CHIP Response To Article About Rent Registrations
(New York, NY) — Today, The City published a story entitled: Apartments Vanish From New York’s Rent Regulation System and Questions Linger About How. In the article, there is a suggestion that roughly 116,000 rent-stabilized apartments may have been illegally removed from stabilization.
“The idea that tens of thousands of apartments have vanished from registration is absurd. This is simply the natural lag that we see in registering apartments each year,” said Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program.
In 2019, the Office of Rent Administration (ORA) released its first annual report on rent-stabilized apartments. In that report, it found that 922,277 rent-stabilized apartments were registered in 2018.
In ORA’s 2020 annual report, the number of registered apartments for 2018 rose to 965,970. In the 2021 report, the number of apartments registered for 2018 rose again to 976,478. The same trend appears when looking at the 2019 registrations counted in the 2020 report and then in the 2021 report.
This pattern of roughly 50,000 to 100,000 apartments being registered late has been common practice since before the passage of the 2019 rent laws. CHIP encourages all of our members to register all of their rent-stabilized apartments on time and we actively help small owners attempting to comply with the law. The data suggests that a vast majority of rent-stabilized building owners register their apartments in a timely fashion.
“We support any efforts the Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) undergoes to improve reporting of rent registered apartments. This is why we publicly called for more funding to put into DHCR in next year’s budget,” Martin said.
“Furthermore, if any owner is illegally deregulating apartments they should be punished to the full extent of the law. While we disagree with some provisions of the current rent laws, we have zero tolerance for owners who intentionally break the law,” Martin added.
