Living with Legends

NYU finds that surveillance cameras do not deter crime.  The study reviewed "five years of evidence from Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan."  The researchers question whether the trade-offs in cost and loss of privacy are worth it.

Tishman Speyer may now have to pay $200 million back to tenants (at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village) because a court has ruled that they "had wrongfully raised rents and deregulated thousands of apartments after receiving special tax breaks." According to the NY Times, the ruling could "affect hundreds of other apartment house owners who, like Tishman Speyer, obtained tax breaks under the city’s J-51 tax program for property renovations and then raised rents beyond certain set levels. The Appellate Division ruled that apartments must remain rent-regulated as long as the building owners enjoy J-51 tax benefits."

An in-depth article in The Indypendent explains why tenants should support repealing the "vacany decontrol" law. "The top priority for the tenant movement, however, is repealing “vacancy decontrol.” Enacted in the 1990s, it lets landlords deregulate vacant rent-stabilized apartments if the rent can legally be $2,000 per month or more. (Rent stabilization covers buildings with six or more apartments built before 1974, or buildings where the owner accepted it in exchange for tax breaks.) Once an apartment is deregulated, there are no restrictions on rent increases and the new tenant has little to no housing rights. The bill to repeal vacancy decontrol, S. 2237, has 23 co-sponsors.

As we reported earlier on the blog, efforts are underway to reform the DHCR's Individual Apartment Improvement Code which allows landlords to use the 1/40th increase to pad the cost of apartment improvements in an effort to deregulate units.