Increases penalties for owners of rent-regulated property who overcharge tenants

• Democratic5

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Cordell Cleare says this is needed

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 (DHCR3 which oversees rent-stabilized apartments shows that, as of 2014, New York City had 839,797 rent-stabililzed apartments registered with the state." Over the same time period, the New York City Department of Hous- ing 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 up to five times the amount of the overcharge. As under current law, a landlord could mitigate the civil penalty by demonstrat- ing by a preponderance of the evidence that the overcharge was neither willful nor attributable to his or her negligence.

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.