LogFAQs > #986074700

adjl posted...

I'm inclined to guess that if one unit is uninhabitable beyond economically viable repair, the rest of the building probably isn't far off and demolition/replacement may be on the horizon as the only route forward (let's be real: if a single unit needs 50k in repairs, it's probably not viable to repair that unit with or without rent control)

Not at all. Significant fire or water damage, or a single destructive tenant, combined with decades of code changes that stop being "grandfathered" in when major renovations are undertaken can pile up in a hurry, and NYC labor costs add even more. $50k in renovations isn't that much of a stretch. An example might be that renovating that one apartment would require replacing the entire building's plumbing system to remove lead pipes to bring that one unit up to code. The lead pipes are currently grandfathered in (and despite the Flint disaster, generally safe enough), but for a newly renovated apartment they'd have to be removed.

Admittedly, some of those should result in demolition and replacement, but lol NYC "historic character" and zoning laws generally mean even 100+ year old buildings built before insulated wiring was invented can't be knocked down. And people tend to get upset when all the rest of the tenants get evicted to do that, especially since new construction wouldn't fall under rent control.

In terms of viability, consider that the difference between rent control and market rate is going to be at minimum $1000 a month, meaning even a $50k renovation bill would pay for itself in four years for a market rate unit, and could not ever pay off at all for a rent controlled unit.

adjl posted...

As it stands, I don't think zoning laws typically allow for a building of apartments to have units sold individually as condos, but that's not that hard to change, and treating apartment buildings as a collection of individual properties is kind of a prerequisite for any sort of legislation that requires individual properties to be occupied. Other alternatives would be to instead set a minimum occupancy threshold that does treat buildings as a single entity and not a collection of individual properties (like 90%, which gets rounded up so that buildings under 10 units are expected to be fully occupied), or to exempt a unit from being counted by having it formally condemned.

Existing rent control is why none of this would work. The NYC implementation of rent control is so financially debilitating to landlords that every conceivable scheme has been used to get units out from under such controls. As a result, most of the loopholes allowing units to be changed from rent control to market rate have been eliminated.

I know using current policy to argue against changes to that policy seems pretty stupid, but the whole system is so fucked up you're stuck with a "can't get there from here" problem unless the entire legal code - and possibly the entire physical city - is nuked from orbit, bulldozed flat, and started over from scratch.