Cartoon by Sue Susman using Gemini
https://citylimits.org/
Comment (not in the City Limits article) :
The former head of the Rent Stabilization Association (owners of rent stabilized buildings, which group has now merged with the Real Estate Board of NY to form the NY Apartment Association) has created a new group to deal with apartment warehousing. The group, "Unlocking Our Housing NYC" has hired canvassers to go door to door to sign up tenants who don't want landlords to hold empty rent-stabilized apartments off the market. (We don't either!)
The problem: The group pretends it doesn't have a solution in mind. But the head of the group, Jay Martin, has been advocating for years to raise rents on empty apartments.
One bill that would fulfill landlord wishes is a "vacancy reset" so that for rent-stabilized apartments occupied for at least 10 years, the landlord and the new tenant can set a new base rent. Given the shortage of NYC apartments, that will create a bidding war - and the tenant who offers the HIGHEST rent will get the apartment; that rent will become the new "legal regulated rent" for that apartment. And that means
- landlords will have an incentive to get long-term tenants out (something we thought we stopped with the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act) and
- those apartments will only be affordable to the wealthiest tenants.
The City Limits article doesn't note that where landlords maintain apartments that tenants live in for decades, landlords do not need huge sums of money to get those apartments ready to rent out again once the tenant leaves.
