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The NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently published its annual State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods report. The report provides a compendium of 2016 data and analysis about New York City’s housing, land use, demographics, and quality of life for each borough and the city’s 59 community districts.

On May 18, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) presented the NYC Water Board with its recommended approach to billing rates for the coming year. The DEP recommended that the board take no action on water rates. And at a public hearing on June 16th, the Water Board confirmed that water rates won’t be raised in Fiscal Year 2018.

The City Council unanimously passed Intro 1218, which was proposed by City Councilman Vincent Gentile. The bill imposes stiff penalties on owners for illegal conversions. It targets owners of homes classified as “aggravated illegal conversions,” by imposing a $15,000 violation per three or more units above the legally allowed amount as stated in the home’s certificate of occupancy. If unpaid, the fine would be subject to a lien sale on the property.

OATH is New York City’s central independent administrative law court; it’s not part of the state court system. The OATH Hearings Division is the division of OATH that’s responsible for holding hearings on summonses issued by a variety of agencies for alleged quality of life violations. These types of hearings were traditionally called Environmental Control Board (ECB) hearings.

The City Council recently passed legislation requiring residential property owners to file the bedbug history for each of their properties electronically with HPD. It was signed into law on May 10 by Mayor de Blasio. In addition to filing this new electronic form with HPD, owners and managers will be required to post the same at a prominent place in the building or provide the form with each new or renewal lease. An HPD-approved form on preventing, detecting, and removi...

At the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) Preliminary Vote on April 25, the board recommended increases for rent-stabilized apartments. Five of the board's nine members voted to recommend a 1 to 3 percent increase on one-year leases, and a 2 to 4 percent increase on two-year leases. This vote comes after there were rent freezes over the last two years.

The city recently filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against an owner for using Airbnb to advertise sublets of a dozen apartments in three buildings on the Lower East Side for fewer than 30 days. This lawsuit represents the biggest crackdown thus far on an owner illegally using Airbnb. It’s illegal in the city to rent out a place for fewer than 30 days without being properly licensed as a hotel or bed and breakfast or another similar business.

Vacancy rate estimates capture only the number of units empty at a specific point in time and not what became available over the course of a year. To address this question, the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) examined tenant information for over 925,000 apartments that were rent stabilized for at least two years from 2010 through 2015 to calculate how many apartments turn over from one year to the next and how turnover rates vary by neighborhood.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently unveiled new legislation aimed at holding unscrupulous landlords criminally accountable for tenant harassment. Current state law demands prosecutors reach a high bar in order to criminally charge landlords with harassment of rent-regulated tenants. According to the press release, this is why in the past 20 years, not a single landlord has ever been convicted of the crime of harassment of a rent-regulated tenant.

In Matter of Prometheus Realty Corp. v. New York City Water Board, the Appellate Division, First Department of the State Supreme Court ruled 3 - 1 that the city’s water board lacked a rational basis to award the credit to owners of one- to three-family homes, while leaving other property owners ineligible.