MANHATTAN SNAPS
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Editorial
COURTESY BRAD HOYLMAN’S OFFICE
State Senator Brad Hoylman, center, with tenants in Albany on “Tenant
Tuesday” last month.
Victory for tenants!
What a difference having a Democrat-controlled state Senate has meant.
And nowhere has that been more apparent than in the sweeping and
historic win for tenants this past Friday.
With votes of approval by the state Senate and Assembly followed by the signing
by Governor Andrew Cuomo of “The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act
of 2019,” vacancy decontrol is now a thing of the past.
It’s a huge victory for affordability — and a massive relief for tenants in 1 million
households in rent-regulated apartments across New York City.
Under vacancy decontrol, if an empty apartment’s rent was roughly $2,775 a
month, it could be taken out of the rent-regulation program and turned market
rate. That, unfortunately, led to bad-actor landlords using sundry harassment
techniques to push out tenants, so that the owners could keep boosting the rents
to reach the decontrol threshold.
Harassment, of course, can take different forms, from subtle to blatant — ranging
from lack of heat and hot water to disruptive, noisy, dusty, unhealthy interior
gut rehabs of buildings.
Obviously, not all landlords are bad actors. But, in effect, by now making rent
regulation permanent, it takes away a huge incentive — and temptation — for
landlords to harass tenants.
Since vacancy decontrol was enacted in 1994, it’s believed that more than
160,000 apartments — and 62 percent of all units deregulated during that time —
lost their rent-protected status due to vacancy decontrol. So, obviously, this reform
will go a long way toward stopping the drain of the city’s stock of affordable-tomiddle
class housing.
Housing activists even had ambitiously hoped that some of those “lost” units
could now be restored to rent regulation, but it was apparently too far a reach even
for this sweeping legislation. Similarly, an effort to get buildings with fewer than
six units into the rent-regulation program also failed.
However, rents will also be kept down because the so-called vacancy bonus
has now also been repealed — meaning landlords can no longer jack up an apartment’s
rent by as much as 20 percent after a tenant vacates.
Also now signifi cantly reduced is landlords’ ability to pass along costs of major
capital improvements (M.C.I.’s) and individual apartment improvements (I.A.I.’s)
to tenants.
Owners will now also be restricted to taking only one unit for “personal use”
and must use it as their primary residence.
Furious lobbying efforts by the real estate industry, for once, failed in the face of
a newly blue Albany. Cuomo did not stand in the way. Landlords will continue to
make their profi ts — though just a bit less.
The new rent reforms went into effect Saturday.
“The pendulum is swinging,” said state Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the
Senate Democratic majority leader.
Friday was a very emotional day for tenant advocates and for lawmakers who
fought in the trenches alongside them for so long. Assemblymember Yuh-Line
Niou posted a 1-minute video of herself on Twitter, tearing up with joy, taken right
after the Assembly had voted on the “tenant protection package.”
“We’re gonna change a lot of lives with that,” she said of the legislation. Noting
that 70 percent of the constituent cases she sees in her Lower East Side/
Chinatown/Lower Manhattan district are housing related, she said her district is
plagued by some of the absolute worst kinds of landlord neglect and harassment.
But now, there’s new hope and new optimism.
As Niou simply put it, “We’re making history today.”
12 June 20, 2019 TVG Schneps Media
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