Housing & Tenants Rights

The OTA will safeguard tenants by bringing their perspective to the DOB, ensuring that the department makes obstructing landlord misfeasance a top priority. Landlords have used construction as a form of harassment, subjecting their tenants to difficult conditions – loud noises, damaged walls, loss of power, and lead dust in the air – with the aim of pushing residents out of their homes. Other landlords have been known to cut corners while upgrading units of rent-stabilized housing to justify rent hikes. These issues need to be remedied, and that starts with empowering a Tenant Advocate to get the job done.

The OTA will be required to submit to the Mayor and the Speaker of the Council quarterly reports about how it has fulfilled its responsibilities. The report is also to be posted on the OTA’s website. Among other data, it is supposed to include the number of complaints received by the office and a description of those complaints, the average time taken to respond to the complaints, and a summary of efforts made to communicate with tenants. The report also must include lists of instances in which it found Tenant Protection Plans did not meet city standards.

Self-Certification, or Professional Certification, is when licensed professionals conduct their own reviews of buildings projects, thus avoiding a full review by the DOB. While self-certification is necessary given the volume of work in the City and the DOB’s limited resources, it can be abused to facilitate dangerous or illegal work.

Local Law 149 will require the DOB, before issuing a permit for a construction project, to conduct its own inspection for buildings where more than 25% of units are occupied and for any building owned by a landlord who has been found guilty of tenant harassment. For the full text of Local Law 149, click here.

The DOB issues vacate orders to protect tenants when a building is deemed unsafe for tenancy. Although these orders are necessary to protect tenants from dangerous living conditions, when they are not issued simultaneously with orders to correct, landlords are able to abuse this system to remove tenants without making any fixes, using perilous living conditions to force residents into relinquishing their claim to an apartment.

Local Law 150 will require the DOB to issue orders to correct at the same time as vacate orders, demanding that landlords correct problems no more than 10 days after the order to correct has been issued. Orders to correct will also come along with notification to landlords that failure to comply and improve conditions could result in penalties and fines. For the full text of Local Law 150, click here.

All too often, contractors begin rapid and dangerous construction without the necessary permits. Local Law 155 will create a watch list for contractors who have engaged in work without the proper permits within the previous two years. The DOB will need to perform at least one inspection on any occupied site where a contractor on the watch list has begun work. Thus, the agency will be able to ensure that no laws or requirements are being broken or violated. Contractors can get off the watch list after two years if they acquire all the proper permits for any construction project in that time span. For the full text of Local Law 155, click here.

Local Law 156 will increase the penalties for work without a permit so that they can actually prevent excessive and unlawful construction. Under this law, the penalty for doing work without a permit in one or two family dwellings will be six times, instead of four times, the amount of the fee payable for the permit. The penalty for partial work without a permit will be at minimum $600 instead of $500. For buildings with more than one or two families, the penalty is 21 times, instead of 14 times, the fee payable for the permit, and the minimum penalty for partial work will be $6,000 instead of $5,000. For the full text of Local Law 156, click here.

Under Local Law 158, landlords who have done work without a permit within the past year of filing construction documents may not self-certify their construction documents. The borough president, local Council Member, and local Community Board all must be notified of the construction plans via the DOB. Furthermore, penalties will be doubled for any other violations, and the DOB can charge a fee for any inspection that was prompted by a complaint and that resulted in the issuance of a violation. For the full text of Local Law 158, click here.

When landlords want to hasten construction, they can falsify permit applications by claiming that a building is unoccupied–allowing them to skirt important tenant protections. This dangerous fraud is made easier by the fact that, unless they root around on the Department of Buildings’ website, tenants would have no idea that their landlord has made such a claim. Local Law 158 will require that all on-site permits include the building’s occupancy status right on the piece of paper posted on the job site, making it easier for tenants and advocates to ensure honesty. For the full text of Local Law 158, click here.

Stop work orders are issued when an inspector deems that construction work is in violation of a DOB regulation. Local Law 157 will increase the penalties for a violation of a stop work order. Working while a stop work order is in effect will cause contractors to incur a fine of $6,000 instead of $5,000 for the first violation. The fine for each subsequent violation will be $12,000. For the full text of Local Law 157, click here.

Landlords are required to file a Tenant Protection Plan when they file construction documents for an occupied building. Too often, however, these documents are filled with technical jargon and lack a meaningful explanation of how tenants’ safety and quality of life will be safeguarded during construction.

Local Law 154 mandates that the Tenant Protection Plan be written in plain language, so that tenants are able to read it and understand what the plan is to keep them safe–and so that they can report it if the plan isn’t followed. It also expands the scope of these plans, requiring them to include information about the maintenance of services during construction. Finally, it ensures that these plans be made public, requiring that they are posted on the website and throughout the affected buildings.

To ensure that these revamped plans are followed, the DOB will need to proactively inspect a portion of buildings, and DOB inspectors are empowered to issue a stop work order if the construction is in violation of the Tenant Protection Plan. For the full text of Local Law 154, click here.

Combined with the creation of the Office of the Tenant Advocate to monitor them closely, this legislation should transform Tenant Protection Plans into a critical safeguard for tenants.

Local Law 159 mandates that landlords must post on every floor of the building a “Safe Construction Bill of Rights” no less than 14 days before construction work is to begin. The Bill of Rights is supposed to explain to tenants what is happening in their building. The landlord must list the following in English, Spanish, and other languages that the DOB determines: a description of the work and its possible impact on tenants, the construction hours, a timeline for the completion of the work, and who to reach out to in the landlord’s office and in the City if there is an issue. For the full text of Local Law 159, click here.

The package includes a law, Local Law 151, that will establish a task force on construction work in occupied multiple dwellings. The law mandates that the DOB, Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) collectively create a task force of 13 members to facilitate communication between these four agencies and help oversee the issues that generally arise for tenants during construction projects. The commissioners of these four agencies will be members of the task force. The Mayor is to appoint four city council members to serve on the task force, and the Speaker is to appoint five city council members to serve as well. The task force will be disbanded three years after its establishment. For the full text of Local Law 151, click here.

All too often, landlords merely accumulate fines without paying them. The DOB issues fines when a property fails to comply with a part of the NYC Construction Codes or Zoning Resolution, but it needs a better way to enforce its penalties.

Local Law 152 will expand the category of buildings for which fines can be made lien collectable, including those buildings in the group of properties against which the city can initiate foreclosure proceedings. Threat of foreclosure proceedings will encourage landlords to pay their fines. For the full text of Local Law 152, click here.

In addition, Local Law 153 will allow the city to put liens on apartment buildings that fail to pay substantial fines. This applies to buildings with 20 units or more and at least $60,000 owed in fines and to buildings with 6-19 units with at least $30,000 owed in fines. If such buildings fail to pay these fines, the city will have the right to foreclose them. For the full text of Local Law 153, click here.

Additionally, although it is not part of the STS legislative package, Local Law 160, a law authored by Council Member James Vacca, will go a long way towards making DOB’s enforcement more effective. This law will forbid the DOB from issuing a building permit for a property where $25,000 or more are owed to the city or where the owners of such property owe this amount or more to the city. There are some exceptions to this prohibition, such as where the permit would be required to correct a dangerous condition. For the text of Local Law 160, click here.

Local Law 162 will create a rebuttable presumption that where a landlord commits one of a series of harassing acts or omissions, that landlord’s actions constitute harassment. The law will expand the term “harassment” to mean “any act or omission by or on behalf of an owner that substantially interferes or disturbs the comfort, repose, peace or quiet” of a tenant and causes or is intended to cause the tenant to leave the dwelling. For the full text of the law, click here.

Similarly, Local Law 163 will expand the definition of harassment to include repeatedly contacting or visiting a tenant at unusual hours. For the full text of the law, click here.

Local Law 184 will make tenant harassment laws applicable to private dwellings, as opposed to just multiple dwellings. Private dwellings are those with no more than two families, whereas multiple dwellings are those with three or more families. For the full text of the law, click here.

Local Law 164 will allow for a landlord’s actions to be considered “repeated” acts of harassment even if his/her previous act was against a tenant in a different dwelling unit. For the full text of the law, click here.

Local Law 165 will increase the penalties for violations of the administrative code for tenant harassment. The penalty for tenant harassment will be a minimum of $2,000 instead of $1,000 for each dwelling unit in which a violation occurred. For a second violation, the landlord must pay the fine at a rate $4,000 per dwelling instead of $2,000. For the full text of the law, click here.

Local Law 148 will allow housing court to award statutory damages, compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney’s fees for tenant harassment actions. For the full text of the law, click here.