Mythbuster

Deep down, we all have the same irrational fantasy: living in a $400-a-month downtown apartment—preferably southern-facing—that we can stay in well into Czar Bloomberg’s glorious ninth term. So it’s not surprising that during the current economic nosedive, rumors are circulating about cash-strapped landlords opening up hidden stockpiles of rent-regulated apartments to the public.

Warehousing—holding on to vacant apartments for profit—drew scorn from housing groups and city legislators in the 1980s, when some landlords kept empty units in the hopes that their buildings would eventually be converted into co-ops. But does this practice still happen? And if so, are the landlords who do it—perhaps themselves laid low by the economy—suddenly unclenching their viselike grips on those coveted pads?

Not quite. “You hear of individual instances, but in terms of widespread hoarding I haven’t heard of any of that recently,” says John Fisher, the director of Tenant Net, a website that specializes in NYC and New York State housing issues. “I haven’t heard of it since the early ’90s, and that was what was left over from the ’80s.” Magda Cruz, who represents owners’ interests on the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, agrees: “We do not see owners holding apartments off the market,” she says, “or any particular trend suggesting that apartments are not being improved when there is a vacancy.”

These days, it’s more common for landlords to renovate a vacant unit and get it back on the market as quickly as possible—the exact opposite of hoarding—because he or she can raise the rent by a certain percentage of the cost of the upgrade. When the raised monthly rent exceeds $2,000, a unit becomes destabilized, and can be let at market rate. According to Tom Waters, a housing policy analyst who interprets data on rent-regulated apartments at the Community Service Society of New York, “That’s why you can’t find a rent-stabilized apartment anywhere in Manhattan below Harlem.”

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