Examining the Myth of the “Mom-and-Pop” Landlord

An analysis of NYC building ownership by JustFix.nyc

In 2019, New York State’s tenant organizing groups and tenant advocates fought to establish stronger tenant protections within New York’s rent laws, and they were largely successful. Opponents to these policy changes, however, tried to cast small landlords—commonly known as “mom-and-pop” landlords—as inconsequential victims of these tenant-centered laws. New legislation designed to shield tenants from displacement and prevent further housing deregulation would also hurt the businesses of these smaller operators, the Real Estate Board of New York claimed.

“While ‘mom-and-pop’ landlords do exist, they do not represent the typical owners of registered properties in NYC.”

In response to these narratives, JustFix.nyc decided to take a look at building ownership distribution in New York City. Through our Who Owns What tool, which maps property ownership using public HPD Registration data, we were able to estimate landlord portfolio sizes across the city based on common ownership patterns seen in the data. Our analysis looked at the size of landlords who owned rent-regulated housing stock and evicted tenants at a higher rate.

“Larger landlords were more often the owners of rent-regulated buildings and are more often responsible for evictions and MCI increases.”

Here are some of our key insights:

The typical rent-paying New Yorker has a large landlord

An average HPD-registered apartment belonged to a 21 property, 893 unit portfolio, according to public HPD data. Landlords owning more than 20 buildings were associated with more than half of these apartments citywide.

Larger landlords evict more tenants, and at higher rates, compared to smaller landlords.

Landlords associated with over 20 buildings were responsible for more than half of all executed evictions in 2018.

Not only were larger landlords evicting more tenants, but they also evicted tenants at a higher rate per units owned. Tenants of large landlords (21+ buildings) were 24% more likely to have been evicted in 2018 than tenants of tiny landlords (only one building).

Larger landlords are also more likely to own rent-regulated buildings

Roughly half of all rent-regulated buildings were owned by landlords with 21 or more buildings in their portfolio.

More importantly, larger landlords were a lot more likely to own rent-regulated buildings. For landlords with more than 60 buildings, rent-regulated properties represented more than 50% of the homes that they owned collectively. For small landlords who only owned one building, less than one-tenth of the properties they owned were rent-regulated.

Larger landlords apply for more Major Capital Improvements (MCI) rent increases, and more frequently, than small landlords do

Landlords of rent-regulated buildings are permitted by law to apply for a “Major Capital Improvement” (MCIs) increase when they update or install new infrastructure in their building. These increases allow landlords to permanently raise the rents of rent stabilized apartments, and according to tenant advocates, MCIs are often a tool for exploitation and displacement.

Our analysis showed that most applications for MCI increases between 2000 and 2014 occurred in buildings currently owned by large landlords, who own more than 20 buildings.

In addition to filing more MCIs, larger landlords also used MCIs at a higher rate per building. Buildings of large landlords (21+ buildings) applied for MCI increases at 10 times the rate of the buildings of tiny landlords (only one building).

Conclusions

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 was a big win for tenant rights. The bill issued stricter preservation of rent-stabilized housing stock, tightened regulations on Major Capital Improvements, and codified stronger protections for tenants fighting evictions. These changes were intended to curb displacement, which, previous to the bill, had been largely unregulated over the past few decades.

Given that these policy changes sought to limit displacement-based business tactics within Big Real Estate, it‘s not surprising that the landlord lobby would fight back. The image of the “mom-and-pop” landlord is a convenient symbol for portraying landlords as blameless victims and obscuring the true power dynamics within the housing industry.

Our findings arrived at this conclusively: Small “mom-and-pop” landlords do not represent the average owners of registered properties in NYC. Also, since larger landlords are more often the owners of rent-regulated buildings and more often responsible for evictions and MCI increases, the legislation on these issues will in reality have a disproportionate effect on large landlords as opposed to their smaller counterparts.

To dig a little deeper, check out these reports in the Pacific Standard and CityLab.

Our Methodology and Sources

This report analyses data from JustFix’s Who Owns What tool, which links together properties through common ownership found in public HPD registration data. Originally developed by tenant leaders and organizers around the city in an effort to expose ownership patterns obscured by inconsistent registration practices, Who Owns What’s portfolio mapping method is currently used as a reliable source of data for litigation, tenant organizing efforts, and city programs. As with everything we build at JustFix.nyc, our code is open source and can be accessed on the JustFix GitHub page.

For any property with HPD Registration, the Who Owns What tool:

1. gathers the business address (or addresses) of entities registered with the property on HPD and finds other properties in the city with a matching address
2. gathers the “Head Officer”, “Individual Owner”, and “Corporate Owner” contact names registered with the property on HPD and finds other properties in the city that have a matching contact name, using “fuzzy matching” to account for misspellings

Under this algorithm, Who Owns What estimates a building’s portfolio as all HPD registered properties that fit the above criteria. All statistics and summarizations in this report were calculated using the complete set of portfolios determined by Who Owns What for all HPD Registered properties in December 2018. For the purpose of this report, the terms “buildings” and “properties” refer to city tax lots as defined by the Department of City Planning.

Other source info:

• All HPD data is publicly available and comes from the NYC Open Data Portal via nycdb.
• 2018 Evictions data is from NYC Marshals, with data cleaning, geocoding, and validation by the City Council Data Team, the Housing Data Coalition and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (Licensed CC BY NC SA 4.0). For more information, read their data methodology.
• Rent Regulation data is from 2017 Building Registrations filed with NYS Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) via the NYC Rent Guidelines Board.
• Historical data on MCI applications was provided by the Urban Justice Center, who sourced the data from the Community Service Society of New York.

For more information about the analysis, please contact Sam Rabiyah, Data Lead and Engineer, at hello@justfix.nyc.