Early in October the US Supreme Court dismissed without reason any review of a case challenging New York State’s Rent Stabilization Law (https://www.costar.com/article/574482717/supreme-court-denies-challenge-to-new-yorks-rent-regulations-law) (https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2023/10/2/23900463/supreme-court-rent-regulations) (https://nyassembly.gov/Press/files/20190611a.php). This filing by landlords challenges the 2019 legislative reforms to the original law and is based on the landlords’ arguments that these reforms were destroying their property and ownership rights and destroying housing by increasing proprietors walking away from buildings they could no longer afford to maintain. The court’s refusal has given some relief to tenants and their advocacy groups. However, there are still two smaller cases waiting their turn with SCOTUS and this is giving everyone some pause.

I’ll weigh in with my two cents worth: This bickering and battling between rent-stabilized tenants and their landlords has been going on since I became a citizen of the city back in the ’70s. I have previously lived in a rent-stabilized apartment for many years in the past. It is no great secret that the lawmakers and the courts instinctively lean on the side of the tenants; their support stemming from a traditional viewpoint that the tenant is the “little guy” against the bigger and more powerful owner of the property they are renting. My reading of this legislation from the links I provided above appears to slather on even more tenant protections while handcuffing property owners more severely.

The Rent Stabilization Law has become a very large and ugly 800 pound gorilla which has been fed a number of unsavory bananas, including the shadow of competitive fair market value, the escalating costs of competitive new constructions and maintenance of existing properties, ever rising property taxes and insurance costs and electrical and heating needs for the common use areas, increasingly stringent sanitation, health and safety, and fire code regulations with their eye-popping fines, increased cost of a myriad of vendor services including contracting, exterminating, plumbing, and electrical and, problem-child tenants who disrupt daily living for a wide variety of reasons.

I’m not being oblivious to the fact that there are significant scurrilous landlords whose ethics and procedures are downright dangerous to tenants and give a black eye to those peers who are trying to be fair, equivocal, and accommodating with their tenants whether they are big proprietor companies or small family landlords. On the flipside of the coin there is also the terrorizing tenant who has some sort of personal agenda for making life miserable for the landlord (i.e., paying camping ground rates and expecting Hudson Yards treatment, holding an apartment for ransom and becoming such a nuisance that the landlord will pay them a generous price to vacate). But this being said, the whole damn thing’s a big mess and it’s going to take cooler heads with greater intellects than those currently stirring the pot of rent stabilization laws whether they are advocacy groups on either side, the politicians up in Albany, or the housing experts who seldom live up to that title. These folks have some personal dog in the fight and really can’t be trusted to come up with a fair and even handed way of providing a “preferential” rent for those citizens whose needs truly justify their paying a reduced monthly living cost. The politicians want those votes. The lawyers want those fees. The advocacy groups want the attention (and sometimes the lucrative 501 (c) (4) incoming), the experts want the media facetime, and the tenants either can’t afford or don’t want to pay a fair market rent (I personally know of a stabilized tenant who is paying well under $1000 a month yet expects the landlord to make the apartment like a Trump Land luxury rental. A truly deserving disabled or elderly person could use this apartment because the tenant makes a good living to the point of owning a luxury car and having out of state family-owned rental property). The Rent Stabilization Law is a bugaboo that has gotten way out of hand and needs to be intelligently reconstructed before the number of walkaway properties increases dramatically and tenants wind up with the worst landlord imaginable: the City of New York. Don’t believe me? Ask tenants who are already living in properties owned by the city. Dracula landlord indeed.