Not long after Covid ended, a tenant in one of my Manhattan buildings died. He was an elderly Italian immigrant who lived alone in a small studio near Gramercy for decades. These things happen in the course of life, and there’s always a story: Sometimes people die, get married or divorced, or decide that the big city isn’t for them.
Normally, it doesn’t take too long for landlords like me to renovate an empty apartment and list it on StreetEasy so that new people can move in and start the next chapter of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent-stabilized, laws that were passed in 2019 essentially prevent me from doing anything with it except shutting the door and keeping it empty.
Strict limits on rent increases under the 2019 laws have left an estimated 50,000 apartments like this one vacant across the city. Because the restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often don’t even cover the costs of maintaining them, they become ghosts. It’s like they don’t exist at all.
Incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani promised during his campaign to “immediately freeze the rent” for rent-stabilized apartments, but those rents have essentially been frozen since 2019. At the time, the laws were widely heralded as the strongest set of rent regulations anywhere in America, and were specifically designed to protect tenants from price gouging and the threat of displacement after decades of gentrification.
But sometimes people die, as was the case with my Italian tenant. And his apartment wasn’t exactly in “all you need to bring is your toothbrush” move-in condition. He had lived there since at least 1984. To get an apartment like this one into good shape after such a long occupancy requires renovations, and renovations cost money.
