Relates to penalties for owners of property who fail to file a proper or timely rent registration statement

3 Co-sponsors

• Martin Malavé Dilan
• Jesse Hamilton
• Liz Krueger

Title of bill

An act to amend the emergency tenant protection act of nineteen seventy-four, and the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to penalties for owners of property who fail to file a proper or timely rent registration statement

Summary of provisions

Section 1 amends the opening paragraph of paragraph 1 of subdivision a of section 12 of section 4 of chapter 576 of the laws of 1974, constituting the emergency tenant protection act of nineteen seventy-four, as amended by chapter 116 of the laws of 1997, to increase the penalty for a rent overcharge of a rent-stabilized apartment from three times the amount of the overcharge to five times the amount for a first offense, and ten times the amount for any subsequent overcharges.

Section 2 amends the opening paragraph of subdivision a of section 26-516 of the administrative code of the city of New York, as amended by chapter 116 of the laws of 1997, to increase the penalty for a rent overcharge of a rent-stabilized apartment from three times the amount of the overcharge to five times the amount for a first offense, and ten times the amount for any subsequent overcharges.

Section 3 sets the effective date.

Justification

According to a recent investigation by ProPublica, close to 200,000 units of rent-stabilized apartments are not properly registered with the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of being overcharged on their rent or illegally evicted.

The investigation noted that "data provided to ProPublica by DHCR - which oversees rent-stabilized apartments - shows that, as of 2014, New York City had 839,797 rent-stabilized apartments registered with the state." Over the same time period, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) published a survey estimating that there should be 1,029,918 rent-stabilized units in the city - a gap that dwarfs the survey's 34,000 unit margin of error.

According to ProPublica, HPD's survey methodology attributes the gap between their estimate and the number of registered rent-stabilized units in part on the reduced penalties against landlords who treat apartments that should be rent-stabilized as market rate.

This bill would increase the penalty for overcharging a rent-stabilized tenant to five times the amount of the overcharge, plus interest, for a landlord's first violation, and ten times the amount of the overcharge, plus interest, for any subsequent violations. As under current law, a landlord could mitigate the civil penalty by demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence that the overcharge was neither willful nor attributable to his or her negligence.

Legislative history

New bill

Fiscal implications

None to the state

Effective date

This act shall take effect immediately; provided that a. the amendments to the opening paragraph of paragraph 1 of subdivision a of section 12 of the emergency tenant protection act of nineteen seventy-four shall expire on the same date as such act expires and shall not affect the expiration of such act as provided in section 17 of chapter 567 of the laws of 1974; and b. the amendments to section 26-516 of chapter 4 of title 26 of the administrative code of the city of New York made by section two of this act shall expire on the same date as such law expires and shall not affect the expiration of such law as provided under section 26-520 of such law.