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The City Council recently passed legislation requiring residential property owners to file the bedbug history for each of their properties electronically with HPD. It was signed into law on May 10 by Mayor de Blasio. In addition to filing this new electronic form with HPD, owners and managers will be required to post the same at a prominent place in the building or provide the form with each new or renewal lease. An HPD-approved form on preventing, detecting, and removing bedbugs must be also included with either the posting or lease distribution.

At the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) Preliminary Vote on April 25, the board recommended increases for rent-stabilized apartments. Five of the board's nine members voted to recommend a 1 to 3 percent increase on one-year leases, and a 2 to 4 percent increase on two-year leases. This vote comes after there were rent freezes over the last two years.

The city recently filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against an owner for using Airbnb to advertise sublets of a dozen apartments in three buildings on the Lower East Side for fewer than 30 days. This lawsuit represents the biggest crackdown thus far on an owner illegally using Airbnb. It’s illegal in the city to rent out a place for fewer than 30 days without being properly licensed as a hotel or bed and breakfast or another similar business.

Vacancy rate estimates capture only the number of units empty at a specific point in time and not what became available over the course of a year. To address this question, the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) examined tenant information for over 925,000 apartments that were rent stabilized for at least two years from 2010 through 2015 to calculate how many apartments turn over from one year to the next and how turnover rates vary by neighborhood.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently unveiled new legislation aimed at holding unscrupulous landlords criminally accountable for tenant harassment. Current state law demands prosecutors reach a high bar in order to criminally charge landlords with harassment of rent-regulated tenants. According to the press release, this is why in the past 20 years, not a single landlord has ever been convicted of the crime of harassment of a rent-regulated tenant.

In Matter of Prometheus Realty Corp. v. New York City Water Board, the Appellate Division, First Department of the State Supreme Court ruled 3 - 1 that the city’s water board lacked a rational basis to award the credit to owners of one- to three-family homes, while leaving other property owners ineligible.

In a recent speech during the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York Winter Conference, Governor Cuomo vowed to veto any 421-a legislation that doesn’t include protections for union labor. The governor said that the exclusion of a prevailing wage provision is “the camel’s nose under the tent” that may lead to weaker labor unions across the country.

The city council recently enacted a bill that would require street numbers to be placed on every side of a building that contains an entrance primarily used for day-to-day pedestrian ingress or egress. The bill is currently awaiting the mayor’s signature before becoming law.

The Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings’ Environmental Control Board (OATH ECB) is proposing to repeal its buildings penalty schedule, which consists of Buildings Penalty Schedule I and Buildings Penalty Schedule II. This schedule is found in 48 RCNY § 3-103, and contains penalties for violations of Title 1 of the Rules of the City of New York (RCNY) and Titles 27 and 28 of the New York City Administrative Code. At the same time, DOB is also proposing to enact a Buildings Penalty Schedule within its own rules, which will be located in 1 RCNY § 102-1.

The City Council recently passed a package of bills intended to make it harder for the police to evict tenants committing nuisances such as drug dealing. The mayor is expected to sign the package.