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Almost a quarter of the city's million rent-regulated apartments had three or more maintenance problems, according to a new report looking at housing conditions in New York by city Comptroller Scott Stringer. This information was based on Census data. Staten Island had the highest-quality rent-stabilized housing stock, followed by Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
The NYU Furman Center recently released a report that examines the challenges of retrofitting New York City’s multifamily housing stock against future climate threats. The report, entitled "The Price of Resilience: Can Multifamily Housing Afford to Adapt?" was the culmination of collaboration with government officials, architects, engineers, and housing policy experts.
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently moved to dismiss a class action suit seeking to overturn existing city and state property tax laws, which the plaintiffs contend is racially discriminatory. The class action suit was filed in February and seeks to overturn a property tax system that’s widely acknowledged to benefit single-family homeowners in wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of homeowners in less wealthy ones. It also benefits homeowners as a class at the expense of renters, a disproportionate number of whom are black and Hispanic.
An owner is under investigation for allegedly using illegal tactics to force rent-stabilized tenants out of his properties. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched the investigation following complaints about the behavior of the owner's company, Steven Croman Realty.
Recently, a planned separate entrance for residents of low-income units in a luxury housing development on the Upper West Side was approved, and claims of modern-day segregation followed shortly after. Now, the de Blasio administration hopes to change a 2009 zoning code, enacted under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that allowed for divided housing.
In the wake of the Rent Guidelines Board vote that capped rent increases at the lowest hike in the board’s 45-year history, the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) has called upon Mayor Bill de Blasio to keep taxes and other building owner costs down.
In a 7-0 ruling, the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, recently ruled that the tenant could not trigger a DHCR probe into improvements made at her apartment beyond the four-year time frame. The tenant had tried to invoke the Grimm decision to prove that the owner overvalued the cost of improvements he made to the six-story building in which she resided to inflate her unit’s rent.
According to recent data from the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, bedbug infestations have dropped every year for the past four years. Brooklyn has had the most bedbug violations since 2010, but all five boroughs have seen declines in confirmed bedbug cases. Here are the numbers:
Mayor de Blasio’s budget for the Health Department includes $611,000 to target the “rat reservoirs.” The money will be used to hire nine inspectors to hunt and exterminate in Manhattan and South Bronx. They will be specifically targeting colonies in parks and sewers where rodents lurk and infest the surrounding neighborhood.
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