Press Release
Statement on Rent Guidelines Board Hearing
Today, the staff of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board released their 2023 Income and Expense report findings. Because of lags in the data, the report focuses on 2021 housing conditions, comparing them with 2020. While the findings show a decrease in net operating income (landlords’ incomes minus expenses), the underlying data points to those losses being driven by the temporary departure of New Yorkers in the wealthiest Manhattan neighborhoods during the height of the pandemic.
These losses were heavily concentrated in what the board calls “core Manhattan” (Manhattan south of 96th street), with the biggest losses in the wealthiest neighborhoods – the Financial District and the Upper East Side. Neighborhoods in working- and middle-class neighborhoods of the city, like every community district in the Bronx, East Flatbush, or the North Shore of Staten Island, where tenants did not have the option to flee the city, saw their rates of rent collections rise during the same time period.
Further, net operating income declined most dramatically in partially-rent stabilized buildings. The findings show that rent growth was positive in buildings that were fully rent stabilized. Again, this points to the demonstrated loss of income being driven by market rate units in mixed-status buildings, rather than by the rent stabilized stock overall.
The pattern here is clear: the driver of distress was in the market-rate housing stock, particularly in Manhattan. As the New York Times reported today, however, new US Census figures show that Manhattan’s population has bounced back and asking rents have skyrocketed.
The Rent Guidelines Board must not reward landlords with a major rent hike based on old data that mostly reflects losses in the non-stabilized Manhattan market, especially because net operating income is still up by 50 percent since 1990.