The Lower East Side has been losing its rent stabilized housing for many years, but city and state agencies do not make it easy to track those losses. Now John Krauss, a civic hacker, has put together a map detailing the number of apartments that have been deregulated across New York from 2007 to 2014.
After crunching the numbers from city tax records, Krauss concluded that about 50,000 apartments have exited the rent stabilization system. Gothamist first reported the results yesterday:
With shades of red signifying deregulation of more than half the rent-regulated apartments in a building, orange a loss of 5 to 50 percent, and yellow a slight decrease, Manhattan looks like a blaze of fall foliage. The deregulation was most intense on the Upper East Side and East Village/Lower East Side.
Here are a few examples in our community:
- 102 Norfolk St., owned by controversial property owner Samy Mahfar, lost 22 out of a total of 26 rent stabilized apartments
- 143 Ludlow St., another Samy Mahfar building, lost 19 out of 25 apartments.
- 10 Rutgers St. (a modern building known as “The Crossroads”) lost 51 of 89 apartments.
- 163 Ludlow St., owned by Ben “The Sledgehammer” Shaoul, lost 16 of 20 apartments.
- 54 Eldridge St. lost 26 of 26 apartments.
- 384 Grand St., a housing development fund corp., lost 26 of 29 apartments.
- 86 Clinton St. lost 12 of 21 apartments.
- 87 Attorney St. lost 24 of 24 apartments.
- 120 Ridge St. lost 22 of 22 apartments.
Some of the buildings listed above have been at the center of the Lower East Side’s affordable housing battles in recent years. In some cases, these properties have been purchased by medium-sized to big players in the New York real estate industry at inflated prices. Affordable housing activists have long complained that these landlords embark on campaigns to drive rent stabilized tenants out of their properties. This past spring, housing activists unsuccessfully lobbied lawmakers in Albany to abolish vacancy deregulation, which now allows landlords to convert units to market rate when they reach the $2700/month threshold.
On the Lower East Side, about 40% of all rental apartments are rent regulated, while 21% are public housing and 27% are market rate.
What an amazing map. It is clearly the result of much hard work on the part of the civic hacker, finding the data and mapping it in such a useful way.