{"id":224069,"date":"2025-09-13T17:12:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/224069\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T17:12:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:12:17","slug":"letting-nyc-landlords-cover-costs-is-common-sense-and-mamdanis-plan-will-only-worsen-renting-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/224069\/","title":{"rendered":"Letting NYC landlords cover costs is common sense \u2014 and Mamdani’s plan will only worsen renting madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not only is a disastrous 2019 state law pushing rent-regulated units off the market by the tens of thousands, the city\u2019s efforts to get those \u201czombie\u201d apartments on the market have stalled \u2014 and Zohran Mamdani\u2019s rent freeze promises to make the crisis even worse. <\/p>\n

Six years ago, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the \u201cHousing Stability and Tenant Protection Act\u201d into law, making it impossible for landlords ever to recoup the cost of bringing units up to code (as other laws require) when a tenant moves out after decades. <\/p>\n

Such repairs and upgrades can easily cost $100,000 or more; pre-2019, the building owner could hike the rent to finance the work \u2014 but no more, so now thousands of apartments fall off the market every year.<\/p>\n

The city Housing Preservation & Development department\u2019s \u201cUnlocking Doors\u201d program offers to reimburse owners of \u201cdistressed\u201d rent-stabilized units<\/a> up to $50,000 for certain improvements, such as mandatory lead and asbestos abatement, electrical and plumbing upgrades and removing asthma triggers.<\/p>\n

HPD initially offered $25,000-a-unit deals, and when that got zero takers, it doubled the grant \u2014 and got one owner to sign up.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n

Turns out that HPD\u2019s \u201chelp\u201d is so meager, with so many strings attached, that owners find themselves literally better off keeping their apartments empty.<\/p>\n

Consider: The New York City Housing Authority estimates that it needs about $500,000 to get one of its older units up to code.<\/p>\n

Landlords who sign up for the HPD program must also decline Section 8 applicants or tenants who want to pay the old-fashioned way, in cash; they can only accept new renters who are homeless or on the verge of eviction.<\/p>\n

But the main issue here isn\u2019t the failure of some ill-designed city program: The \u201cwarehousing\u201d problem \u2014 with as many as 50,000 rent-regulated apartments sitting empty \u2014 is entirely Albany\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

And this is just one part of a broader crisis, as state and city policies increasing combine to starve landlords of enough revenue to cover their \u201cbreak even\u201d costs for building maintenance plus fuel and water bills, taxes and the building\u2019s mortgage. <\/p>\n

In the name of \u201caffordability,\u201d Mamdani promises<\/a> to freeze rents for rent-stabilized units \u2014 which will push many smaller landlords over the brink to bankruptcy, and force others to let whole buildings decay.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s supporters imagine that this mess will\u00a0allow the city to assume ownership of hundreds of thousands of apartments, which it can \u201cdecommodify\u201d and make available to the homeless and the needy: At last, \u201caffordable\u201d housing for all!<\/p>\n

Oops: The city already owns 180,000 units of \u201cdecommodified\u201d housing in NYCHA, which faces tens of billions in overdue maintenance. How will adding another few hundred thousand apartments to that fast-decaying inventory do anything but dig a deeper hole?<\/p>\n

The only way to turn this around is to let landlords cover their costs: That means no rent freeze and undoing the 2019 law\u2019s deadly restrictions.<\/p>\n

Instead, the city has Mamdani poised to triple-down on the madness \u2014 and guarantee a crisis that will make housing even less affordable for ever-more New Yorkers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not only is a disastrous 2019 state law pushing rent-regulated units off the market by the tens of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":224070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[852,5229,42046,4691,7065,24668,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,24845,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-224069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-department-of-housing-preservation-and-development","11":"tag-editorial","12":"tag-housing","13":"tag-landlords","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-city","16":"tag-newyork","17":"tag-newyorkcity","18":"tag-ny","19":"tag-nyc","20":"tag-opinion","21":"tag-rent-stabilization","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115198109072074208","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}