More than 13,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat empty for the past two years amid a heated debate over “warehousing” low-cost units, according to a new review of state data.

Tenant organizations, landlord groups and policymakers have been trying to determine the exact number of empty rent-stabilized units in New York as the city contends with a dire housing shortage, surging homelessness and record-breaking rents.

The city’s Independent Budget Office reviewed state data and found that the number of empty rent-stabilized apartments decreased significantly from 2021 to 2022, following a pandemic-related exodus from Manhattan.

Landlords listed 42,275 rent-stabilized apartments as of April 1 of last year, with most of those apartments marked as “newly vacant,” the IBO said. The agency said 13,362 units sat empty for at least two consecutive years — up from 12,300 in 2021 — suggesting they were vacant for reasons other than the routine movement of tenants.

“There’s going to be vacant apartments but what we wanted to answer in this project is, are these part of natural turnover, or are these apartments that are sitting vacant over multiple years?” said IBO Assistant Director Sarah Stefanski, who analyzed the data.

Stefanski said the limits of the data tracked by the state makes it impossible to know how many apartments are being deliberately held offline, or “warehoused,” because landlords are not required to say exactly why a unit is empty. But she said looking at specific units marked vacant for consecutive years offers a clue.

The issue of empty and “warehoused” apartments is fueling intense debate, with policymakers proposing legislation that would force owners to bring apartments back on the market. City officials enacted a grant program for landlords with empty units in need of renovation.

Vacant apartment estimates based on city and state data ranging from nearly 90,000 empty units to fewer than 40,000 over the past two years.

Renters and their advocates have accused property owners of deliberately holding regulated apartments off the market to force changes to state laws that cap maximum rents and prohibit deregulation — a move that would allow them more latitude to increase rents.

Landlord groups say owners have no choice but to keep low-cost units empty because they cannot earn enough from rent to cover needed repairs and renovations, highlighting empty apartments to angle for a change.

The IBO report found that about 5% of rent-stabilized apartments were registered as empty last year with the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal, which administers the rent laws and oversees the state’s regulated housing stock.

DHCR Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas said the IBO's data shows that things are going back to normal after years of pandemic-related instability.

"The COVID-era increases in rent regulated apartments registered as vacant has receded to historic pre-pandemic norms. And that is good news," Visnauskas said in a statement, adding that New York still needs to spur more housing development to address the state's "profound shortfall."

Still, thousands of rent-stabilized apartments remain unaccounted for. Landlords registered around 836,000 rent-stabilized units last year, the IBO found, down from more than 944,000 in 2019, the year new laws restricted owners’ ability to raise rents and deregulate apartments. Landlords are often late registering the units with HCR.

IBO Director Louisa Chafee said the agency undertook the study “given broad concerns about warehoused rent stabilized apartments.”

But city and state housing agencies say the situation is not as severe as publicized, saying that many of the apartments that sat vacant in 2021 were located in Manhattan buildings where rents are regulated — and often extremely high — as a condition of tax breaks.

The majority of rent-stabilized apartments in New York City are located in buildings with six or more units built before 1974. In general, owners can only increase rents within a range set each year by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. The vacancy rate in those units remained low even during the pandemic, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

“We do not have a lot of low-cost vacant units,” HPD Assistant Commissioner Lucy Joffe told councilmembers at a June hearing on vacancies. “The dearth of units available for rent on any given day in our city is one of the main problems in our housing market.


This story was updated to include a statement from RuthAnne Visnauskas, the commissioner of the state Division of Homes and Community Renewal.