An apartment at 423 East 81st Street before and after a $45,000 renovation.

From the July issue: At the height of the recession, New Yorkers could rent deeply discounted apartments without paying brokers’ fees, but found that aging appliances and scuffed hallways were often the norm.
Those days are over. Now, landlords are courting renters with granite countertops and new, stainless steel appliances — in exchange for higher rents, of course.
With the market bouncing back and renter incentives disappearing, many landlords are ramping up renovations at their buildings, after several years of avoiding major capital projects. With rents rising, the economics of renovations make sense again. [more]

While Governor Andrew Cuomo lobbies for rent-regulation, New York City landlords claim that they cannot sustain their businesses without rent increases for stabilized apartments, according to Crain’s. Operating costs for buildings that are entirely or partially rent-regulated– almost half the residential buildings in the city — jumped 6.1 percent in the year ending March 31, according to New York City Rent Guidelines Board’s annual price index, 2.7 percent more of an increase than in the previous year.

“A lot of owners can’t make their expenses,” said Roberta Bernstein, president of non-profit organization Small Property Owners of New York. “We keep on getting strangled.”

Owners say they are facing a dramatic rise in taxes in addition to hikes in the cost of fuel and utilities. Fuel has risen 23 percent in the last year, according to the index, real estate taxes rose 3.5 percent and property taxes ate from 7 to 30 percent of landlords’ income. [more]

Bad New York City landlords may often nab headlines but, as any property owner will tell you, tenants can often be problematic as well. Across the five boroughs there are hoarders, scam artists and serial evictees — as evidenced by the Village Voice’s list of top 10 worst tenants, published today. Among the offenders is a hoarder in a West Village rental apartment at 1 Christopher Street on the corner of Greenwich Avenue, whose apartment began to seep a black mold through the doorway, and a woman who allegedly filed a false domestic violence claim to get into Section 8 housing (a legal case is pending). [more]

Following the Village Voice’s notorious “Top Ten Worst Landlords” list, published in March, several religious Jewish advocacy groups leapt into action, according to the Voice, after learning that several of those named on the list were Orthodox Jews. Today, some of the city’s most influential religious leaders say they’re creating awareness about the issue. Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and president of Orthodox social justice group Uri L’Tzedek, said he’s particularly concerned with how the “slumlord” label is affecting his community. [more]

A program aimed at spurring improvements at some of the city’s most run-down buildings has failed to meet expectations, according to a report released today by the New York City Independent Budget Office. The initiative, known as the Alternative Enforcement Program, gives landlords a four-month grace period to correct violations at particularly deteriorated buildings, after which point the city is slated to reinspect and repair the property, later billing the landlord. But this program, which the budget office said “has been accounting for an increasingly large share of the city’s spending on housing code enforcement,” has affected less than half a percent of the city’s rental housing units, the report says. TRD [more]

A controversial property owner with buildings in New York City and Florida has garnered Department of Buildings approval to build a 19-unit, transient housing facility in Brooklyn, according to the New York Post, much to the chagrin of residents in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, where he plans to build. Landlord Moses Fried is infamous for alleged mismanagement of his buildings, including one that was the target of a prostitution raid and another that has been hit with 45 different violations. Residents say that Fried’s next project, a short-term stay facility that is slated to open in a year, will degrade the quality of their community. [Post]

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The risk of abandonment for apartments has climbed significantly in the market downturn, according to the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which said that the number of at-risk buildings has jumped 44 percent in fiscal year 2009, from the previous year. City officials said that the financial downturn has left many landlords unable to handle the cost of mortgages and even smaller financial obligations, like necessary building repairs. The resulting crop of fleeing landlords has resulted in a financial strain on the city, the New York Post reported. Last year, the Housing Department spent around $4 million on repairs for abandoned buildings in Brooklyn, for example.

Some of the landlords in New York City with the highest numbers of
housing code violations are receiving a share of $81 million of federal
stimulus money, with no requirement that they make repairs to their
buildings, the New York Daily News reported. Seven properties that have
received or are slated to get $1.5 million in stimulus money would make
the Slumlord Watch List proposed by City Council member Bill de Blasio,
who is running for public advocate. To qualify for the list, a property
with 35 or more units must have at least two “hazardous” or
“immediately hazardous” violations per unit. The 138-unit building at
234 Herkimer Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant qualifies with 374
violations, and the owner, Restore Housing Development, is set to get
$270,602 in stimulus funds. [more]

From the August issue: In a bad economy, the plight of the unemployed gets most of the
attention. But as the ranks of New York City’s jobless increase, and
more people downsize apartments or take on roommates to deal with the
economic downturn, they also send their landlords’ utility and
maintenance costs skyrocketing in rental buildings.
“Where you get lots of move-ins and move-outs, you worry about
damage at the building,” said David Picket, president of the Gotham
Organization, which operates more than 1.7 million square feet of
residential and retail real estate in New York and other parts of the
Northeast. “Even in a good market, it’s a fine line,” he said. “When you boost
rents up, which forces certain people to leave, you create certain
costs for yourself that you don’t have if people stay in place.” In a bad market, however, those costs don’t come with the added benefit of higher rental income. Comments

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As landlords worry about rising unemployment numbers and another
potentially slow fall and winter rental market, many are offering
tenants rent reductions they did not ask for. A tenant at the Related
Companies’ Ventura, on East 86th Street, opened his lease renewal to
find that the landlord had reduced his rent to $3,600 per month from
$3,900. A real estate broker who also lives on the Upper East Side said
her landlord offered her an unsolicited 20 percent rent reduction. But
Fritz Frigan, executive director of sales and leasing at Halstead
Property, said he is seeing fewer rent reductions and incentives being
offered by landlords now than in the first quarter of this year. [more]