Video: Tenants Rights in NYC

NYC’s tenants are entitled to several rights, which are overseen by NYC’s government. Some of the significant tenant rights include:

1- The right to have a safe, hygienic, and well-maintained building and apartment, or house with all the basic facilities made available to them by the owner.

2- The right to have privacy, which means landlords can not enter the tenant’s apartment or house without prior notice except for an emergency. The prior notice can only be approved by tenants if the landlord wants to enter the apartment for reasons such as repair or maintenance purposes or to inspect the property for future buyers or tenants.

3- The right to report to the police station if the landlord has changed the locks and has locked them out illegally. The Unlawful Eviction Law (NYC Administrative Code 26-521) protects this right of tenants.

4- The right to rent an apartment or house, regardless of the tenant’s ethnicity, gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, disability, or citizenship status (NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, n.d.).

Figure 2. NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) Office

NYC’s government has multiple rights in terms of land and property. These rights include:

1- The right of eminent domain, which means the government has the authority and right to acquire private property or land to turn it into a public good such as building shelter houses, public parks, railways, and freeways. However, the government has to pay compensation to the owner.

2- The right to be acknowledged by mortgagees of a zombie property, which are properties considered abandoned or vacant if the mortgagee in consecutive three inspections finds that no occupant was living in the property. In this case, the mortgagees are required to register the property under the Department of Financial Services.

3- The right to be acknowledged by both buyers and sellers of buying or selling a property. Both are required to fill out a real property transfer form and submit it to the government, meanwhile, sellers are also obliged to pay property transfer tax to the government.

4- The Office of Real Property Tax Service (ORPTS) is in charge of the local assessment administration. This division is in charge of handling the fairness of property assessment. They are responsible for measuring market value in each city and town, developing values of taxable state-owned land, and providing state aid to towns and cities (New York State, 2021).

Video: "Poor Door" NYC

Although there was an initiative taken by the NYC government, particularly by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to make housing affordable for ordinary New Yorkers, which is known as Inclusionary Housing Program (IHP). However, the housing developers adopted stealthy strategies to exclude and segregate the ordinary or middle-class from the apartments’ wealthy residents. The program allowed developers to build larger or taller housing projects with the condition that a particular number of housing units would be allocated to lower-income New Yorkers, which means they could rent houses for less than the market value. Also, under the Program NYC’s government offered subsidies to developers of almost tens of millions of dollars, along with a significant amount of property tax abatement. On the contrary, to maintain the status quo the developers built separate entrances for the lower-income residents. In addition, lower-income residents were denied access to gyms, swimming pools, and other recreational activities even though the ordinary and the wealthy were charged the same amount for the apartment amenities. This exclusion is termed the “poor door” and is claimed to be a neo-segregationist policy. Furthermore, tenants of 15 Hudson Yards filed a lawsuit against the “poor door” and the discriminatory policies by the building’s management (Brenzel, 2022). They claimed that the Black and Hispanic residents were treated differently than other white and affluent residents. However, it was dismissed by New York’s federal judge who ruled that there was a lack of evidence provided by the plaintiffs.