care only about big real estate developers. Cuomo and de Blasio gleefully gave nearly 2 billion dollars to the wealthiest man in the world by subverting the city's democratic institutions when city homelessness is at the highest level since the Great Depression. There are over 63,000 homeless each night in city shelters. Families with children now make up a staggering three-quarters of that population. Families enter shelters from a few clustered zip codes in the poorest neighborhoods, but come from every city zip code prior to entering those neighborhoods. New York's poorest neighborhoods are now ghettos into which working poor and working class families are driven before they finally can't afford to live there and wind up in shelters. My first job as an attorney was representing indigent tenants in lower Manhattan in the 1990's. Bad landlords were trying to drive my clients, primarily elderly Italian, Jewish, and Hispanic women, out into the street, so I don't buy any of the nonsense here by landlords griping about how only "bad tenants" get driven out. However, bad landlords are a symptom of a political and economic system subsidizing luxury development for Russian oligarchs, while steadily reducing the amount of truly affordable housing for everyone else.

Five bad landlords in NYC are partially responsible for spurring me on to a new life in Southeast Asia. These new laws are a step in the right direction, but won't change the underlying fact--New York City is now exclusively for the rich. I remember when the whole Village was writers, artists and musicians. It was an exciting place to be. Enjoy shopping at Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs on Bleecker Street--an absurdity I have finally recovered from.

We don't even protect NYCHA tenants, the over 170,000 apartments with over half a million tenants? The government owns those buildings. And who is protecting the tenants there with over a $32 billion backlog in repairs, with boilers that are constantly breaking down and out of date? It is not because of greedy landlords. Then who is at fault? The cost just to make reported repairs to get these properties in decent condition is $188,000 per apartment.

Basically, you believe that housing should not be private property and that landowners should not be able to do what they want with their property. Why should someone who happened to move to the city decades ago get to live in a below-market rate apartment while others do not?

Maybe those advocating for landlords to be able to capriciously and rather suddenly hike rents of modest-income families with kids in local schools and jobs and family and church nearby should invite the mortgage lenders on their own homes to Willy-nilly, whenever they want to raise their monthly mortgage payments on all of their own residences to however high the lender wants, while maybe also raising the amount of principle they have to pay down to the current market rate for their homes, even the mortgage has been paid for 15 years and property values have skyrocketed to tens of millions of dollars more than the original mortgage was for. That might give those advocates a semblance of what modest-income tenants go through.

Over half of NYC rental housing is not free market. Rent Stabilization, Section 8, Mitchell-Lama rentals, Public Housing (NYCHA) and Rent Control apartments provide non-market affordable rent. These programs are over 70 years old. They actually limit housing and lower the quality of housing. They provide several incentives to create an inefficient market that is bad for society.

Once again, the editorial board that has no people with business backgrounds on it thinks more government regulation is a good thing. Shocking. However, they start with a completely wrong premise that housing is a "right" for poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods. Nonsense. Apartment rentals are BUSINESS. And just like any other business, when there is an opportunity to make more money, the people who own these buildings and have spent good money to buy them should have every right to make as much money off them as they can. When I read that the city council spends taxpayer money to allow people who don't pay their rent to get free legal support from the government it shows just how out of touch with reality our city council is. If someone is not paying their rent, they should have no right to stay in the apartment and require the landlord to absorb their non-payment costs. Landlords are not the bad guys, Editorial Board. They are just trying to make a living like anyone else. And if tenants can't pay, or if there is the opportunity to rent to someone who will pay much more money, Landlords as business owners should be able to take advantage of that opportunity. Until we change from capitalism to socialism (and end up with an economy like Russia's), the city council would be wise to remember that.

Laws without enforcement become invisible. Steep and escalating fines for landlords who abuse the system are necessary. And so is jail time for serial abusers. That'll put the fear of God in them.

Rent-control/stabilization is the worst most inefficient system at best and broken and abused at worst. Personally, I was offered a rent-stabilized apartment in an building I was applying for a 3k apartment for when I was single and making over 200k. I know others like me. Also, it creates unhealthy incentives by residents and their children who no longer have an drive to make more money. If anything, the subsidy should be from the government to the resident to afford what is priced appropriately on the free market. There could also be some old fashioned subsidized housing like the old Stuy town. One easy thing to start with would be to stop letting foreign nationals buy up apartments as their personal lockboxes and free that up.

Seems to me that one reason NYC and similar cities have a supposed housing shortage is that they give permits for developers and others to build or create-by-renovate expansive and expensive luxury housing when the space, money, and resources would be better and more ethically used to permit the building and renovation of more modest housing complexes for average Americans. Many of those luxury units are owned by people who use them only occasionally (not their primary residence, maybe not even their secondary residence), if at all. And many of hose people are not even American.

"Abusive landlords get away with this because of lax enforcement of weak laws." And who might be responsible for this state of affairs? Could it be Giuliani, Bloomberg, Quinn, and all the other NYC power-brokers who paved the way for landlords and "developers" to run rampant for the last 20+ years? Various governors and state legislators in bed with big money and big contributions from the real estate cartel in NYC? Or the NYC "industry groups" of developers and realtors (Kushner, Ratner, Speyer, etc.) who've bought and paid to get their way, pushed their agenda through (see #1 and #2 above), and fought hard to gut middle-income housing in NYC for decades? Things don't happen in a vacuum! And change and reform wopn't happen until the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the nature and extent of control by developers and ready collusion by various politicos is laid out clearly for all to see. Follow the money!

LANDLORD 1: Gah! Now we won't be able just scare away the pesky locals and get OUR people in! LANDLORD 2: Pfft. When has the LAW ever got in the way of us? Just grease some cop palms, maybe a de Blasio here and there...besides, Amazon HQ2 will do the gentrifying now! LANDLORD 1: Heh heh, you're right, nothing's changed! And people even still fall for our whole "The Mayor is *air quotes* FAR LEFT" schtick...bwahah! They think there's a far left! Oh, I LOVE America. LANDLORD 2: Idiots...cheers! *clinks glass with Landlord 1*

These new laws will prove as ineffective as the old ones because they ignore the underlying economic reality. If NYC has a housing shortage and the public wishes to address it, the government should do so out of public funds. That's right: face the taxpayers and tell them their taxes will be used for a massive investment in low-income housing. Instead, NYC attempts to fund public housing out of the pockets of private property owners by regulating rents and condo conversions, and by insisting that new buildings include space for low income tenants. These actions are free to government, but impose what should be governmental costs upon private property owners. The government, in effect, is confiscating part of the market value of the land. Given the absurdity of of such confiscations, property owners quite naturally do everything in their power to circumvent these laws. Few people invest in NYC real estate for public purposes. They invest to earn a fair return. Progressives congratulate themselves on being so fair and compassionate. There appears to be no limit how benevolent and self-righteous they can be with other people's property.

It's time the slumlord got his due, Fair treatment for tenants renew, Gentrifying denying For true fairness vying For Jared Kushners overdue.

This is an industry that is creating the seeds of its own destruction. There is a developing glut of high priced, "luxury" free market housing in Brooklyn and other areas that will result in a crash. Meanwhile, working people increasingly have nowhere to live. DeBlasio promised to be the champion here but has been bought out by the real estate lobby. He permits obscent high rise developments that offer below market apartments to a few lucky lottery winners who then find out they are expected to use the back door without access to the building gym. And now Amazon will worsen the housing shortage. The bottom line is that there is no master plan to keep NYC livable.

For the Mayor to equivocate for a single, solitary second should disabuse anybody who isn't in on his double-dealing already ... of the notion that he's *really* liberal. You're known by the company you keep and the donations you take, ... and he's a wolf in sheep's clothing, cozying up to all but the most vile folks (the Kushners among them) in the R.E. biz. That it took him 2-3 days to express sympathy for a woman victimized by the still out of control NYC police - at least the many bad apples who will retire if and only if their OWN financial security is totally guaranteed - is further proof that if Trump conned the U.S., diBlasio has successfully conned NY - TWICE.

After 10 years in a rent-stabilized building I got tired of fighting with my landlords to make basic repair, provide working appliances and hold rent increases down to reasonable levels. Earlier this year I purchased a small apartment just across the river in Union City, NJ at a fraction of the price of a comparable unit in New York City. My commute to work is even shorter but I miss being on the subway line. At the end of the day City Hall can regulate predatory housing practices but living below market rates will always be a struggle in expensive cities.

Please, please bring these kinds of tenant protections to the SF Bay Area, where landlords can and do engage in practices such harassment and endangerment by construction, sometimes spending close to $1million to do, and then are allowed by poorly-crafted laws and inept local officials to charge the cost back to the tenants themselves. Financial, psychological, and sometimes physical abuse all in one. And then they sometimes reap "economic development zone" and other tax breaks on that same property as well.

How about mentioning the good small landlords, people owning one or two buildings who get taken advantage of by tenants who manipulate things like rent control. I am a small landlord who has a great relationship with my tenants but has a tenant that refuses to pay even a $68 monthly rent for a rent controlled apartment that was gained by right of succession. This is an individual that constantly contacts HPD with unfounded complaints. The courts approved the right of succession but since I also live in my building I believe it was totally fraudulent. Tell me, who speaks for us?

When you buy a building subject to Rent Control you pay less for that building as compared to similar buildings not subject to Rent Control. The buyers of rent controlled buildings who got their price break when they bought the building must be forced to abide by the terms of the building's rent control status by being subject to non-refundable forfeiture and loss of their entire investment, if not criminal prosecution, if they fail to abide by the property's lawful rent controlled status. No more of this practice where you buy a Rent Controlled building on-the-cheap thinking that you'll force Rent Controlled tenants out so that you can raise rents. You live with what you bought!