There have been so many articles and discussions about the lack of available housing in New York that the vast majority of us need a sedative just to keep listening. The fact is, the majority of the hand-wringing comes from politicians living in Lalaland who want to solve a situation that for the most part they created with their hairbrained policies. These politicians refuse to face the reality of what must be done in New York if they want to solve the problem of available housing.
Available housing did not disappear overnight, and the dearth of it has more to do with the laws on the books of New York that seem to discourage landlords both big and small from putting more units on the market, or updating and repairing older units in run-down buildings.
The laws that have been placed on the books in recent years do not allow landlords to raise the rent more than a small percentage each year, even if the cost of gas, electricity, heat, and water climb steadily. The laws do not allow landlords to raise rents in rent-stabilized buildings, even if the landlord renovates the apartments and invests a lot of money in fixing them up.
The laws have become totally invested in protecting tenants from increased rents with no consideration to the actual cost of maintaining and upgrading the units, which requires the landlord to invest large sums of money out-of-pocket to maintain his rental units and buildings. This results in a situation where it is more cost-effective for the landlord to write-off empty apartments as a loss rather than renting them out with all the restrictions that keep the rents below what he needs to cover his costs.
We will discuss the above in more detail in a moment, but the even bigger culprit working against landlords placing more units on the market is the landlord-tenant court system in New York, which does everything against the landlords except burning them at the stake for trying to address problem tenants and evict delinquent ones from their buildings.
Problem tenants come in a variety of categories. There are tenants who trash the apartments, causing thousands of dollars of damage, and there are tenants who don’t pay their rent for months at a time because they know the system works in their favor and it takes a landlord 6-12 months just to get the court to agree to an eviction (whereby these same tenants just go to the next landlord and do the same thing over again—we call these tenants, “professional rental delinquents” since this type of tenant can go years doing this without being stopped and forced to pay rent.
Forget about evicting squatters! The law on the books gives squatters the right to squat anywhere if they can manage to stay there more than 30 days, then whoever owns the property must also wait 6-12 months for the court to agree to evict them.
If a landlord cannot depend on the court to get rid of bad tenants or squatters, or at the very least, if the landlord needs to wait 6-12 months just to get his case heard in court, why would he rent his units at all since one bad tenant can actually cost him five years of rental income between lost rent and legal fees? Where squatters are concerned, something is wrong with the law that states law-abiding citizens can be taken advantage of by anyone who decides to squat, if they can manage to hold out 30 days. I cannot even imagine who wrote that crazy law!
The bottom line is that if the politicians want to solve the problem of available housing, they must first fix these crazy laws that do not protect honest landlords, and in the case of squatters, honest homeowners, since these laws have had the effect of taking a large number of apartments off the market by disgusted landlords.
The system has to change to protect the innocent, and while honest tenants also have to be protected, both honest landlords and tenants should be protected equally. None of them should have to wait 6-12 months to get their case heard in court; otherwise, the situation is only bound to get worse.
Anessa Cohen lives in Cedarhurst and is a Licensed Real Estate Broker (Anessa V Cohen Realty) with over 20 years of experience offering residential, commercial and management real estate services. You are invited to visit her website at www.avcrealty.com. She can be reached at 516-569-5007 or Readers are encouraged to send any questions or comments by email to anessa@avcrealty.com.
