Friday, June 26, 2015

Here It Is

The New York metropolitan region’s rent laws will be extended for four years, and will be made retroactive to June 15, 2015. Further, additional reforms will be made to strengthen these laws, including:
  • Increasing and indexing the high rent threshold to the applicable rent guidelines board (rent guidelines boards apply different rents to different geographic areas). This will make it more difficult for units to be removed from rent regulation because it will allow for the high rent watermark to float based on the rent guidelines board increases.
  • Vacancy decontrol limits will be increased to $2,700, and annual increases thereafter will be indexed to the Rent Guidelines Board.
  • Increasing civil harassment penalties. These provisions increase monetary penalties imposed on landlords who harass tenants by approximately $1,000, to $3,000 for each offense and up to $11,000 for each offense where the owner harassed a tenant to obtain a vacancy.
  • Extends the Major Capital Improvement amortization period from 84 months to 108 for buildings over 35 units and 84 months to 96 for buildings under 35 units. The legislation limits the amount of rent that landlords can charge tenants in order to receive reimbursement for necessary improvements or installations.
  • Limits the vacancy bonus provided to landlords on tenants who receive preferential rent as a way to stop the “churn” on these units.

5 comments:

Stuy Town Reporter said...

Not a peep from the TA about this deal. I assume they are putting something together, but at least something, however minimal, could have been said by now.

Anonymous said...

STA,
Give it a rest. All last week I was getting TA emails and seeing posts on the TA FB page that this was a bad deal and that we should call Cuomo to tell him to do better. I got an email this morning from them saying that Hoylman and Kavanagh both voted against it. I guess people in PCVST raised hell.

Anonymous said...

"I guess people in PCVST raised hell"

That was not raising hell. Cuomo knows it too. If we raised hell, he would have done better for us. We barely raised the roof.

Anonymous said...

Staffers at Cuomo's and Kavanagh's offices said the phones were ringing off the hook. Tenants turned out, tenants got arrested, Cuomo got exposed.

Cuomo is HATED upstate and only beat Teachout in the primary because of support from NYC. He thinks he'll be unscathed by all this, that we'll forget about it all three years from now. I doubt it. He's Governor Glenwood now.

Anonymous said...

So basically Albany said we will hurt tenants a little less over here if we can hurt them over there. That is the state of affairs in Albany. Let us hurt tenants over here and we will stop hurt them over there. How about this, stop hurting tenants all together, anywhere, everywhere Governor Glenwood. Sigh, I didn't miss a thing.