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New York City's Rent Guidelines Board has voted to raise rent on nearly a million regulated apartments, bypassing the mayor's appeal for a one-year rent freeze. In a 5-4 vote, the board voted to implement an historically small increase: Rents for one-year lease renewals will be raised by 1 percent, and by 2.75 percent for two-year leases. The rates are for renewals as of Oct. 1.
On May 14, the New York City Council unanimously voted to expand a housing subsidy program that will now give a rent freeze to tens of thousands more seniors citywide.
As part of New York State’s 2014-2015 budget, the state legislature approved on March 31 a huge increase to the income limit for eligibility in the city’s Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE) program. The exemption freezes housing costs for rent-regulated residents older than age 62 who already pay more than one-third of their income for rent.
Airbnb has reached a deal with the New York attorney general in which the rental company will turn over anonymous records of Airbnb hosts for analysis. In the data handed over there will be no names, addresses, or personally identifiable information.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration recently proposed a 3.35 percent increase in New York City’s water and sewer rates. It’s the lowest such increase since fiscal 2006, but officials acknowledged the recommendation doesn’t fully address what the mayor previously denounced as a “hidden tax.”
On May 5, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a 10-year, $41.4 billion affordable housing plan for New York City. The plan outlines how the administration intends to create and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years. Of those, 80,000 will be new units and 120,000 will be preserved, and they will target a range of incomes, from extremely low to middle-class.
Recently, the Citizens Budget Committee and DNAinfo looked at the census numbers and state records and found that in 2010, 22,642 of the city’s 970,000 rent-stabilized apartments (approximately 2.3 percent) were occupied by households making more than $199,000. Of those, 2,300 apartments were occupied by people making more than $500,000.
Local Law 84 of 2009 requires all large buildings in the city to annually measure and publically disclose their energy consumption. LL84 standardizes this process and captures information with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) free online benchmarking tool called Portfolio Manager.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara recently filed a lawsuit against an owner for allegedly violating the federal Fair Housing Act by not making its buildings accessible to residents with disabilities. The two buildings named in the suit are Tribeca Green in Battery Park City and East 96th Street’s One Carnegie Hill. The architects of the two buildings are also named.
According to a recently released study by Skift, a travel news and market data Web site for the travel industry, Williamsburg, with 1,694 rental listings in 2013, has posted more Airbnb listings than any other neighborhood in the city. Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side came in second and third, respectively, with Bedford-Stuyvesant fourth at 1,024 listings, according to the report.
On Jan. 8, the DHCR officially adopted amendments to the Rent Stabilization Code. The amendments were the end product of the formal process required under the New York State Administrative Procedure Act to amend various regulations in the Rent Stabilization Code, the Tenant Protection Regulations, and the State and New York City Rent Control Regulations. The following are the most significant amendments to the Rent Stabilization Code:
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