Cheap Apartments Are A Thing Of The Past In NYC, Study Shows

NEW YORK — Major shifts in New York City's housing market have made cheap apartments elusive for working-class residents, a new city comptroller's report shows.

UPDATE: Comptroller Scott Stringer's office revised this report on Wednesday, Sept. 26. It now says the city lost 425,492 apartments renting for $900 or less from 2005 to 2017, not more than 1 million. The comptroller's office blamed the mistake on a mathematical error.

The city lost more than a million apartments renting for $900 or less in a 12-year period as more than 88,000 units fell out of rent stabilization, according to the report Comptroller Scott Stringer released Tuesday.

That means middle- and high-rent homes now dominate the rental landscape, with units going for more than $2,700 a month comprising nearly 14 percent of all apartments in the city, the report found.

The figures show the imperative for state lawmakers to expand the city's rent protections next year so native New Yorkers don't have to fight so hard to stay in their homes, officials and advocates said.

"Unless Albany lawmakers strengthen renters' rights and expand rent stabilization, this will become a city where the entrance fee will become a two-million-dollar condo," Stringer, a Democrat, said at a news conference Tuesday. "And that kind of city betrays everything we stand for."

Stringer's office used data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey to analyze how the city's housing market changed from 2005 to last year.

Cheap apartments weren't always so hard to find. Nearly three quarters of all the city's rentals in 2005 went for $900 or less in 2017 dollars, the report found.That's about all New Yorkers earning minimum wage can afford while still paying for food and subway costs, said Delsenia Glover, executive director of the advocacy group Tenants & Neighbors.

But the share of rentals in that price range shrunk to just 20 percent last year, Stringer's report found.

Meanwhile, the number of units renting for more than $2,700 climbed to 292,245 last year, or 13.9 percent of all apartments, from 54,710, or just 2.7 percent of all apartments, in 2005, the comptroller's office said.

The stock of rent-stabilized apartments has also been drained in recent years. The city saw a net loss of 88,518 rent-stabilized units from 2005 to 2017, with more apartments losing rent stabilization than gaining it in every year except 2017, the report found.

That's largely driven by a provision in state law known as high-rent vacancy deregulation, the comptroller's office said. It allows landlords to deregulate vacant apartments when their rents hit a legally mandated threshold, which was raised to $2,700 in 2015.

Such loopholes encourage landlords to force out longtime tenants and hike rents, advocates said. Stringer and Democratic state lawmakers said the rent laws should be expanded to cover every apartment in the city.

"Rent-stabilized tenants are an endangered species and fast becoming extinct unless we do something about it," said state Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan).

A version of that idea, sometimes known as universal rent control, was part of Cynthia Nixon's platform in her unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for governor.

Progressive state Senate candidates who similarly ran on closing rent-law loopholes claimed primary victories over former members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a now-defunct group of breakaway Democrats who allied themselves with Republicans for years.

Stringer expressed confidence that rent reform would be possible in Albany next year because of the "changing winds."

"This is a fight we can win," he said.

(Lead image: City Comptroller Scott Stringer speaks at a news conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. Photo from Comptroller Scott Stringer/Twitter)