Good news on Frankensteining regulations!

New Regulations to Keep Frankensteined Apartments Stabilized and Affordable!

With a lot of hard work, testifying, and campaigning, we have helped win new regulations by the New York State Homes and Community Renewal that will enable New York City to retain more of its affordable, rent regulated housing, closing a loophole in the housing law. 

Because of this loophole, owners have erased rent stabilized homes by combining adjacent, formerly affordable apartments into Frankensteined monsters at sky-high rents. It has even encouraged landlords to warehouse vacant rent-regulated apartments - sometimes for years - in the hope of Frankensteining them later.

In one building, for example, an empty stabilized apartment renting for about $850 a month was combined with an unregulated market-rate apartment above it going for about $3,000 a month. The result was a duplex apartment advertised at $13,000 per month, according to an advertisement on Streeteasy.com. This practice of Frankensteining has removed rent-regulated apartments throughout the city, and warehousing has nearly emptied some buildings on the Lower East Side.  Estimates from the city and others range from 13,000 to 60,000 empty, rent stabilized apartments

In response to tenant actions, New York State’s housing agency proposed these regulations and they should make a difference. The regulations say the new rent will be the combined legal rents of the original apartments. Where a rent stabilized unit is expanded with common-area space, the rent must be proportional to the change in the unit’s size (plus any “individual apartment increases” capped at  $85 over 15 years and normal Rent Guidelines Board increases).  So that $13,000 rent seen above would be more like $5,000, and the apartment will stay rent stabilized.

Moreover, landlords who created those vacancies by harassing tenants out, or by fraud or evasion, may be entitled to no increase at all.  

This new regulation, in keeping with the intent of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, will discourage Frankensteining and keep more apartments affordable and rent stabilized in the midst of the one of the greatest housing shortages New York has ever seen. 

We thank the many tenants who worked hard to demand these changes, and we are glad the New York State Homes and Community Renewal enacted these long overdue new regulations. We urge Governor Hochul to sign S2980/A6216 to make the changes more comprehensive and permanent.