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Opinion

The State Must Take on Frankensteining Before More Affordable Apartments Vanish


Under construction (photo: Mike Groll/Governor's Office)


The Stand for Tenant Safety/Coalition to End Apartment Warehousing applauds the New York State housing agency’s proposed regulations regarding the first rents for combined or “Frankensteined” apartments. Under that proposal, where at least part of a newly-combined apartment is rent-stabilized, the newly-created unit would be rent-stabilized at whatever the last stabilized tenants paid, with any rent increase or decrease tied to the percentage in the new apartment’s change in size, plus any individual apartment increase (IAI).

Tenants are facing major displacement pressure from Frankensteining just as they did from IAIs, the vacancy bonus, and other now-limited ways that landlords had an incentive to increase rents and remove tenants from their homes.

As tenants who have lived through Frankensteining construction, we have experienced the drastic decline in living conditions in buildings undergoing these changes. Construction has led to excessive dust, noise, and disruption. 

Frankensteining allows landlords to enrich themselves while undermining neighborhood stability and reducing the number of affordable and rent-stabilized units. There are no mechanisms for government agency oversight or even the minimal accountability for the rent increases that come with IAIs or building-wide improvements.

Apartments that previously rented for $1,000-$2,000 each per month, when combined, can be listed for $9,000 or more — whatever the market will bear. The landlord may add a dishwasher, fancy kitchen counters, and some crown molding, essentially cosmetic changes that do little but raise rents, while most working people just need a decent, affordable place to live.

It’s frustrating that this “apartment combination/setting a new first rent” loophole has caused the loss of affordable housing (as shown in “Warehousing and Frankensteining,” our recent report with case studies of nine Manhattan buildings), especially after the valiant efforts of tenants throughout the state to protect their homes led to the passage of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which significantly strengthened rent regulations. 

In our ever-increasing housing and homelessness crisis, every affordable apartment makes the difference for someone who needs housing immediately. Building more affordable housing is necessary, but preservation is easier, less costly, and the effects are immediate. While we wait for more housing to be built, we are losing more and more of the 858,000 rent stabilized apartments we do have. Since 2019, some 116,000 rent stabilized units vanished from the rent regulation system altogether, unregistered. 

The hearings about the new rules are over. Now we urge the state Department of Homes and Community Renewal to quickly implement the rules that disincentivize Frankensteining and preserve affordable housing. Any delay in the implementation of the rules is an egregious affront to the intent of the law and contributes to furthering the greatest affordable housing crisis since the Great Depression.  

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by Jodie Leidecker, Sue Susman, and Edward Ratliff on behalf of The Stand for Tenant Safety/Coalition to End Apartment Warehousing. On Twitter @NyWarehousing.

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2023 Could Be Year of Rent-Stabilized Housing Collapse; Here’s How We Avoid That


Housing across the city (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


I can’t say I am optimistic about 2023. Increasingly I am hearing from owners of rent-stabilized apartment buildings that they will not be able to make their mortgage payments this month or soon thereafter. A confluence of "once in a lifetime" events is pushing this much needed housing toward the brink of insolvency.

A well-run rent-stabilized building should have two to three years of cash reserves set aside. This helps the owner keep up with mortgage payments and unexpected costs that pop up. The COVID-19 emergency was one of those unexpected costs, though at an almost unimaginable scale. A massive number of renters lost income and simply could not pay their rent. The state’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) helped many. But ERAP only covered a maximum of 15 months rent. It’s been 34 months since covid hit, and thousands of renters haven’t paid any rent in that time.

Another factor that is dragging down these buildings is the inability to bring outdated rent-stabilized apartments back online. Unfortunately during COVID-19 many elderly or long-term tenants left their apartments or passed away. If the tenant lived in the apartment for more than 20 years, it likely needs very substantial renovations and upgrades to comply with a host of city and state requirements that didn’t exist when they moved into the apartment. This work is not optional. It is mandated by government building codes. 

In order for the apartment to be in compliance with Local Law 1 of 2004, the entire apartment must be lead remediated, which means all doors, window frames, and other features need to be completely replaced and possibly the entire walls, floors, and ceilings. In order to comply with Local Law 97 of 2019, the apartment should get insulation improvements, electrical upgrades, and energy efficient windows. In many cases, plumbing upgrades are necessary as well. This is why it usually costs $100,000, or more, to get each of these apartments available to rent again. Any owner who attempts to rent the apartment without doing the work would face significant fines. 

The rents on these apartments already do not cover their operating costs, let alone the renovation cost. Because of this, the only logical option for an owner is to leave the apartment vacant. That is bad housing policy.

The final straw that is forcing these buildings into insolvency is inflation and interest rates. The operating costs on every aspect of housing has gone up, driven by increased property tax assessments, skyrocketing fuel costs, and other increased expenses. Then, in order to combat inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, making it harder to borrow money. The typical rent-stabilized building needs to refinance every 5 to 7 years. Banks and lenders require this because they want to re-adjust the mortgage on a building to better reflect the changes in the market conditions and regulatory changes that the government has implemented. The process is far different than a typical 30-year home mortgage.

How big is this problem? Hundreds of buildings housing many thousands of renters don’t have the cash flow to pay their mortgages or maintenance. The banks and lenders for these buildings are scrambling to find anyone who will take them over. This process is ugly for renters in the building, who suffer most from deferred maintenance. 

My organization, CHIP, is proposing a small and simple change that would help many rent-stabilized buildings be preserved and bring thousands of affordable apartments back online, helping to alleviate the city’s severe housing shortage.

Under our proposal, building owners would fully renovate vacant apartments coming off of long-term occupancy, setting an affordable new rent, but leaving the apartment in stabilization. These new apartments would be lead-free and energy efficient, which is vitally important for the long-term health of tenants. In most parts of the city, the new apartments would have rents low enough for voucher holders to access them.  

Every other place in the country with rent regulations has a path for old apartments to be brought back on the market. The new rent would cover the renovation costs and take the pressure off rents in other parts of the building. The government would put in place measures to ensure work is done to code and rents are kept in line with comparable rents in the area. The result would be housing that is safe, clean, updated, and affordable for decades to come.

This simple fix would help house tens of thousands of people and ensure the quality of housing for hundreds of thousands of other renters isn’t diminished. It’s a win-win for everyone.

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Jay Martin is Executive Director of CHIP. On Twitter @jaymart222.

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Governor Hochul’s Misguided Veto of the Non-Religious Addiction Recovery Options Bill


Gov. Hochul signs substance use treatment legislation (photo: Governor's Office)


Governor Hochul’s veto of the Nonreligious Recovery Options bill is a significant missed opportunity to both improve New York’s civil rights record and improve public health outcomes in the midst of an ever-worsening addiction crisis that is claiming the life of a New Yorker every three hours. 

This bill would require New York’s courts, prior to specifying a substance use program, to inquire on the record if the defendant objects to a religious element of the program. If such an objection was registered, the bill would then require the court to identify an alternative equivalent program to which the defendant has no religious objection, and confirm the defendant’s consent on the record.

This noncontroversial bill passed the Legislature earlier this year, sponsored by the Senate’s leading voice on addiction recovery, Senator Pete Harckham, and Assembly Member Harvey Epstein, a powerful criminal justice advocate. It was supported by a broad coalition of First Amendment and recovery groups, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, Friends of Recovery, and SMART Recovery, among others. It is disappointing that the governor disregarded the collective expertise and lived experiences of our coalition and its constituencies. But to justify doing so due to perceived administrative burdens and the potential expansion of civil rights protections is unacceptable. 

It is well-settled law that any individual mandated by a court to attend recovery treatment must be provided with a secular option, and that 12-step programs are religious in nature and therefore cannot be the only option mandated. The governor’s veto message acknowledges this, yet fails to recognize that a constitutional right is a right in name only if not enforced by our justice system.

The Nonreligious Recovery Options bill had two purposes: to shift the burden from defendants to the courts to ensure judicial compliance with the Constitution and to improve overall recovery outcomes by providing defendants with multiple paths.  

Regarding the latter, it’s about much more than aligning programs with a defendant’s values. As was noted in personal testimony provided to the governor’s office, some faith-based settings stigmatize individuals using Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT), a life-saving and evidence-based tool strongly endorsed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a federal agency devoted to substance abuse and mental health issues.

In 2009, SAMHSA issued a “Know Your Rights” document that specifically criticized courts for discriminating against people using MAT. With even SAMHSA acknowledging bias (and outright illegal discrimination) in courts handling substance abuse cases, it's not a stretch to imagine that even well-intentioned judges may not be in full compliance with the law when mandating individuals to attend recovery programs.

Courts nationwide, including in New York, have a bias toward faith-based programs. For many of the criminal justice system’s practitioners,12-step programs are ubiquitous and well-known, while alternatives that research proves work just as well are not. There are also cases in which defendants and incarcerated individuals are outright denied a secular option when requested.

This was the case in lawsuits in New York and in dozens of additional cases across the country. The problem is not limited to the court system either — just last year a Buddhist won a case against their employer and collected $305,000 in damages for being denied a secular recovery option.

The defendants who get appropriate recovery treatment are those who know their rights (many do not) and have the resources and courage to go up against the very system that wields power over their individual liberty — as you can imagine, most opt to keep their head down. Governor Hochul callously disregarded this reality when she characterized this bill as “unnecessary.” Shockingly, the governor outright rejected the notion that the responsibility to ensure compliance with the Constitution falls to the justice system, putting it squarely on the defendant: “Given that defendants already have the right to request nonreligious treatment, this bill…imposes an overly rigid burden on courts and judges,” she stated. 

Perhaps an even more disturbing line of argumentation was her concern that the Legislature could be emboldened to codify the affirmation of other rights. Stating the bill could “invite future selective legislative efforts to inject a similar burden upon judges to inform litigants of their rights to opt out of other court mandates.” For the governor to state concern about setting a precedent that could further empower individuals to exercise well-established constitutional rights should be cause for concern for any New Yorker who values individual freedoms.

If personal testimony from individuals who work directly with mandated defendants were not sufficient proof of the problem, one need not look any further than the impassioned testimony of Assemblymember Angelo Morinello. A former judge who served on the bench for 14 years, he opposed this bill. He stated that defendants “need direction and control,” should not be given a say in their recovery options, and denied that Alcoholics Anonymous "ever tried to be a religious component to these individuals." He proudly boasted of overseeing 600 addiction cases in which it is clear his "direction and control" involved mandating faith-based recovery options.

Recovery advocates know that multiple paths are necessary to improve recovery outcomes. When the vast majority of New Yorkers, 46% of whom are religiously unaffiliated, are provided with a narrow set of recovery options, the state is undermining its own policy goals.

As Mayor Eric Adams pursues his homelessness and mental illness plans, including more arrests and involuntary hospitalization, this issue will become even more acute. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, substance abuse disorder is more prevalent among the homeless than the general population.

Homelessness and substance use disorders are overlapping challenges for the state and city, and there is no doubt that if the unhoused are forcibly removed from the streets, many will end up in drug courts. The governor’s veto will mean that defendants may only get their constitutional right to a secular recovery option if the officials who happen to be handling their cases are concerned enough about the protection of rights to grant it. And for many individuals, including LGBTQ+ people and others who have suffered trauma in religious settings, they will be forced to attend faith-based programs that may retraumatize them and are not conducive to their recovery.

As an advocate for the rights of nonreligious Americans, this veto is a slap in the face to my community, and calls into question whether Governor Hochul is serious about tackling New York’s addiction crisis.

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Sarah M. Levin is the founder of Secular Strategies. On Twitter @SarahMLevin.

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