The Landlord Sob Story Has a Villain, and It's Not the Tenant

The Real Deal published a piece this week arguing that tenant rights are deterring investment and prolonging vacancies in New York City. The article features a landlord attorney with a sympathetic anecdote about one rent-stabilized tenant who is allegedly holding up repairs to a dangerous stairwell. It quotes a developer explaining that good cause eviction now adds years to his renovation timeline.

It frames the Certificate of No Harassment program as a bureaucratic weapon used against innocent building owners just trying to fix their properties. 

There is some real pain in there. Some landlords are genuinely struggling, and we will get to that. But the piece frames an entire policy debate around who gets to profit from displacement, then asks you to feel sorry for the people doing the displacing.

Let's back up.

The Business Model That Built This Problem

The TRD piece treats it as a natural economic phenomenon that "old buildings are worth more when vacant." It is not. That is a specific investment thesis, and one that has caused enormous harm to this city.

The tell-tale sign of what advocates call predatory equity is landlords who are over-leveraged, meaning they are taking on more debt than the current rents can support. Because they are not looking at the rent they are getting, they are looking at the rent they could get. They buy stabilized buildings at prices the current rent rolls cannot justify, then spend years systematically trying to empty them.

Predatory equity is a business model in which speculators purchase rent-regulated properties at inflated prices, taking on debts that cannot be supported by the existing income flow from the property's rent. Landlords can only turn a profit by systematically driving out rent-regulated tenants.

Stuyvesant Town / PCV - 10,000 Displaced 

The biggest example in NYC history was the $5.4 billion purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in 2006 by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty. The complex, 11,000 apartments on 80 acres in the middle of Manhattan, was built by MetLife after World War II as affordable housing for returning veterans. Tishman Speyer's business plan was straightforward: every time a rent-stabilized tenant moved out, convert that unit to market rate. Over 4,311 apartments were converted before tenants successfully fought back in court. At average NYC household size, that is roughly 10,000 people who had to find somewhere else to live, so that an investment group could charge more rent in their place. The stabilized units in that complex had a median legal rent of $1,700 a month in 2015. The median market rate rent in the same complex today is $5,395 a month. The apartments did not get three times better. The people who could afford them just changed.

The deal itself ultimately collapsed. CalPERS, the California public employees' pension fund, lost $500 million. CalSTRS, the separate California teachers' retirement fund, lost $100 million. Florida's state pension fund lost $250 million. All three were convinced by Tishman Speyer that the ability to displace working-class New Yorkers was a safe bet. It was not. But the 10,000 people who got pushed out of their homes during that process did not get their apartments back when the deal collapsed.

Other Bad Actors

Then there is Kushner Companies. Kushner Cos. was investigated in New York over allegations that the company used disruptive construction projects to harass rent-regulated tenants so they would move out of their apartments, freeing up apartments to be sold as high-priced luxury condos. Residents of Austin Nichols House in Brooklyn accused Kushner Cos. of doing work that released dangerous toxins into the air and created unlivable conditions for tenants, including vermin and excessive construction noise, all-day hammering and drilling, dust, rats crawling through holes, and workers with passkeys barging in unannounced.

Then there is Ink Property Group. Ink bought dozens of rent-stabilized buildings in low-income communities of color with the intention of illegally deregulating affordable housing for profit. Through a variety of illegal activities, Ink forced out rent-stabilized tenants so their units could be offered at market rate, engaging in a campaign of harassment, and in some cases creating hazardous conditions so tenants were forced to leave because their apartments were no longer habitable. Ink even provided monetary commissions to employees who successfully convinced tenants to move out, offering up to $5,000 for each buyout.

The New York Attorney General secured over $400,000 for impacted tenants in that case.

Reality Check... 

So when someone suggests that the Certificate of No Harassment program is an unreasonable burden on building owners who just want to fix things, keep that history in mind. The CONH program exists because the harassment it is designed to catch is real, documented, and prosecuted at the highest levels of state law enforcement. One landlord attorney's anecdote about a difficult tenant negotiation does not undo any of that.

The Property Tax Claim

This one gets complicated, and it is worth being honest about it.

Some small building owners report that their property taxes and insurance alone exceed total rental income, pointing to stabilized units renting for an average of $1,300 per month while annual property tax bills run $75,000 or more.

That is a real situation for some operators, particularly small owners of older pre-1974 buildings in the Bronx and outer boroughs where regulated rents are lowest and tax bills are not proportionally smaller.

But here is what that argument leaves out.

According to the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, the net operating income of rent-stabilized buildings, meaning the amount of revenue landlords received after operating costs, rose 6.2 percent between 2023 and 2024 citywide. That was the third year in a row that net operating income increased. Core Manhattan buildings saw net operating income climb 10 percent in a single year.

According to the 2025 RGB Income and Expense Study, 9.3 percent of properties were in distress citywide, meaning their operating costs exceeded gross income. That number is real and worth taking seriously. But 9.3 percent is not the entire industry. It is a specific slice, concentrated in the most vulnerable buildings, in the most under-served neighborhoods, often held by exactly the kinds of over-leveraged owners who bought on speculation rather than sustainable cash flow.

The solution to that problem is property tax reform and targeted financial relief for genuinely distressed buildings. It is not stripping protections from the other 90 percent of tenants citywide. Those are two completely different policy conversations, and the TRD piece collapses them into one convenient grievance.

Also worth noting: From 1968 to 2024, the full span of the current rent stabilization system, rents went up 1,017 percent, while costs for all other measured goods rose 826 percent. New York City rents have risen far faster than wages.

That is not the picture of an industry being strangled by regulation. That is an industry that has, over 56 years, extracted rent increases well beyond the rate of inflation while the people paying those rents have fallen further and further behind.

The Real Supply Crisis

Here is what is actually creating vacancies and deterring investment in this city.

The 2023 NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey found the tightest housing market in the city in over 50 years. The rental vacancy rate fell to a multi-decade low of 1.4 percent. The vacancy rate of apartments that rent below $1,650 was less than 1 percent.

For those seeking units under $1,100, the vacancy rate was a mere 0.39 percent.

That is not a market with a vacancy problem caused by tenants refusing to move. That is a market where nearly every affordable unit is occupied, because there are not enough of them and the people in them have nowhere else to go.

Manhattan median rent hit $4,800 a month in April 2025. Vacancy in September 2025 was at its lowest point in nearly four years.

Who Is Actually Moving In

While longtime New Yorkers are being squeezed out, there is a very specific replacement market absorbing vacated units.

New York City was the preferred destination for relocating tech workers in 2023, posting a 3.6 percent net gain in tech talent, the largest of any city in the country, claiming 15 percent of all people who moved for tech jobs.

The return-to-office push has only accelerated this. Manhattan saw 23.2 million square feet of new office leasing in the first nine months of 2025, the highest volume since 2006. Companies like Deloitte, Amazon, and JPMorgan Chase are locking in large blocks of space in new and modern towers. JPMorgan Chase alone controls 6 million square feet of office space in Manhattan and is building a $3 billion, 60-story headquarters for about 10,000 employees.

Those 10,000 employees need somewhere to live. They arrive with salaries that make $5,000-a-month rentals entirely manageable. When a longtime New Yorker making $60,000 a year vacates an apartment that goes back on the market, a tech worker making $200,000 is standing right there with a cashier's check.

Tenant protections that slow down that vacancy pipeline are not an investment deterrent. They are the only thing standing between several hundred thousand working-class New Yorkers and the street.

Who Is Leaving

The numbers on displacement are not abstract.

New York City lost 114,000 more residents to other U.S. cities than it gained in 2025. Rising rents, tight inventory, and persistent affordability pressures are leaving New Yorkers both cost-burdened and short on viable housing options. Median asking rent jumped nearly 7 percent in 2025 to $3,585. The study found that while the pandemic-era exodus was concentrated among higher earners, by 2024 the trend had shifted: the bottom 40 percent of earners were now being displaced at higher rates, a displacement crisis that now spans the entire socioeconomic spectrum.

Housing costs, not taxes, are what drive people out. Of the top twenty county-to-county moves out of New York, median income families leaving can expect average annual rent savings of $5,600, or 19 percent, lower in their destination counties. That is five times the amount they might save on taxes.

Teachers. Nurses. Restaurant workers. Bus drivers. The people who keep this city functional are the ones being priced into New Jersey, Queens, or completely out of the region. Not because of tenant rights. Because of a housing market that has been systematically tilted toward investors for decades.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

The TRD piece asks why landlords cannot improve their buildings without fighting tenants every step of the way. That is a legitimate question. Here is the better one: why does improving a building require emptying it of the people who live there?

For a genuine maintenance repair, it does not. You fix the joists, you temporarily relocate the tenant, you bring them back. That is exactly what the law allows. That is exactly what the landlord in the TRD story is negotiating right now, and by the attorney's own admission they are close to a resolution after three months.

Three months of negotiation for a joist repair is not a housing crisis. It is a legal process functioning as designed.

The buildings where improvement truly requires full vacancy are the ones being proposed for demolition or luxury conversion. And the argument that New Yorkers who have lived somewhere for 20 years should have to give up their homes because a developer would make more money building luxury condos on the same footprint is not an investment argument. It is a displacement argument dressed up in the language of property rights.

The city's vacancy rate is under 2 percent. We are not short on demand. We are short on affordable supply, and we have been for decades. Every rent-stabilized unit that gets deregulated is one fewer unit that any working New Yorker can afford. That is not a rounding error. That is how neighborhoods become unrecognizable.

The landlord lobby has spent years arguing that tenant protections are what stands between this city and a flood of new housing investment. The flood has not arrived. The protections have been chipped away repeatedly. Rents are at record highs. Vacancy is near record lows. And people are leaving.

At some point we have to ask ourselves: investment for whom?