NYC Comptroller Pushes Back on Rent Control Vacancies

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander has issued a report directly challenging survey results from two trade groups representing landlords which found that vacancies of rent-controlled apartments are surging because owners can’t afford necessary repairs.

The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) of NYC late last month released the results of a year-long survey of 781 residential property owners and managers representing properties encompassing 242,000 units, asking them about the impact of NYC’s 2019 rent control law.

REBNY said the results prove that the 2019 rent law, known as the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), “has wrecked the ability of property owners to pay for the upkeep of their property.”

The survey commissioned by the trade groups found that owners of small portfolios with moderate rent stabilization have an 18% vacancy rate, while owners with small portfolios that are primarily rent stabilized have a 25% vacancy rate.

Lander, who analyzed data from NYC’s recently released Housing and Vacancy Survey, painted a much brighter picture in a report entitled “Accurately Assessing Vacancies in NYC’s Rent Stabilized Housing Stock.”

“This analysis finds that the number of rent-stabilized units that are vacant and not available to rent, both in general and specifically due to landlords’ inability to make repairs, fell significantly from 2021 to 2023,” the comptroller said in the report.

“A quite small number of affordable rent-stabilized units—likely fewer than 2,000 that rent for $1,500 or less, representing less than 0.5% of the City’s stabilized housing stock—is sitting vacant due to landlords’ inability to make repairs,” Lander’s report said.

The comptroller’s report said that the number of rent stabilized units in NYC that are vacant but not available for rent for any reason declined from 42,860 in 2021 to 26,310 in 2023.

“The number of rent stabilized units deemed dilapidated or otherwise uninhabitable declined from 11,500 in 2021 to just over 3,000 units in 2023,” Lander’s report said. “There are likely fewer than 2,000 vacant apartments that rent for less than $1,500 each month and have been held off the market due to an owners’ inability to make repairs.”

“This report finds no evidence that the HSTPA led to an increase in vacancies, or distress on the city’s rent stabilized housing,” Lander concluded, calling proposals for a re-introduction of vacancy decontrol “a dramatic overreaction.”

RSA fired back with a statement branding Lander’s analysis an “ideologically driven undercount.”

“Apartment vacancies are a moving picture, not a snapshot, and the number of vacant apartments in our study is the self-reported lived experience of our members—a metric more reliable than the City Comptroller’s ideologically driven undercount,” Michael Tobman, RSA’s director of membership and communication, told GlobeSt.com.

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