ProPublica

City Council members want a new system and fines to be sure that landlords are complying with rent limits at up to 200,000 unregistered apartments.

Council Member Ben Kallos has proposed a new system requiring landlords to register rent-stabilized apartments with the city or face fines. (Bryan Anselm for ProPublica)

Listen to Podcast Here

• Multiple layers of government are partially responsible for the lack of enforcement.
  Kallos: You have Housing Preservation and Development, which has a duty to deal with [affordable housing] registrations. You have the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, which is the state entity. Everyone must register with the DHCR, and that information should be shared with HPD – which theoretically should have a duty to do the enforcement. … Currently we're not seeing that happening. As of 1993, the state of New York stopped charging fines for people who don't register, which is partially responsible for what happens. If you're a landlord and you do not register, nothing happens to you.
• ProPublica’s reporting pushed Council Member Kallos to introduce his bill.
  Kallos: The affordable housing registration problem is something that I've been looking at for quite some time, but it wasn't until ProPublica did this intrepid reporting that really uncovered what was going on and what was wrong. That really helped me finalize legislation that I introduced. … It requires every owner of affordable housing, whether it is subsidized or rent-regulated, to register with HPD in addition to DHCR. And it has steep fines for people who do not register – and that would be per apartment, per month, up to $2,000, indexed to inflation.

Download the Podcast

Since the 1990s, New York City has published, and public officials have quoted, an estimate that there are 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, giving some 2 million tenants protections from eviction and unlimited rent increases.

The estimate comes from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, which publishes a survey on which the number is based. Rent-stabilized apartments are vital to affordable housing and thus an important gauge of the housing market.

There’s one problem with the figure, however: It could be off by as much as 20 percent.

Data provided to ProPublica by the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) — which oversees rent-stabilized apartments — shows that, as of 2014, New York City had 839,797 rent-stabilized apartments registered with the state. For that same year, HPD’s survey estimated 1,029,918 units.

Last month, Werner met with City Council Member Ben Kallos to discuss enforcement and administration of the law, which is shared by HPD, the city’s Department of Finance and the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR). A reporter also attended.

“We have a bureaucratic quagmire between DHCR, HPD and DOF and we as a city and a state must get to the bottom of it,” Kallos said at the meeting. He called Werner “a hero” for raising the issue.