New York City’s housing agency says the number of low-cost, rent-stabilized apartments being held vacant plummeted last year amid an increasingly dire shortage of affordable units.
The comparatively low number of housing units being held off the market — or “warehoused” — belies estimates by both landlord groups and housing advocates who are locked in a dispute over how to get owners to bring empty rent-stabilized apartments on the market. Landlords have argued that state rent regulations make the units so unprofitable that they’re better off leaving them vacant. Tenant groups have argued that money-hungry owners are starving the city’s affordable housing supply while they wait for changes to those regulations.
But with the city’s overall vacancy rate at its lowest point since the 1960s, city officials say a lot of cheaper units have been leased up.
Last year, HPD officials said the agency tallied 2,477 rent-stabilized units “that had been vacant and off-the-market for 12 months or more, were in need of repairs, and had a low legal rent” of less than $1,000 a month using data from the city’s 2021 Housing and Vacancy Survey. That’s far fewer than the tens of thousands estimated by landlord groups.
And HPD told Gothamist on Friday that the number has dropped even further, based on the initial results of the city’s latest Housing and Vacancy Survey, released earlier this month. Agency spokesperson William Fowler said the survey covered a larger sample size than the previous report, and while the city hasn’t zeroed in on a specific number, it’s turned up so few units matching the low-cost, repairs-needed criteria that the overall number can only be lower than in the 2021 survey.
The extent of the problem is negligible compared to the vast need for new housing supply, Fowler said.
“As the city has been saying for months, the 2021 survey found under 2,500 low-cost, rent stabilized apartments that were off the market for over a year and in…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply