Testimony: Enforcement of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act (HSTPA)

Thank you for the opportunity to offer comments on the agency’s proposed new regulations based on the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act (HSTPA). Our names are Oksana Mironova and Samuel Stein and we are housing policy analysts at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), an independent nonprofit organization that addresses some of the most urgent problems facing low-income New Yorkers and their communities, including the effects of the city’s housing affordability crisis.

In the years – in fact decades – leading up to HSTPA, the Community Service Society’s research demonstrated the need for major reforms to the rent laws. We showed how numerous loopholes within the rent regulation system allowed for rampant fraud and overcharges, as well as perfectly legal means to hike rents to unconscionable levels. Our data showed how low-income tenants in particular suffered as a consequence of issues with the Vacancy Bonus, Individual Apartment Improvement and Major Capital Improvement rent increases, Preferential Rents, Vacancy Decontrol, and more. These loopholes displaced tenants from their homes, made the rent stabilized housing stock less affordable, and ultimately took over 290,000 apartments out of the regulatory system altogether.

We also showed how tenants beyond New York City, Westchester, Rockland and Nassau needed access to the ETPA and its protections – especially once they were improved and corrected by much-needed reforms.

We therefore celebrate the 2019 HSTPA as landmark legislation which provided a much-needed corrective to the most unfair and dysfunctional aspects of the rent stabilization system. We encourage HCR to enact rules and regulations that are in line with the legislations’ goals to protect and geographically expand rent regulation, shield tenants from unlawful rent increases, and preserve New York’s low-rent housing stock.

To this end, we make the following top-line recommendations:

1. Wherever HCR’s draft recommendations refer to exceptions or waivers for landlords’ applications that directly impact tenants’ rights or regulatory status, we urge the agency to instead adopt clearer and more universal guidelines. The system works best when its rules are clearly understood by all, landlords and tenants alike, and allow for as little confusion or unpredictability as possible.
2. Landlords must register Rent Regulated apartments in all cases. HCR must proactively track apartment registrations year to year, and investigate landlords who fail to register apartments that should not be leaving the system. Landlord penalties for failing to register must be increased, and no orders should be granted to landlords who fail to register units.
3. HCR enforcement must be proactive, not reactive.  HCR should build on the Tenant Protection Unit’s work, including majorly expanding investigations into attempts by landlords to deregulate units or buildings, and focus on auditing the worst actors – such as those named in “worst landlord” lists by New York City and New York State officials.

Beyond these high-level recommendations, we also suggest the following additions to HCR’s proposed recommendations:

1. HCR should commit to issuing initial decisions on tenant-initiated cases within one year of filing.
2. HCR should track and publish aggregated data on rent registrations, violations, MCI applications and IAI applications, as well as those applications’ results on the State’s Open Data portal.
3. HCR should require that landlords provide rent stabilized tenants with both their lease and a copy of their unit’s registration, including a rent history with MCIs and IAIs (including their expiration dates), whether the tenant signed a 1- or a 2-year lease renewal in the previous years, and the Rent Guidelines Board adjustment for their lease renewals.
4.  Landlords should be required to submit to HCR electronic copies of all vacancy and renewal leases signed by tenants to avoid any circumvention of the rent laws.
5. HCR should create a complaint process for tenants who received a new lease with the preferential rent illegally withdrawn and publicize this process to all tenants with preferential rents.
6. All cases of owner misconduct (not just harassment) should be cause for barring landlords from claiming exemption from rent stabilization as a result of “substantial rehabilitation.” In all sub-rehab cases, HCR should investigate any attempts by the landlord to harass tenants prior to or during construction.
7. Landlords must request permission from HCR to combine vacant apartments, including altering layouts or services. Tenants in newly combined apartments should have the opportunity to review and challenge the resulting order.
8. HCR should bar IAI rent increases in apartments where serious violations are present, establishing a protocol that proactively checks violations data provided by code enforcement agencies.
9. Landlords should not be allowed to collect Rent Guidelines Board rent increases during any years when an apartment is unoccupied.
10. In rent-controlled units, HCR should ask all landlords to guarantee that they have stopped adding fuel and labor pass-alongs as of June 14, 2019; landlords must refund tenants for any fuel and labor pass-alongs.
11. In rent-controlled units, HCR should remove fuel and labor pass-alongs from the MBR eligibility form and apply a 2% total aggregate cap on MCI increases.
12. In cases where a rent stabilized apartment is leased as supportive housing, the rent should return to the RGB rate of that last pre-nonprofit tenant plus any subsequent RGB allowable increases. The rent should not see any additional increases due to MCIs or IAIs.

Thank you again for the opportunity to offer our comments. For more information or if you have any questions, please contact Oksana Mironova at omironova@cssny.org or Samuel Stein at sstein@cssny.org.

Issues Covered

Affordable Housing