Mamdani Admin Proposes More Penalties, Fines for Landlords

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to beef up landlord penalties.

That’s one of the takeaways from a report released by the administration Thursday based off its “Rental Ripoff” hearings held earlier this year. The administration spoke to 2,400 renters to look for ways to improve their experiences.

The 67-page report lays out a plan to tighten the leash on New York’s landlords. That plan includes increased penalties, heightened scrutiny and ultimately the transfer of property.

“We are expanding headcount to be able to do more housing code inspections and also more targeted enforcement,” said Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Several of the report’s recommendations come with potential fees, fines and penalties attached for landlords. Those include:

Expanding the lien authority of the Department of Buildings to include all categories of housing code violations.
Increasing fees for landlords found falsely certifying that violations have been corrected.
Considering an additional fee associated with buildings being monitored for leaks and mold.
Allowing DOB to issue annual recurring penalties for landlords who let immediately hazardous violations languish.
Increasing penalties for buildings in the Alternative Enforcement Program, which are selected for a high concentration of housing code violations.

Enacting most of those recommendations would require City Council legislation. The Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants is planning to launch a task force focused on that issue in the fall.

“We’re going to be rolling these out over the next few years,” Weaver said of the general recommendations. “This is not something where we’re going to be able to implement everything in the report tomorrow.”

Several of the other recommendations support the mayor’s goal of transferring buildings from private landlords to its preferred owners. As described in the housing plan released in May, the strategy involves working with tenant organizations to target specific portfolios.

Specifically, the report describes a plan to home in on at least ten portfolios for investigation and potential transfer, based on the concentration of longstanding and egregious housing code violations. It hopes to “legally recognize” tenant unions as groups that can represent tenants’ interests in discussions with landlords. Further, it recommends bringing high-violation buildings under the city’s regulatory umbrella by tying a city loan and regulatory agreement with a path out of the Alternative Enforcement Program.

“We really do believe that owners and tenants working together and bargaining with one another is a way to make our housing code enforcement system stronger and our housing system fairer,” Weaver said.

Perhaps more welcome news for landlords, the report also recommended allowing tenants to schedule city housing code inspections, easing access. Weaver said the city would also plan to conduct mass sweeps of buildings to clear violations that owners had corrected, although this detail was not included in the report.