NYC Landlords Cry Foul Over Tenant Protections, But the Real Story Is Slumlord Behavior

Since the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), landlords and politicians have been crying about lost profits, burdensome regulations, and supposed threats to the market. The narrative is always the same: they claim they can’t afford to maintain buildings anymore, that the new laws are “punishing” owners, and that the city will collapse if they can’t raise rents to whatever level they choose.

  

But here’s the reality: for years, many of these landlords operated like slumlords. They exploited loopholes, deregulated apartments through shady practices, raised rents to astronomical levels, and pocketed the money rather than reinvesting it into the very properties they own. The HSTPA didn’t create a crisis — it exposed one.

Take the common complaint we hear today: “If you don’t have the paperwork from 15 years ago when you deregulated a unit, when the rent was $900, and now you’re charging $6,000…” In other words, landlords are upset that they can no longer get away with charging luxury prices for units that were supposed to remain affordable. But the truth is they should never have been able to do that in the first place. Charging $6,000 for a poorly maintained, once-regulated apartment isn’t “sound business” — it’s exploitation.

For decades, landlords relied on aggressive rent hikes and excessive debt to fuel their own personal gain, using buildings like ATM machines instead of treating them as long-term community assets. Instead of maintaining heat, fixing leaks, or renovating outdated units, too many owners squeezed tenants while extracting maximum value for themselves and their lenders. When tenants pushed back or when laws finally curbed these abuses, suddenly landlords started claiming poverty.

Politicians who echo landlord talking points would like you to believe that tenant protections are the problem. But the real problem is the culture of speculative greed that defined New York real estate for decades. The HSTPA didn’t kill housing investment — it simply put limits on a system that had been extracting wealth from working New Yorkers and funneling it into the pockets of a small class of building owners.

What’s playing out now is a clash between a housing system that should function as infrastructure — providing safe, stable, affordable homes — and one that has too often been treated as a casino. Landlords aren’t victims here; tenants are. And if landlords are struggling because they can no longer charge $6,000 for a unit that was deregulated under dubious circumstances, that’s not a policy failure. That’s justice catching up.