New York City’s housing agency says the number of low-cost, rent-stabilized apartments being held vacant plummeted last year amid an increasingly dire shortage of affordable units.
The comparatively low number of housing units being held off the market — or “warehoused” —belies estimates by both landlord groups and housing advocates who are locked in a dispute over how to get owners to bring empty rent-stabilized apartments on the market. Landlords have argued that state rent regulations make the units so unprofitable that they’re better off leaving them vacant. Tenant groups have argued that money-hungry owners are starving the city’s affordable housing supply while they wait for changes to those regulations.
But with the city’s overall vacancy rate at its lowest point since the 1960s, city officials say a lot of cheaper units have been leased up.
Last year, HPD officials said the agency tallied 2,477 rent-stabilized units “that had been vacant and off-the-market for 12 months or more, were in need of repairs, and had a low legal rent” of less than $1,000 a month using data from the city’s 2021 Housing and Vacancy Survey. That’s far fewer than the tens of thousands estimated by landlord groups.
And HPD told Gothamist on Friday that the number has dropped even further, based on the initial results of the city’s latest Housing and Vacancy Survey, released earlier this month. Agency spokesperson William Fowler said the survey covered a larger sample size than the previous report, and while the city hasn’t zeroed in on a specific number, it’s turned up so few units matching the low-cost, repairs-needed criteria that the overall number can only be lower than in the 2021 survey.
The extent of the problem is negligible compared to the vast need for new housing supply, Fowler said.
“As the city has been saying for months, the 2021 survey found under 2,500 low-cost, rent stabilized apartments that were off the market for over a year and in need of repairs,” Fowler said. “With most apartments that were off the market in 2021 becoming occupied in 2023, we estimate that figure to be much, much lower.”
The agency said it would produce specific figures after analyzing more granular data from the survey and receiving permission to publish it from the U.S. Census Bureau. HPD revealed the 2021 data on low-cost units held off the market during a City Council hearing last June.
Overall, just 1.4% of all New York City apartments were vacant and available for rent last year, according to the survey. Meanwhile, less than 1% of the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments were vacant and available to rent.
The city housing agency also found that more than 26,300 rent-stabilized apartments of any price were “vacant but unavailable for rent” from January to July 2023 — down from roughly 42,860 during the 2021 survey period. HPD declined to speculate about the cause of those vacancies, but said the figure includes older rent-stabilized apartments as well as newer and often higher-rent units that receive property tax breaks and other state and city subsidies.
Landlord trade groups immediately criticized HPD’s accounting of the low-cost rent-stabilized units being held off the market, when asked by Gothamist.
Jay Martin, director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, which represents smaller owners of rent-stabilized apartments, said the 26,300 empty and unavailable apartments all likely have rents too low for landlords to break even or turn a profit, with operating costs on the rise.
“Apartments that were right on the edge of being profitable, owners figured out how to get back online,” he said. “Why would those apartments be vacant year over year if they were renting for above their operating costs?”
The Rent Stabilization Association, which opposes rent regulations and represents owners with large portfolios, also disputed the estimate. RSA spokesperson Michael Tobman said strict regulations that prohibit owners from raising rents after a tenant leaves — a practice known as a vacancy bonus — are compelling owners to keep units offline.
“After decadeslong tenancies, these apartments could be made available to tenants if the economics made sense,” Tobman said, adding that the vacancy survey “doesn’t capture the fullness of this serious problem, which has an even more acute impact on smaller buildings.”
But policy experts say the survey offers the most scientific review of the city’s housing stock.
“Everything has a margin of error but if you’re going to trust a number, the [Housing and Vacancy Survey] number is the one to trust,” said Moses Gates, vice president for housing at the Regional Plan Association. “That’s the official number as far as I’m concerned.”
The survey is conducted roughly every three years, and the initial report issued earlier this month does not indicate how many specific rent-stabilized units were vacant in consecutive years — a metric that could suggest how many are being held offline.
A report last year by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that around 13,000 rent-stabilized units were vacant and held off the market for more than a year, suggesting some level of “warehousing.” The IBO used registration data maintained by the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal, which administers the rent regulations.
Tenant groups have criticized landlords who they say are deliberately holding low-rent units off the market and possibly waiting for rule changes or a court decision that will allow them to raise monthly prices — a potential strategy for property owners with large portfolios that could absorb any lost rent revenue on a handful of apartments. Lawmakers passed stricter regulations in 2019 to stop landlords from driving tenants out of their units in order to raise rents on the next occupant and even lift the unit out of rent-stabilization altogether.
The problems associated with vacant rent-stabilized apartments can plague neighboring tenants with issues like free-roaming rats, break-ins and unaddressed leaks.
The Coalition to End Apartment Warehousing has highlighted those problems in buildings across the city. Coalition organizer Jodie Leidecker said members avoid assigning a specific number to the problem and instead focus on the impact of units taken offline, often by investment firms with huge portfolios.
“If there's even one apartment that's being held off the market, we think it's important to move people into permanent, safe housing, affordable housing,” Leidecker said.
Still, estimates on the number of empty units have come to dominate policy debates as different sides of the issue point to various estimates to further their arguments. .
“Depending on your perspective on the housing crisis you have an incentive to emphasize a different number,” said Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Husock said landlords want to highlight a large number to suggest 2019 rent laws are discouraging them from bringing apartments back on the market, while tenants point to the number to say owners are “gaming the system” at their expense.
Sam Stein, a Community Service Society housing policy analyst who conducts detailed analyses of the housing survey and argues for strong tenant protections, said the intense focus on the number is understandable, even if it’s around 2% of the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments: The notion that units are being held offline during a housing crunch “freaks people out.”
“It’s a small fraction of the total rent-stabilized housing stock and less than it has been in past years,” Stein said. “But it’s also hard to tell tenants or homeless New Yorkers that 20,000 empty rent-stabilized apartments is meaningless.”
