Evictions, Violations Concentrated in 10% of NYC Housing Stock

12 minutes read

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Rental Ripoff” hearings will begin this week, promising tenants an opportunity to complain about their landlords — directly to city officials.

But a new analysis from the Real Estate Board of New York suggests that the most acrimonious living situations are in highly concentrated clusters. Just 10 percent of multifamily buildings in the city are responsible for 80 percent of the executed evictions in the last two years, according to the analysis. A similar fraction is responsible for roughly half of the housing code violations in that time period.

The analysis adds data to an ongoing conversation about the administration’s approach to addressing tenants’ concerns. Since his campaign last year, Mamdani has publicly allied himself with tenants and given the real estate industry reason to fear he may enact new and broad legislation. But whether any new rules are board-based or targeted is still up in the air.

“What we observed in the data was a concentration in a smaller subset of the building universe really driving the lion’s share of problems and what is defined as bad behavior,” said Basha Gerhards, executive vice president of public policy at REBNY.

The analysis also shows that rent-stabilized buildings are overrepresented among properties with the most hazardous housing code violations. Only 1 percent of market-rate buildings have had an immediately hazardous violation in the last two years, compared to between 17 and 35 percent of rent-stabilized buildings, depending on the level of rent stabilization.

Evictions, violations and complaints are also geographically concentrated. The ZIP codes with the highest concentration of those actions include the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Flatbush, Prospect Park South, East New York, Brownsville and Ocean Hill — generally lower-income neighborhoods.

“To us, this really points to a resource and staffing question,” Gerhards said. “The city has available to it a broad and deep tool bench of things that it can deploy to help tenants in buildings where they’re experiencing bad behavior.”

The recent showdown between the Mamdani administration, Summit Properties and Pinnacle Group also brought attention to the concentration of violations in the housing stock. Tenants in some of the 5,100 mostly rent-stabilized apartments that Pinnacle placed into bankruptcy cast the firm as a slumlord, although Summit, the buyer, said violations were concentrated in just 8 percent of the units.

Allia Mohamed, CEO of housing review platform OpenIgloo, said she also has seen a concentration in where tenants are reporting dissatisfaction.

“From what I can tell, the majority of landlords are doing the right thing,” Mohamed said.

But one other factor affecting the housing stock is the age of the buildings, with those built earlier than 1974 are racking up open violations. Ninety-three percent of open violations are concentrated in pre-1974 buildings, according to an OpenIgloo analysis.

Although the majority of pre-1974 buildings have some rent-stabilized units, fully market-rate buildings of that age have a similar rate of open violations.

“What we’re seeing is that market-rate pre-1974 buildings are struggling just as much as the rent-stabilized buildings when it comes to violations, when it comes to tenant satisfaction,” Mohamed said. “You have close to 1 million units that were built before 1974, and they need dramatic attention, whether they’re regulated or not regulated.”

But violations and evictions are just one lens to view the quality of a landlord-tenant relationship, according to Mohamed. How landlords respond to maintenance requests, handle security deposits and increase rents also play a role in tenant satisfaction.

Eviction filings, rather than executed evictions, can similarly give greater insight into the housing market, according to Jenny Laurie, executive director of Housing Court Answers, which helps tenants in court.

Most eviction cases are resolved in some way, often with the city providing some financial assistance to tenants in the form of one-shot deals or other programs. Displacement by eviction is typically due to a specific case, sometimes for tenants who are unable to comply with a settlement or undocumented immigrants.

“Over the course of the history where we’ve been tracking evictions, New York City has a 5 to 15 percent eviction rate, which is very low compared to other cities,” said Laurie. “Most cases don’t end up in an executed eviction, but it’s still a crisis and a problem.”