Illustration: Emma Erickson

Welcome to “Apartment Department,” Curbed’s advice column by Clio Chang. Join us every other Wednesday for questions about making peace with noisy-sex neighbors, the nuances of roommate fridge etiquette, and whatever else you might need to know about renting, buying, or crying in the New York City housing market.

Got a problem? Email clio.chang@nymag.com.

Dear Apartment Department,

My partner and I are moving in together and we want to find a rent-stabilized apartment. Both of us have been hit with big rent increases in other apartments over the years, and we want to find a place where we can stay long-term. But it’s so hard to tell if a place on StreetEasy is rent-stabilized or not, which seems crazy. Sometimes it’s written in the listing, but sometimes we only learn that a place is stabilized after we’ve toured it with a broker. Other times, we ask and the broker says they’re not sure. Why is it so hard to find out? Can’t the city just publish a database of rent-stabilized apartments? Zohran, help!

Sincerely,

Searching for Stability

I found my rent-stabilized apartment a few years ago the same way most people in the city do: sheer luck. After looking at dozens of places, I applied for a one-bedroom in Brooklyn. A day later, the broker told me to meet him at the building management’s office with a cashier’s check for the first month’s rent and his broker’s fee. Then he said he had some good news — he had “negotiated” the rent down from the listing price by $50, but he would still take his fee at the higher rate (naturally). It wasn’t until I went to sign the lease that I saw my apartment was rent-stabilized. The broker hadn’t negotiated anything; the rent I was being offered was the maximum legal rent.

Only to say — yes, it is maddeningly hard to know this kind of thing in advance. The city doesn’t publish a list of rent-stabilized units, and neither does the state, which is the actual entity that governs the stabilization system. (It’s Kathy Hochul, not Zohran Mamdani, whom you have to beseech.) Ask the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal why it doesn’t publish this kind of list and it will point to privacy laws that govern rent stabilization. Only the tenant and the owner can know if a specific unit is stabilized. And that’s only if your landlord tells you or you go out of your way to request your rent history after you move in. So why is this information so private? “This has been a great mystery to me,” Oksana Mironova, housing analyst at the Community Service Society, said. “I’ve tried to get this data for my own research purposes multiple times, and they always come back with the fact that it’s a privacy issue.”

It’s hard to imagine what the dire consequences would be if the general public knew whether a specific unit is regulated or not. After all, the actual rents don’t have to be disclosed, even though most are easily searchable on StreetEasy. And New York invites transparency in other matters of public concern — like minimum salaries, for example. “It seems like something extremely valuable for both research and organizing purposes, and it doesn’t feel like a breach of ethics to me from the side of the state,” Mironova said.

City legislators have tried to tackle the issue. City Councilmember Sandy Nurse said she didn’t realize her own apartment was stabilized until a tenant organizer advised her to get her rent history. A bill she sponsored that went into effect in January requires landlords of buildings that contain at least one rent-stabilized unit to put a sign up in the common area to inform their tenants of that fact and to give them information on how to figure out if their own unit is stabilized. Which is not exactly a solution to your problem, of course. Nurse knows that too. “We were able to say that you have to post a sign,” Nurse told me. “But forcing some of this stuff we just can’t do, because it’s at the state level.” Having one stabilized unit in a building means there are likely others, so if you see a sign posted in a building you’re touring, it’s a start — if landlords comply. (It’s still early days, but there is no sign up yet in my building.)

But there are also some general rules of thumb to help you do some sleuthing while touring apartments. If a building went up before 1974 and contains six or more units, it most likely contains stabilized apartments. But decades of landlords deregulating apartments means nothing is assured. You can check if the building you’re looking at has stabilized units on DHCR’s dashboard and JustFix, a nonprofit that scrapes state and city records. A bunch of enterprising teens also created a portal that analyzes the probability that any given listing is rent-stabilized, based on things like listing description, state registrations, and whether the price is undermarket enough to indicate a history of rent stabilization. Another telltale sign: If the rent in the listing ends in a non-round number, it’s likely stabilized.

Once you sit down to sign your lease, your landlord is required to attach a rider that informs you of the rent paid by the previous tenant and that your apartment is stabilized. At this point, you should technically know for sure, but just because your lease doesn’t include this rider doesn’t mean it’s not regulated. (Landlords can be slippery!) Which is why you should always request your rent history once you move into a place to confirm your apartment’s stabilized status.

Is this just a lot of roundabout work to figure out something that should maybe just be publicly accessible information? Probably. Is it strange that our current system has driven a bunch of children to spend their summer coding a rent-stabilized housing portal because the city doesn’t have one? Most definitely. But nothing in New York City real estate comes easy. I asked a friend who was feverishly looking for a rent-stabilized apartment and finally found one if he had any advice. His words were as Zen as they were true: “I always like to remind people that you only need things to work out one time.”

Have a question for the Apartment Department? You can send it to clio.chang@nymag.com.

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