Massimo D'Angelo
The sunset provisions that extended affordable housing protections—which can be traced back to World War II—to the roughly one million apartments within New York City covered by the Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 and Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 (collectively, the RSL), were set to expire on June 15, 2019. Therefore, it came as no surprise that Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA) into law on June 14, 2019, the day after it was passed by the Legislature, extending rent regulation statewide. However, the HSTPA, which also came on the heels of Mayor Bill de Blasio's recent pronouncements that New York City is in the midst of a major affordable "housing crisis," went radically beyond simply extending the prior protections afforded by the RSL.
|HSTPA's Radical Changes to the Rent-Regulation Laws
The HSTPA totally abolished both high-rent and high-income and high-rent luxury deregulation, and repealed vacancy increases and longevity bonuses. Beyond this, through the imposition of stringent caps, the HSTPA essentially eviscerated the rental increases from which owners previously benefited under the RSL for making Individual Apartment Improvements and Major Capital Improvements to their buildings. Effectively, the HSTPA allows owners to deregulate only under very narrow circumstances.
Additionally, the HSTPA strictly limited the recovery of regulated apartments for the owner's own use to one unit insofar as the landlord can also show that it has an "immediate and compelling necessity." RSL §26-510(j). Previously, an owner could recapture their rent-regulated apartment if the owner or owner's immediate family member could demonstrate a good faith claim to occupy the unit as their primary residence. What constitutes an "immediate and compelling necessity" under the HSTPA will be defined by future case law, but, for example, an owner's claim to be restored to possession to attend school in the City, which typically satisfied the prior law, will most likely not suffice under the current law.
|Two Sides of the Same Coin
Given the seismic changes to New York's rent-regulated landscape produced by the HSTPA, tenants are now armed with much longer and sharper swords to combat landlord abuse, generally, in the form of strong-arming of buyouts and harassment. Tenant groups have championed the new law as leveling the playing field against their more powerful landlords who have much deeper pockets. One of the main reasons for making it virtually impossible to deregulate under the HSTPA was to deter widespread illegal deregulation of rent-regulated housing, where owners simply falsified improvements that were made within their units and buildings in order to meet the required monetary deregulation thresholds. Invariably, this has led to the improper deregulation of thousands of rent-regulated units in the past few years alone, which has only worsened the affordable housing shortage crisis in the City.
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