Small-property owners are suing New York, city and state, in federal court, aiming to get tens of thousands of their \u201czombie\u201d apartments back on the market.<\/p>\n
Pray they win; tenants desperately need that housing \u2014 and local politicians need a warning about how their excess are endangering all the rent laws.<\/p>\n
The problem: 2019 changes to the Rent Stabilization Law under then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo made even vacant apartments<\/a> subject to rent regulation if their buildings were built before 1974 (which covers about a million units).<\/p>\n Those \u201creforms\u201d also severely restricted how much of the costs for repairs and upgrades the landlord can pass along to new tenants as rent.<\/p>\n All that made it near-impossible for owners to recoup the money they\u2019d have to spend to bring units up to code after a longtime tenant vacates; far better to just keep them off the market.<\/p>\n \t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n Take brothers Pashko and Tony Lulgjuraj, landlords in Washington Heights.<\/p>\n Two units in their five-story building would take thousands to fix up, but the law bars them from charging enough rent to cover that.<\/p>\n For example, rent in one two-bedroom unit, a would be capped at just $710 a month, not nearly enough to offset costs.<\/p>\n The result: Landlords like the Lulgjurajs have to warehouse units<\/a> rather than lose money by fixing and renting them.<\/p>\n The Census Bureau counts 26,000 such \u201czombie\u201d apartments as of last year \u2014 vacant even as would-be tenants would practically kill to get them; others put the count as high as 50,000.<\/p>\n Either way, the number would balloon under Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani\u2019s plans to freeze rents<\/a>.<\/p>\n With help from the Institute for Justice public-interest law firm (which has taken 13 cases all the way to the US Supreme Court, winning 11 of them), the plaintiffs argue that these laws add up to an unconstitutional \u201ctaking\u201d of property.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to argue with that: By making it prohibitively expensive to rent their units, the law renders the apartments near-worthless.<\/p>\n