The Empty Rent Stabilized Units in NYC

**Bridget Bergen** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, sitting in for Brian today.
By now, you've probably heard that a rent freeze is on the way for New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments across the city. This comes after the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze the rent on both one- and two-year leases starting this October, making good on a key promise for Mayor Mamdani's campaign last year.
While tenants rejoice over the news, landlords are less pleased with the results of Thursday's vote. Many have expressed concerns about their ability to keep up with rising costs of utilities and insurance and have argued that the freeze will ultimately make the housing crisis in New York City worse. We heard that argument firsthand last week during our segment on the freeze. A landlord named Noah called in to explain why he thinks the policy backfires. Here's what he said.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:07)
Landlords can no longer renovate units that might have been occupied for 40, 50 or 60 years and be in terrible condition and expect any return. In fact, they'll lose money. So what you're going to see is over time, any unit that becomes vacant that was stabilized will simply stay vacant. It will not be put back on the market. So ultimately, this price control thing is self-defeating. And since there's no means test and in fact, there's no incentive for landlords to even pursue any, for instance, non-prime residency or illegal subletting, et cetera, et cetera.
This is just going to diminish the quality of the housing stock for decades to come, as we saw happening in the early 1970s.

**Bridget Bergen** (1:54)
It will simply stay vacant.
The term for what Noah is describing is warehousing. When landlords keep apartments empty on purpose, rather than renting them out. How often that actually happens is a hotly disputed topic. What's not disputed is that a lot of stabilized units are sitting empty. A recent state tally counted more than 57,000 departments.
Landlords say that it's a sign the rules are backfiring, but that number can't tell you why those units are empty, and that's the whole fight. Joining me now to get into it is David Brand, housing reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. David, welcome back.

**David Brand** (2:33)
Thanks for having me. Good to hear from Noah again, too.

**Bridget Bergen** (2:37)
I'm sure he had a lot to say about it last week, but you've been digging into that 57,000 figure. What did the state actually count there?

**David Brand** (2:47)
Every year, owners of rent-stabilized apartments are required to register the status of their units as of April 1st of the previous year.
What the latest figures show is that owners registered 57,421 apartments that were vacant. That's up from about 8,000 more than the previous year. It was 49,426 the previous year, so 8,000 unit increase. Then this came from an email that the state's housing agency, Homes and Community Renewal sent to the Rent Guidelines Board, which had requested some more data on this as they made their decision on, as we saw, was to freeze the rent. But they don't explain why those units are vacant, and so that is why this is such a hot topic and really a hornet's nest. Every time I'm on the program talking about rent regulations, rent stabilization, rent rules, multiple people typically call in to say, what about vacant apartments? What about warehousing? This really is a very hot topic that people are really interested in, but that we don't really have concrete data to know why or how many apartments are being held off the market.

**Bridget Bergen** (4:02)
So what can you tell us about why these units are empty? And what's actually inside that count?

**David Brand** (4:10)
So I think we can think about this debate and what makes it such a hot topic, like kind of politically and as a tenant versus landlord issue, and also as a landlord versus rent regulations issue. Because there are many tenants out there who see warehoused units, who see empty units in their buildings, could be for a number of reasons. It could be, as Noah said, a long time tenant leaves the unit. And because of the rent rules in New York, they are not allowed to increase the rent past what the current law allows. And so they find it not cost effective.
Other people could be holding multiple units offline gradually in an attempt to clear the entire building and then they could demolish it. And so a lot of people who get very open arms in this about this are tenants who live in a building where they see apartments just sitting empty and that causes problems. People can come into the building. I've been into really disgusting apartments where just covered in rat feces and that's just a window open and empty apartment attracting rats and bugs and problems for the other tenants. But has this kind of like visceral effect and this is definitely happening and it also is happening to people's mental health and their living conditions.