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Today the Urban Institute hosted a very valuable talk on corporate ownership of family housing. The recording of the talk will be available on their site at this link here in the next couple of days.

A key development is that tenants’ rights activist Tara Raghuveer (who covered the situation in NYC for the NYRB here) was instrumental in founding a national-scale federation of tenant unions. This allows tenants to share information, celebrate wins and coordinate to push back against the corporate ownership of housing in America. You can find out more at this link here.

A Stop Work Order (SWO) is an official directive issued by the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) or another regulatory agency that requires all construction or renovation work at a property to cease immediately. It’s a serious enforcement action, typically issued when work is being performed without proper permits, in violation of safety codes, or in a way that poses a danger to workers, residents, or the public.

Why Stop Work Orders Are Issued

A Stop Work Order can be triggered by a variety of issues, including:

Construction or alterations being done without required permits.

Unsafe or hazardous conditions observed at the site.

Failure to comply with the building code, zoning regulations, or approved plans.

Obstruction of DOB inspectors or refusal to provide access for inspection.

Once an SWO is in place, all work must stop immediately except for tasks specifically approved to make the site safe (for example, shoring up a wall or removing debris).

What Tenants Should Know

If you live in a building with an active Stop Work Order, it means that no construction or renovation work should be taking place. Any ongoing work could be illegal and unsafe. You can verify the status of an SWO through the DOB’s Building Information System (BIS) or DOB NOW website by entering your building’s address.

Stop Work Orders are intended to protect the public and ensure accountability. If enforced properly, they help keep tenants safe and make sure that any future work in the building meets legal and safety standards.

You can view a full citywide map of Stop Work Orders at this link here: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/swo-map.html

Check to see how your building compares to others!

In this great Brooklyn Rail piece, the outstanding writer and tenants rights activist Holden Taylor floats perhaps the most important question facing renters in NYC today: is it time for a citywide tenants union?

https://brooklynrail.org/2022/07/field-notes/Who-is-for-Tenants

If you rent from a landlord, you may have noticed that you’re asked to make your rental payments out to an LLC– a Limited Liability Company– such as “123 Main Street LLC”. This would strike any casual observer as odd because we know that the ultimate beneficiary would be the landlord.

The reason is that LLCs are used to shield a landlord’s personal assets if the building comes under legal scrutiny for matters such as rent overcharge and illegal deregulation. Tenants seeking damages in this area therefore must sue the company, not the individual. Landlords who are concerned that they might be exposed to litigation regarding rent overcharges therefore often hide their properties inside an LLC to limit exposure.

LLCs also offer the benefit of hiding the identity of the landlord because the names of the principal officers are often hard to access. For tenants seeking to learn the identities of their landlords, however, the law has changed recently in a direction that helps improve the availability of accurate information. New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the LLC Transparency Act in December 2023, creating a database of the beneficial owners of LLCs that is accessible to government agencies and law enforcement, meaning that certain forms of tenant litigation can result in the names of landlords being accessed by the courts if needed.

While the act was aimed at combating money laundering, it also has the added benefit of reducing landlords’ abilities to use LLCs as a shield against legal scrutiny. Tenants who are interested in the details of the LLC that they pay rent to can check the NYS Department of State’s entity database at this link here.

The simple answer is that there is typically a power imbalance between a landlord and a tenant which leaves tenants exposed to exploitation. This is because the landlord owns the living space that the tenant occupies, and can under certain circumstances reclaim that living space at their discretion.

Although some protections exists for tenants (see the page entitled “Rent Stabilization“), generally speaking there is nothing stopping a landlord from refusing to renew a lease to tenant if they believe they could make more money by charging more rent to a new tenant with a higher income.

When landlords are free to rent their apartments to the highest bidder and there is a scarcity of apartments in a city like New York, neighborhoods undergo what is known as “gentrification”. This is where newly-arrived high-income tenants displace low and middle-income tenants by outbidding them in the housing market.

Gentrification leads to a breakdown of community and social cohesion because residential neighborhoods become increasingly ordered by income, rather than by social or familial affiliation, language, religious or cultural background, or workplace proximity. This exacerbates urban segregation because income and assets tend to cluster in desirable neighborhoods that have tenants with the resources to demand better amenities (parks, libraries, etc), while low and middle income tenants are forced out by landlords seeking to capitalize on the willingness of high income tenants to pay higher rents.

Under these conditions, the sole unifying theme of a gentrified neighborhoods is that it is home to wealthy individuals. On the other hand, when legal and economic space is carved out for low and middle income tenants, neighborhoods can preserve historic character (particular national or religious affiliations) as well as make space for individuals who contribute to society in ways that are not highly compensated. This includes those in care and education sectors, but also those involved in creative work where compensation in the early career stage is typically quite low.

Tenants associations are therefore needed to push back against the logic of landlordism, the sole aim of which is to extract the highest rents possible from whichever tenants are willing to pay. Individual tenants who are at risk of being priced out of a neighborhood can join together to resists gentrification by asserting their rights in relation to rent stabilization law, and to the duty of landlords to provide habitable housing that is in good repair to all tenants, regardless of their rental status.

Tenants associations redress the imbalance of power that, if unchecked, would render tenants vulnerable to market forces of the real estate industry, which tends to favor the extant owners of such property.