Based on five findings of harassment, the Mamdani administration says thousands of landlords should be denied building permits — unless they pass an intensive background check that takes seven months.
Not 500 findings of harassment. Not 50 findings.
Five.
If you only read the executive summary of the administration’s recommendation, you’d think harassment was pervasive and justifies making the heavy-handed Certificate of No Harassment program permanent. It says:
“This high proportion of denials demonstrates that the program is successful in its main purpose of identifying the buildings where tenants are at risk of harassment and stopping property owners in those cases from benefiting from the harassment that occurred.”
The authors of this report have certainly read their Orwell.
To begin with, how is the right to apply for a building permit a “benefit” that results from harassment?
A building permit is a requirement imposed by the city. It’s a hassle to get one and it costs money. It’s not a benefit, and it’s not a reward for harassment.
When you file to do renovations, the Department of Buildings does not say, “Based on the harassment you inflicted, here is your permit!”
The city wants to stop owners from harassing tenants into leaving so they can replace the vacated, rent-stabilized building with a larger, market-rate one. But this can block much-needed housing, deny tenants lucrative buyouts and deter even modest renovations.
Jay Martin of the New York Apartment Association cited a Brooklyn building where the last tenant negotiated for a $1 million buyout, but the owner cannot demolish the vacant structure and build three times as many apartments because he was denied a certificate of no harassment.
Instead of new housing, the city is stuck with an empty building.
The phrasing in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development report is a telltale sign that the analysis was rigged — intended from the outset to conclude that the Certificate of No Harassment pilot program should be expanded and never expire.
Consider the primary statistic on which HPD’s recommendation hangs: the “high proportion of denials.” Its description of the data is almost too clever.
“The investigatory process … revealed in over 15 percent of applications that tenant harassment had taken or was taking place,” HPD wrote.
Sounds like a lot, right?
But here’s another way to frame it:
HPD hand-picked 1,508 buildings where it believed harassment was most likely to occur. Over three years and five months, only five were found to have harassed tenants and denied a Certificate of No Harassment.
Another 25 applicants were forced to wait seven months for the certificate, which gives them the right to apply for permits to make structural repairs or change apartment configurations. During that time, they had to undergo an intense, invasive background check despite being innocent of any wrongdoing.
Of the 1,508 buildings on the list of suspects, 98 percent did not bother to seek a Certificate of No Harassment. If the program’s aim is to stop owners from improving or replacing their buildings, it certainly succeeded.
“You are truly ‘guilty until proven innocent,’” one landlord tweeted. “And you have to prove a negative — ‘I didn’t harass anyone.’ Which is hard to do!”
He said it took him a year of struggle to get a building out of the pilot program, which he called “perhaps the most unjust of all.”
The program takes a toll on HPD as well. Each background check involves an enormous use of agency resources — literally months of tracking down and interviewing past and current tenants and poring over records.
The opportunity cost is huge. HPD could be using those thousands of hours to help tenants and landlords solve known problems, rather than going on fishing expeditions for ones that might have existed in the past.
Thirty applications is a tiny sample size, and five findings of harassment is an exceptionally small number on which to decide that thousands of buildings shall be locked into yet another bureaucracy in the pantheon of New York City regulatory programs.
Five might well be an inflated number. It’s likely that the rejected applicants don’t feel they harassed anyone. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered to apply.
“Under this program, doing maintenance in a building can easily be deemed harassment by a renter,” Martin wrote. “Attempting to cure a violation reported by the renter themselves in the unit they live in? Harassment. Notifying a renter you’d like to spray for bugs in their unit? Harassment. Asking a renter if they’d like to renew their lease? Harassment.”
Is it harassment to bring an eviction case against tenants who cause problems in their buildings or keep falling behind on rent? Is it harassment to offer a tenant a buyout and then increase the offer if he declines? The HPD investigator’s opinion may well differ from the landlord’s.
The City Council and Mamdani administration should consider that five subjective findings of harassment in three and a half years out of 1,508 high-risk buildings do not call for a forever bureaucracy that consumes city resources, slows progress and freezes vacant buildings in place.
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