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New York City recently hired Diana Leyden as the city’s first taxpayer advocate, a new position created by Finance Commissioner Jacques Jiha. Leyden is a law professor from Connecticut and has run a free income-tax clinic for low-income taxpayers in Hartford for the past 16 years. According to the website, the purpose of the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate is to help taxpayers solve their NYC tax issues after they’ve made attempts to fix them with the Depart...
The 421-a tax abatement program, which grants subsidies to developers who offer low-income units in new buildings, has expired. The program’s future depended on negotiations between the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York over wage requirements for construction workers at 421-a sites.
Airbnb recently released a massive dataset about its business in New York City. The data on thousands of hosts in the city includes statistics such as host earnings, the types of listings, and how often people rent out their homes. This is the latest action the company has taken to counter the image portrayed by the New York state attorney general, who has accused Airbnb of enabling illegal hotels. Airbnb has pushed back against that perception, pledging to be an &ldquo...
ProPublica, a nonprofit with a focus on investigative journalism, recently conducted an analysis of government data on nearly 15,000 rental buildings receiving the 421-a and J51 tax subsidies as of 2013. About 40 percent—or 5,500 buildings—weren’t listed as rent stabilized, yet records show the owners are receiving more than $100 million in property tax reductions.
As the New York City Council considers new rules to regulate apartment sharing sites such as Airbnb, the home-sharing startup’s public policy blog recently released a statement or “community compact” pledging to “promote responsible home sharing” and acknowledging that a “dense, urban city may have different concerns than a historic vacation town or a non-traditional travel destination.”
Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan) recently introduced a new bill that would ban owners from checking applicant’s credit scores to decide whether to rent to applicants. The legislation would also prevent owners from considering other factors such as medical debt, consumer debt judgments, and debts that have been sent to collection agencies.
Owners could still run detailed credit reports and use other information they contain, including history of bankruptc...
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration intends to spend $1 million on ads to promote the unprecedented rent freeze enacted in June by the Rent Guidelines Board for New York’s rent-regulated tenants. The city will pay for ads on the subway, in newspapers, on the radio, and online. The campaign was announced just before Mayor de Blasio’s first town hall-style meeting.
Rent-stabilized tenants of an East Village apartment building recently submitted audio and video recordings to housing court depicting the owner’s agents as engaging in a campaign of harassment to force them out. The evidence is part of a months-long dispute at the building between the property management company and a group of tenants at the building.
The massive Stuyvesant Town apartment complex is prepped for sale, five years after its owners defaulted on the mortgage. CWCapital Asset Management, which is currently in charge of the property, is looking to sell. A sale of Stuyvesant Town, home to about 30,000 New Yorkers, would end the litigation and fighting that has involved residents, bondholders, and politicians since 2010, when Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Inc. gave up the property after its value plunged in th...
The Independent Budget Office (IBO) recently released a study that found that nearly a quarter of New York City apartments were rented at a preferential rent or at a rate lower than the maximum allowed under law in 2013. Specifically, using apartment registration data from the DHCR, the IBO found that of the 765,354 state-registered units subject to the traditional rent-regulation rules in 2013 (the most recent data available), 23 percent—more than 175,000 apartme...
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