Rent Protections Disappear at More Than 1,500 Apartments
Between 2019 and 2022, Lower Manhattan lost 1,559 rent-stabilized apartments, according to data from the City’s Department of Finance (DOF), compiled by the housing nonprofit JustFix.org, and first reported by the online newsroom TheCity.nyc.
That data has been broken down here for insights specific to Lower Manhattan, defined in this instance as Community District 1 (CD1), a quilt of neighborhoods encompassing 1.5 square miles, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Within this district, accord to DOF data, a total of 1,559 units disappeared from official tallies of rent-regulated apartments in the four-year period that began in 2019. According to the Department of City Planning, CD1 contains a total of 41,977 residential dwellings. This means that approximately 3.7 percent of all Lower Manhattan homes reverted from legally protected affordable units to market-rate apartments during that interval.
The City’s Rent Guidelines Board documents that during the same four-year period, the five boroughs of New York experienced a net loss of 6,372 rent-stabilized apartments. This translates into Lower Manhattan representing roughly one in four of all rent-stabilized apartment losses citywide during this period.
The upside for landlords appears to be considerable. According to the Rent Guidelines Board, the median gross rent for stabilized apartments through New York City in 2023 was $1,570. For contrast, according to RENTCafe (a nationwide apartment search website), the average rent for market-rate apartments in Manhattan is currently $4,939. By these metrics, the landlords of the 42 Lower Manhattan buildings that have shed rent-stabilized units may be collecting in the range of $3,369 additional rent per month per apartment. Over the course of four years, this is the equivalent of $63,027,252 extracted from local residents. For individual Lower Manhattan families, this increase corresponds to $40,428 per year.
There are multiple reasons why landlords can legally stop registering apartments as rent stabilized. The most common is the sunsetting of tax benefits offered by government agencies when the building opened, in exchange for affordability protections but within a limited time period.
The largest blocks of apartments that reverted to market rate during the four-year period ending in 2022 were at Ten Hanover Square (which went from 489 affordable units to 93, for a loss of 396), 450 Washington Street (where all 291 units were deregulated), 399 Chambers Street (340 stabilized apartments down to 72, for a loss of 268), 50 Battery Place (208 protected units to 51, or a decline of 157), and 70 Battery Place (166 affordable homes, down to 43, for a loss of 123).