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A recent study looked at Airbnb home/apartment listings in 20 different Zip codes located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. It found that those listings which offered to rent entire homes or apartments on Airbnb’s website comprise at least 10 percent of the total rental units in those Zip codes, according to the report by New York Communities for Change. The most popular neighborhood for Airb...
Developers in line for tax breaks for building low-income housing in or near luxury buildings can no longer install a "poor door" to separate low-income tenants from those who pay market rates. The New York State ban was passed recently as part of legislation that renewed the state's 421-a tax break program and strengthened the state’s rent regulation.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently announced a settlement deal with Bank of America and Citigroup in which the banks will provide $75 million to build or rehabilitate 2,300 rental units in the city and 1,500 elsewhere in the state. The money, which would be used to fund low-interest loans, will count as “consumer relief” that the banks pledged to provide under multibillion-dollar national settl...
Since Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s Airbnb report last fall, which found that 72 percent of all Airbnb transactions between 2010 and June 2014 violated state law, City Council members have been intensifying their efforts to stem the illegal use of Airbnb. Recently, Manhattan City Council members Helen Rosenthal and Ydanis Rodriguez have introduced new legislation that would ramp up penalties for people who misu...
Newly released data by the Rent Guidelines Board shows the total number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York City increased in 2014, up 169 units. There were 9,182 apartments added to rent stabilization last year, compared to 9,013 that were removed from the rolls.
New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman recently reached a $1.2 million settlement with developers who illegally converted rent-stabilized apartments to luxury condos. The developers agreed to pay $1.2 million to a city housing fund for the loss of five rent-stabilized apartments. The deal also requires them to provide two years of rent payments to tenants who stayed and to reimburse legal fees.
Recently, the New York City council passed a bill that would require owners to provide tenants at least 24 hours’ notice before launching into any renovations that would “disrupt building services,” ranging from building heat to water and electricity. HPD would assume responsibility for enforcing the potential law.
A group of advocates and state Assembly members recently called for the end of certain fees owners are legally allowed to charge rent-stabilized tenants to bump up the amount of money they collect every month. These levies include a $5 monthly charge per appliance for having an air conditioner, for example, or a roughly $16 monthly fee for a washing machine.
Many aging apartment buildings in the Bronx do not have the resources to upgrade boilers and undertake major repairs and renovations to make them more energy efficient and to improve living conditions for tenants. In response to this problem, borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. has teamed up with city housing officials to create a program that will help those buildings pay the upfront costs for energy improvements, such as rep...
Last fall, Mayor de Blasio signed a bill increasing the maximum penalties for owners found to have harassed their tenants, from $5,000 to $10,000, and requiring the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to post a list online of owners that have been found to harass their tenants. Now, there has been a new bill introduced targeting a similar pool of owners who aggressively seek to buy out rent-stabilized leases....
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