A misbegotten City Council drive to prevent landlords from harassing tenants is poised to further slam the city’s housing supply. It’s the mayor’s duty to veto this madness.
Councilman Brad Lander (D-B’klyn) got the council to expand a pilot program that requires some building owners to qualify for a “Certificate of No Harassment” before they’re allowed to renovate a vacant apartment. Worse, there’s no way for landlords to know how they get on the “guilty until proven innocent” list.
It can take the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development years to clear one of these applications, and Lander’s bill will make it worse by allowing HPD to pay activist nonprofits to search for evidence of harassment in the prior five years, with $5,000 bounties for tenants who indeed report suffering. (By the way, the law doesn’t even define what counts as “harassment,” inviting advocates and eager tenants to push the envelope.)
Why the witch hunt? Because the pilot program hasn’t collected as many landlord scalps as Lander & Co. wanted. (Notably, the certificate is also required before owners on the watch list can convert or demolish their buildings.)
HPD’s own study of the program’s first three years was inconclusive: Partly because of the disruptions during the pandemic, it found “insufficient information upon which to make final recommendations concerning the overall effectiveness of the Pilot” and suggested a simple two-year renewal.
Instead, Lander wants five more years, plus the $5,000 incentive for tenants to claim a grievance as well as letting HPD pay activist ideologues to seek out horror stories.
HPD, by the way, refuses to share the algorithm it uses to determine which buildings are covered by the program: Previous violations of HPD rules matter, as do ownership changes, but unknown factors likely play a role, too. Hundreds of buildings are on the list now — and HPD doesn’t even have to alert you when you’ve been added, nor is there an easy way to challenge it.
Yet a building’s value plummets as soon as it lands on the list, potentially devastating the life’s savings of mom-and-pop owners. And banks consider a listing a mark of high risk, so won’t lend to these owners for any capital improvements.
Meanwhile, HPD offers landlords a chance to skip most of the review — by making a binding commitment to charge rents far below market rate, usually not enough to cover the building’s operating costs.
As a result, many landlords are simply leaving units vacant rather than apply for the certificate so they renovate. The small-landlords’ group CHIP believes that more than 2,500 apartments have gone off the market in this way, mostly in low-income neighborhoods, with Lander’s expansion sure to send the numbers vastly higher.
Small landlords (already the favorite target of professional “tenant organizers”) are most at risk, since they usually lack the cash and contacts to jump through the system’s hoops. Many are also struggling immigrants who lack the sophistication to contest the false accusations that the bill would encourage.
This is no effort to simply ID bad landlords; it’s an all-out war on every building owner that Lander & Co. think can be bullied. The bill has no checks on HPD or the activists: Their good faith is assumed, as is the landlords’ bad faith.
Above all, it actively shrinks the number of available units and basically prevents improvements in many buildings. And by slamming decent landlords along with unethical ones, it basically encourages more slumlords.
If the mayor signs this lunacy into law, count it as one more act of sabotage his successor will have to deal with.