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Mayor Adams offers landlords incentives to upgrade rent-stabilized apartments
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Apr 19, 2023
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By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Apr 19, 2023
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Mayor Eric Adams wants to give landlords of rent-stabilized apartments $25,000 to renovate vacant units if they agree to rent to New Yorkers with rental assistance vouchers, City Hall announced on Wednesday.
The new $10 million pilot program, called Unlocking Doors, is enough to repair 400 rent-stabilized units, Adams said in a release. To tap into the funding, landlords would have to rent to residents receiving rental assistance through the CityFHEPS program, which advocates have long criticized for failing to reach enough of the city's homeless and low-income populations.
“This program improves the quality of our housing stock, while providing incentives to property owners to make vacant units available for the lowest-income New Yorkers,” said Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz in a statement.
The pilot comes amid a growing affordability crisis in New York and a scourge of vacant rent-stabilized apartments — which hovered over 38,000 last year, lower than a pandemic-era explosion in vacancies the year prior. Activists and officials have nonetheless been angered by the so-called “warehousing” phenomena as some have taken aim at city policies viewed as hostile to homeless people.
Meanwhile, landlords point to the financial burden for repairs and how upgrades would be far more substantial than the costs they can recoup through rent. But critics are skeptical that all vacancies amid the city’s dire need for housing can be attributed to this alone.
The Community Housing Improvement Program and the Rent Stabilization Association, groups representing rent-stabilized building owners, criticized the pilot as a Band-Aid solution for what they viewed as a more complicated problem.
“It is completely unrealistic to think that $25,000 is anywhere close to enough to renovate a rent-stabilized apartment and bring it into compliance,” reads a joint statement from CHIP Executive Director Jay Martin and RSA President Joseph Strasburg.
Martin and Strasburg said permit costs alone could climb to up to $10,000 before lead remediation or wiring repairs. “Even if this pilot program was successful, it cannot be scaled up to address the growing problem of naturally occurring empty rent-stabilized apartments,” their statement adds.
Once renovated, tenants eligible to move into the apartments will receive a two-year lease at a rent-stabilized monthly rate. Residents can pay for rent with up to a third of their income in vouchers, with the remainder to be paid by the Adams administration, according to the release.
The mayor’s office says applications will open this summer, but did not specify a date.
Tagged
housing
eric adams
Michelle Bocanegra
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