Major Capital Improvements allow rent-stabilized landlords to exceed authorized rent increases when paying off a new roof, boiler or other large expense. Long-standing tenant complaints about fraud are part of the debate over renewing state rent laws.
Like the former mayor, Bill de Blasio faces a housing crisis and a stingy federal government. But the current occupant of City Hall also confronts steeper expectations in a city with less cheap land.
Mayor de Blasio’s housing plan was full of ambition and ideas. Achieving them will require streamlining and rearranging the city’s housing development system, says HPD’s commissioner.
The administration sees city-owned vacant lots as potential sites for affordable housing. Communities that use—or hope to use—those parcels for gardens see them as something else.
From poor doors to subway arrests to demonstrations outside a hotel in Queens, the poor and homeless face a broad menu of stigmatization.
Real Affordability for All is bringing an unusually broad coalition to press the state for changes to rent regulations and other policies to preserve affordable housing.
POP is different from most other real-estate finance operations in two ways. First, it’s named after a papal encyclical. Second, it underwrites housing working-class New Yorkers can afford.
There was high drama as the board voted narrowly for the lowest rent increase ever but defied Mayor de Blasio’s call for a freeze. Updated!
The RBG made history by approving unprecedentedly low increases in stabilized rents. But it rejected a call for rent freezes that the mayor supported during his campaign.
Despite little outreach by the RGB, its 2014 hearings displayed a surge of tenant interest. The vote on a rent freeze will say as much about democracy, the author says, as it does about housing costs.
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