The mayor’s office did not bury the news to spare landlords bad publicity. Just two days later it made one big show of the announcement of its “rent ripoff” hearings, which have outraged and scared owners even before the first hearing.
In his press release about the updated AEP listMayor Zohran Mamdani vowed: “New York will no longer look the other way while bad landlords endanger tenants.”
But AEP is in its 19th year. Clearly the city hasn’t looked the other way. The problem is that AEP hasn’t been very effective, despite imposing fines and charging landlords several times the normal repair costs. It tends to put out a few fires in a building and then move on without solving the fundamental problems.
If AEP were working properly, the crisis of violations that Mamdani continually calls out would not exist. Yet his new list was accompanied only by commotion, and not by reforms.
When The real deal‘s Quinn Waller investigated what happened to buildings owned by infamous landlord Aron Stark after they were thrown into AEP, she found little sign of progress.
It also did not inspire changes in Stark’s stewardship of the buildings.
Waller reported last fall that the city put 1422 Greene Avenue into AEP in 2021 and has since made some repairs and billed Stark for them. But he hadn’t paid, and as of October 1, the 12-unit building still had 79 outstanding violations, 32 of which were immediately dangerous.
Currently, there are 80 open HPD violations, 67 of which are Class B or C. There are also six active violations. construction violations and eight opened environmental violations. Stark hasn’t even filed a property registration form since 2020, and tenants have said he has left the building.
Yet somehow 1422 Greene Avenue was removed from the AEP list.
Instead, Mamdani selected 34-15 Parsons Boulevard in Queens, a 175-unit A&E building that the mayor said is home to more than 1,000 “of the most serious violations.” Only half the building 1,239 violations have been repaired; they just haven’t been approved yet because HPD hasn’t re-inspected them. Another 1,200 violations have been resolved.
“We’ve done a lot of work in that building to resolve these violations,” said Douglas Eisenberg, CEO of A&E. “We invested ten million dollars in the building.”
It’s apparently been years since Ari Stark — a landlord who was once imprisoned for neglecting his property — put even 10 cents into his Greene Avenue building. That the city took his building off the bad-boy list and put Douglas Eisenberg’s on it tells you there’s more than a little theater going on.
What we’re thinking about: Will Mark Levine, the new city comptroller, roll back the project-disrupting 485x rules just proposed by his office? The draft rules were largely prepared under Levine’s predecessor, Brad Lander, who claimed to be pro-housing but sometimes was not, and this proposal is another example. Levine is more enthusiastic about increasing housing supply and now has a chance to prove it, although this will irritate construction unions. Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
Something we learned: Only 13.7 percent of single-family homes are occupied by renters, the lowest share in more than 15 years, a Redfin analysis of the census data found. Housing myth buster Jay Parsons posted the state.
Elsewhere…
The new law Requiring landlords to install air conditioning by June 2030 for tenants who request it is seen by some as another nail in the coffin of rent-stabilized housing.
But a closer reading of the bill suggests its impact will be modest, perhaps even minimal.
One line reads: “The Department of Housing Preservation and Development would notify tenants of the potential impact of electing the program on their rent.”
The law says a rent-stabilized tenant must agree to a rent increase – through an individual apartment improvement – in order to receive air conditioning. This important fact was missing from almost all media reporting of the bill.
For units with individual meters, like most, tenants would also have to pay higher electric bills to use the air conditioning. The prospect of higher rents and higher energy bills should deter many from demanding the upgrade.
The New York Apartment Association pushed for changes to the legislation by Assemblyman Lincoln Restler, D-Brooklyn, which passed 40-7 on Dec. 18. It became law without Mayor Eric Adams’ signature.
Closing time
Residential: The highest housing deal recorded on Tuesday was $37.25 million for a 3,703-square-foot resale condominium at 220 Central Park South. Manju Jasty of The Corcoran Group did the entry.
Commercial: The best recorded commercial deal was $40 million for Metropolitan College of New York’s 100,000-square-foot building at 40 Rector Place in the Financial District. The real deal reported on the deal at the City University of New York in August.
New on the market: The highest price for a home that came on the market was $20 million for a 3,851-square-foot condominium unit at 275 West 10th Street in the West Village. Jessica Chestler and Ben Jacobs of Douglas Elliman have the entry.
Groundbreaking: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 210,689-square-foot, four-story, 32-unit residential building at 2105 Tillotson Ave. in Eastchester. Nikolai Katz submitted the permit for 33 stock takeovers on behalf of Tucker Shane.
— Matthew Elo
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