SUE SUSMAN,  HUI CHENG YONG and  ILLAPA SAIRITUPAC, March 28, 2024

Three rent-stabilized apartments on one floor of 50 West 97th Street are sitting empty. While the multi-millionaire landlord who lived in a Hamptons mansion of epic proportions warehouses them—possibly to pressure Albany to raise rents—many working people, some with family in the building, have applied to rent those units. One neighbor could use an apartment for her aging sister to have her living nearby for daily care. Another tenant has been sharing an apartment with a sibling who now has a growing child and needs more space. But Stellar Management is not renting them out, and there just aren’t many affordable apartments available. 

28 apartments are sitting empty at 788 Columbus Avenue. Many are rent stabilized and have been sitting empty for over five years. Frankensteining activity began in some of the contiguous apartments, but renovation activity suddenly stopped. Is the landlord hoping Albany is about to roll back some of the hard-won Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019? Is he planning to keep these apartments empty for now, losing revenue with the hope of a huge payday down the road?

For the past few decades, real estate industry-backed state and city policy has created a massive housing crisis in New York. Other cities and states have addressed homelessness with some serious successes, while New York upholds landlords’ aim of ever-increasing profits. 

That’s a cold policy, but it’s not bloodless. The effects of housing instability and rising inequality touch each of our lives in many ways. But most of the housing policy costs are externalized onto the public while those who cause housing instability are insulated from its effects.  

Having generated billions of dollars for its elites and millions for lobbyists, big real estate perversely claims its members are on the verge of financial ruin. Despite the fact that rental profits are steady, great, or astronomical—depending on whom you ask, owners cry they’re on the threshold of poverty. They’re lobbying like crazy for a bill, S6352C/A6772A, that would encourage the displacement of long-term tenants by hiking the rents of vacant stabilized apartments that had been occupied for ten years or more.

Are they really too broke to fix their neglected property? 

The landlord group Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) points to its count of around 26,000 rent-stabilized apartments its members are holding off the market as too dilapidated to rent out, and demands more money for their repair. 

• Never mind that landlords have neglected their duty to keep these apartments habitable for decades, and are now blaming tens of thousands of tenants for poor conditions.  
• Never mind that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board reports owners of rent-stabilized apartments have netted from $500 to over $800 dollars above operating expenses(depending on the borough) for each apartment each month for decades. (Those nets don’t include lead abatement, for which there are grants available, taxes, and debt service.)
• Never mind that the state guarantees a 5% return on rent-stabilized housing, so a landlord who is not making that from the rents can ask the state to raise them. (Few ask since it means opening their books.) 
• Never mind that CHIP itself said it was holding these apartments off the market to pressure Albany to give them more money! 
• Never mind that only a single landlord has applied for the NYC “Unlocking Doors”program offering money to bring dilapidated homes up to code. 

The same real estate industry that can’t afford $50,000 to bring an apartment to habitability is spending millions on lobbying. So smooth, so slick, so pervasive is their public relations machine that policymakers—in near-constant contact with industry lobbyists, and almost no routine contact with regular constituents—can fall sway to this spin machine.

But passing S6352C/A6772A would paint a target on the backs of long-term rent-stabilized tenants. As a recent New York Times headline said, “New York City’s Housing Crunch is the Worst It Has Been in Over 50 Years.”  

“What can we do?” we ask. The roots of the crisis are too complex for regular people to understand, we’re told. Policymakers shake their heads grimly in public while accepting millions of dollars from real estate.

Solving this is not impossible: We can start by not handing out gobs of taxpayer money to landlords! We need the city and state to keep accurate numbers of warehoused apartments and how they’re maintained so landlord spin doesn’t dominate housing policy. This should be a city for all of us, and housing is a right. 

Sue Susman is head of the Central Park Gardens Tenants’ Association and runs an email list on affordable housing. Illapa Sairitupac is a tenant organizer, social worker and climate organizer on the Lower East Side. Hui Cheng Yong is an active member of the STS/End Apartment Warehousing Coalition.

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