Tenants of Pinnacle Group buildings, largely in Northern Manhattan, want a judge to throw out a settlement their lawyers reached with the landlord for rent overcharges, the New York Daily News reported.

Five years ago tenants sued Pinnacle, one of the city’s biggest rent-stabilized apartment owners, for illegal rent charges and harassing tenants in an effort to drive them out and increase rents. Lawyers found rent-stabilized tenants, whose rents are registered with the state, had been, in some cases, charged as much as $800 per month more than the state registry indicates.

As per the terms of the agreement reached by Pinnacle and the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Pinnacle has hired a court administrator to settle the claims and award damages to the tenants. [more]

From left: Attorney Sam Himmelstein, Stuyvesant Town and 56 Seventh Avenue (source: PropertyShark)

[Updated 2:47 p.m.] A New York state appellate court ruled yesterday that the landmark decision to protect rent-stabilized
tenants in the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village case should be applied retroactively, a move
that could open the floodgates to millions of dollars in rent overcharges at other developments.
The new case, in which the court actually upheld the landlord’s lower court victory, involved a
Manhattan couple looking to overturn a prior rent-decontrol ruling at 56 Seventh Avenue in the West
Village. The tenants argued that the Stuy Town case, called Roberts vs Tishman Speyer, where Roberts was a tenant, should allow them to have their market-rate apartment rents refunded in the form of overcharges.

“The Court of Appeals, when they decided Roberts , specifically left open the question of retroactivity,”
said attorney Sam Himmelstein, who represented the tenants in the new case. “Landlords have been
making motions to dismiss these cases saying that it shouldn’t be applied retroactively. Even though we
lost the case, it’s a massive victory for tenants at large.” [more]

Few situations could bolster rent-stabilization opponents’ case like an Oscar-winning actress paying $1,048.72 per month for her Upper East Side rental apartment while living in California. The New York Times reported that an anonymous landlord has filed suit against Faye Dunaway for allegedly paying rent-regulated prices on an apartment in which she does not actually reside.

The apartment is a one-bedroom in a century-old walk-up building on East 78th Street between First and Second avenues that Dunaway began renting in 1994. But the 70-year-old actress, who won an Oscar for her performance in the 1976 film “Network,” pays a mortgage on a home in West California, has her automobile registered there and was hit with three moving violations in California between May and December 2010. [more]

Now that rent stabilization laws have been renewed and strengthened for at least the next four years, the Rent Guidelines Board will vote today on how much landlords can raise rents in those units. According to NY1, board members will congregate at Cooper Union’s Great Hall this evening to consider rent increases of 3 to 5.75 percent for one-year lease renewals, and 6 to 9 percent for two-year renewals. The hikes would go into effect Oct. 1. [more]

A tentative deal to renew New York State’s rent regulation laws and cap property taxes for homeowners emerged from Albany yesterday and is expected to move to the Senate and Assembly floors today for a vote, according to the New York Times. The details of the so-called “framework” are as follows: much to the dismay of die-hard tenant-advocates, vacancy decontrol is staying, and landlords will still be allowed to deregulate apartments when tenants’ monthly rent and annual household income reach certain thresholds. But those thresholds are being increased to $2,500 from $2,000, and to $200,000 from $175,000, respectively. Landlords will also be held accountable by state housing officials for how much they spend to upgrade rent-stabilized apartments before they’re allowed to charge tenants for building improvements. [more]

Albany lawmakers have reached a tentative agreement on statewide rent regulations and a property tax cap, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos said today. According to NY1, Skelos said there’s a “framework” in place and that an official deal is hopefully near. The state’s rent laws expired this past Friday after months of negotiations failed to produce new legislation that both the Democrat-led Assembly and the Republican-led Senate could agree upon. [more]

Legislative negotiators have the framework to put a new rent stabilization agreement in place, and a law could be enacted as soon as today, according to the New York Post. The pending current agreement raises the threshold at which rents can be decontrolled to $2,500 per month, from the $2,000 threshold in place for the last eight years. Moreover, the maximum annual income for tenants in regulated units will rise to $200,000 from $175,000. As has been previously reported, significant progress was made in negotiations over the weekend. [more]

There’s less than a week left before the state’s rent regulation laws expire, and according the Post, Albany lawmakers are still so far from reaching an agreement that they’ve begun considering a short-term extension that would buy them some time to continue negotiating. The current laws, which expire June 15, govern the prices on approximately 1.1 million rental apartments in the city. Gov. Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver have been pushing to expand tenant protections, while Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos is advocating for a more landlord-friendly plan that sticks to the status quo. [more]

As next week’s expiration of the state’s rent regulation laws approaches, a new state-sponsored report has revealed that nearly two-thirds of New York City’s 2 million rental apartments still enjoy regulated rental rates. According to the Post, the report, by Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, found 1.4 million rental apartments to be either rent-stabilized, publicly-owned or taxpayer-subsidized — and that’s after the roughly 10,000 units that have been deregulated over the course of the last decade. The impending June 15 deadline for rent regulation to be renewed is threatening some 1 million New York City apartments as lawmakers, tenant advocates and landlords try to hammer out an agreement on income and monthly rent thresholds for decontrol.
[more]

There’s something fishy about the Republican push to end the city’s rent regulations, at least according to some Democrats, and they’re going to get to the bottom of it. The Daily News reported that the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a tenant advocate group, submitted a Freedom of Information Law request for all communications between landlord groups and leaders in the Republican-controlled state Senate. Austin Shafran, an aide to Senate Democrats, said the “affordable housing massacre” being staged by the GOP “needs to be exposed.” But a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos of Nassau County countered that the party “make[s] the decision to support or oppose legislation based on the merits, plain and simple.” [NYDN]