Comptroller Mark Levine blasts NY rent-stablized policies for housing crisis: Its outrageous

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine blasted state and Big Apple rent policies for contributing to the city’s affordable housing crisis.Levine complained that laws governing New York’s 1 million rent-stabilized units make it difficult for landlords to renovate apartments and put them back on the market because they can’t recoup costs with rental increases.The result: a recent report found that a staggering 57,000 rent units sat vacant across the five boroughs last year.“The problem is we just have a shortage of supply of homes in New York City … In rent-stabilized buildings, we have tens of thousands of apartments that are sitting vacant,” Levine said Sunday on 77 WABC’s the “Cats Roundtable” program.“Why would a landlord leave an apartment vacant? Well, unfortunately, the law is very difficult.When an apartment becomes vacant and they need very expensive renovations, sometimes a six figure price tag, the owners of the buildings are not able to raise their rent enough to cover the cost of that renovation.

And so, many of these apartments remain vacant,” he told host John Catsimatidis.He continued, “This has got to be fixed.We’ve got to activate these homes so that they go back on the market.

It can be done in a way that preserves affordability, but allows for more flexibilities for landlords to be able to pay for the renovations … We probably have a shortage of 500,000 apartments.”The Mayor Zohran Mamdani-controlled Rent Guidelines Board recently imposed a two-year freeze on rents for stabilized units, fulfilling a campaign promise.Landlords claimed the existing housing stock will further decline because they won’t have the income to maintain their apartment buildings.Levine said it “costs too damn much” to build in New York City, again blaming policies set by elected officials and bureaucrats.He said the average cost to build higher-end apartments is more than $1 million, and even $750,000 for more modest units.“It’s outr...