Coalition to End Apartment Warehousing / Coalición Contra el Amacenamiento de Apartamentos
https://www.amny.com/lifestyle/city-living/nyc-pols-rally-zombie-apartments/
Posted on October 31, 2022Put on your Zombie or Frankenstein mask and join the NYC Public Advocate, Housing Justice for All, GOLES, and the End Apartment Warehousing Coalition at a
Landlords are refusing to rent out affordable homes, making them into zombie apartments. Stand up against zombie apartments!
Sam Rabiyah, a reporter with The City, joined Bobby Cuza on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to discuss the city’s current housing crisis. (NY1 Photo)\
Landlords claim that
higher vacancy rate they created means we shouldn't have rent
stabilization!
NYC Had 88,830 Vacant Rent-Stabilized
Apartments Last Year, City Housing Agency Estimates
Roughly
1 in 10 rent-regulated apartments were vacant in 2021, Census survey data
reveals — far more than the 61,000 vacancies landlords reported to the state.
BY SAM RABIYAH
OCT
20, 2022, 5:30AM EDT
EXCERPT:
What’s more, [landlord group CHIP's executive
director Jay Martin] said, the new numbers suggest that the Council’s vote to
continue rent regulation may have been invalid. “If HPD claims there were an
additional 45,970 rent-stabilized apartments available for rent during the 2021
Housing and Vacancy Survey then the overall vacancy rate was above 5% and the
housing emergency could not have been legally declared by the City Council,” he
said.
HPD shared its figures after THE CITY
documented a steep increase in the number of vacant rent-stabilized units as
the city emerged from COVID lockdown in 2021, based on a memo from the state’s
Homes and Community Renewal agency. Our reporting showed that:
· Between January 2020 and January 2021, the
state’s count of vacant rent-stabilized apartments nearly doubled, to more than
61,000.
· Landlords registered tens of thousands fewer
rent stabilized apartments with the state than they did previously, declining
to 857,791 units registered for 2021 — potentially leaving those apartments off
the radar for rent law enforcement.
· In all, the state numbers show a loss of over
95,000 stabilized apartments for rent after 2019 — the year a major overhaul in Albany of the state’s
rent laws blocked landlords from significantly jacking up rents on vacant units
when leasing them to new tenants.
· A lawsuit from landlord groups seeking to
abolish rent regulation is working its way through federal courts and could
reach the Supreme Court, potentially rewarding property owners who keep
apartments vacant. Owner organizations are also seeking rollbacks of the 2019
New York rent reforms that sharply capped rent increases on vacant units.
The City's Sam Rabiyah looks at the hard facts: City and State records of vacant stabilized apartments, and how much money landlords are actually making.
The number of empty regulated apartments nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021, a state memo obtained by THE CITY shows.
BY SAM RABIYAH
OCT 19, 2022, 5:05AM EDT
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