Landlords and tenants leave money on the table.
I’m talking about WRITE and DRAWwhich stands for Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption and Disability Rent Growth Exemption.
These programs freeze the rent of certain tenants whose rent is more than one-third of their income. But unlike Zohran Mamdani’s promised rent freeze, landlords will receive a tax break to make up the difference. Everyone wins.
Actually, only 42 percent win. A ridiculous 58 percent of the 160,000 tenants eligible for a rent freeze don’t get one. They are not in the program.
Renters do not have to be poor to qualify. In 2015, at the request of the de Blasio administration, then-Sen. Diane Savino has introduced a bill through Albany to make more renters eligible. Her law raised the family income limit to $50,000.
“The biggest challenge after that was raising awareness,” she says tweeted on Sunday. “Thousands of people still don’t know about the program, or their landlords think it doesn’t apply to them.”
Even tenants who are aware of the program cannot navigate the process. Some landlords help their tenants apply. There is also one helpline for tenants.
But the core problem is that applications for city and state programs are notoriously difficult to fill, especially for the intended recipients – in this case, seniors and the disabled. Even those who succeed in this task lose the advantage if they fail to extend it.
Recently two city officials wrote an op-ed in City Limits to get more people signed up. That was a good deed, but unfortunately the authors didn’t explain why more people don’t know the program or why the process cannot be simplified or even automated.
The city and state could use information from individual tax returns, apartment registration records and property tax records to pre-fill applications and mail them out so they can be signed and returned. Landlords can receive notices from potentially eligible tenants.
These benefits are worth fighting for, but no one should.
What we’re thinking about: Are the 70 convictions for bribery of NYCHA workers an indictment of the public housing model, or are private landlords and property managers just as vulnerable when workers receive kickbacks from the contractors they select for jobs? Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
Something we learned: Ray Wohlfarth has written 14 books on boilers. Every time I see it one of his ‘Boiler Room Detective’ videosI think of the boilermakers of yesteryear and how much expertise will be lost when they are gone. Most already are.
This is most important in cities like New York, where many heating systems are much older than the people who maintain them. Reading and hearing Wohlfarth’s stories, I get the feeling that many steam or hot water heating systems have been ‘fixed’ over the years by people who did not understand them properly, causing even more problems down the road.
Elsewhere…
Mr. Pink is in black.
Steve Buscemi, the actor who played a bank robber by that name in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” sold his Park Slope row house for a dollar less than $5 million. He and his late wife, the filmmaker and choreographer Yes Andreshad paid $579,000 in 1997, leaving him with a capital gain of approximately $4.2 million, minus the cost of any major improvements he made to the property.
Buscemi told the New York Times earlier this year he said the mansion “isn’t right for me anymore, you know? It’s just – it’s too big.” The actor and his new wife, Karen Ho, have done just that moved to Manhattan.
When calculating tax on long-term gains on a primary residence, a married couple can disregard $500,000 of the gain. That would still leave Buscemi and Ho with a hefty tax bill unless they do a 1031 exchange by quickly purchasing a similar property. In that case, they could defer the entire profit.
The purchase price of $4,999,999 was no coincidence. It is $1 lower than New York City’s threshold country house tax increases from 1.5 percent to 2.25 percent.
The buyers are a couple from the neighborhood. They moved from an apartment on Third Street. Similarly, Buscemi and Andres had moved from Ninth Street in 1997. Housing economists call this chain of moves “filter.”
The new owners (like Buscemi) each used a revocable trust for the transaction, meaning they can ultimately pass the townhome to heirs without any probate. In Brooklyn that can save a lot of hassle.
Closing time
Residential: The highest housing deal recorded on Tuesday was $13.3 million for a 2,455-square-foot condominium unit at 220 Central Park South. Deborah Kern of Corcoran did the entry.
Commercial: The best recorded commercial deal was $32.6 million for a development site at 1059-1061 2nd Avenue in Sutton Place. An entity affiliated with John K. Rapp sold the site to Krown Point Capital.
New on the market: The highest price for a home that came on the market was $85 million for a 7,700-square-foot penthouse at 125 Perry Street in the West Village. The pre-war building was converted into a condominium by Alf Naman in 2025. Jim St. André and the Hudson Advisory Team have the listing.
Groundbreaking: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed six-story mixed-use project at 376 East 139th Street in Mott Haven. Kendrick Lam filed the permit on behalf of Morris Yeroushalmi.
— Matthew Elo
#Daily #Dirt #Landlords #tenants #benefits