Landlords See HPD Violations as Weaponized Against Them

In the upside-down world of housing violations, city inspectors can flag a landlord for cracked paint and a broken tile while ignoring a dryer the tenant illegally connected to the gas line with a plastic pipe.

Department of Housing Preservation and Development violations are a hot-button issue for the Mamdani administration, which points to them as proof of owners’ evilness. But landlords view them as ammunition in a system weaponized against them.

CHPC's Howard Slatkin — CHPC’s Howard Slatkin (CHPC)

Housing violations typically don’t come with a fine, but are “intended to drive repairs,” said Howard Slatkin, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and a respected voice on housing policy.

Landlords beg to differ. They say violations, even those without fines, unjustly punish them in all sorts of ways.

“They’re used to prolong nonpayment cases in housing court, as if [tenants] need additional ways to do that,” griped one longtime owner of rent-stabilized buildings.

“Let’s say you bring a nonpayment eviction case. Legal Aid or the judge’s clerk will request an inspection,” said the owner, Joseph. “You could walk in and say, ‘There’s a pretty nice apartment for $800 a month.’ They’ll go in and file violations that trigger rent abatements.”

This can mean years of legal fees and unpaid rent, as well as problems with lenders. “If you refinance, the bank looks at every case,” Joseph said.

Barrier to improvements

In the name of driving small repairs, HPD violations can prevent large ones in rent-stabilized buildings.

To get rent increases approved for a major capital improvement, “you essentially have to have a violation-free building,” Joseph added. “You can have a leaking faucet [violation] from 18 years ago that will prevent you from getting an MCI for a new roof.”

Regulators and inspectors used to be more forgiving. “Over the years, they’ve gotten much more rigorous,” said the owner, who began buying Upper Manhattan properties four decades ago. “You need to have a virgin building.”

If certain violations aren’t cleared in time, the MCI application expires and the improvements are postponed — bad for tenants and owners alike.

“A lot of landlords won’t do [an MCI] because they are afraid of what HPD is going to do when they get in the building,” Joseph said. One strategy is to hire an architect to self-certify that a building is violation-free, but that can still trigger inspections.

Most tenants want capital improvements, which allow for small rent increases, but it only takes one crank to gum up the works — “someone paying $620 a month [who] doesn’t want to pay $625 a month for a new boiler,” Joseph grumbled.

Violations also complicate insurance, which has become notoriously expensive and hard to get for rent-stabilized buildings.

“The other people who look at HPDs are the insurance companies when they’re doing their underwriting,” Joseph said. More violations mean higher premiums.

For small landlord Michael Geylik, infractions contributed to the revocation of his certificate of no harassment, kneecapping his efforts to make structural repairs to his 160-year-old building and evict tenants who violated their leases.

Violations can also lead to rent strikes, leaving less revenue for maintenance, which results in more violations — a negative feedback loop. “When you have older apartments, it doesn’t take a lot for tenants to convince themselves it’s OK to stop paying,” a major housing provider named David told me.

Multifamily mortgages often have upkeep clauses, so an elevated violations-per-unit ratio can also put loans at risk.

“This happens all the time”

HPD violations have become a major headache for David, who pointed to a struggling nonprofit’s distressed portfolio that he bought into before Covid.

When housing court gridlocked and rent collection fell during the pandemic, violations piled up. Even when he had them fixed, getting them cleared was a logistical nightmare.

“If the inspector shows up and the tenant does not provide access, the inspector walks away,” David said. “This happens all the time. Or the inspector dismisses six violations and adds seven more.”

Violations can stay on the books long after they have been corrected.

“HPD can have violations that are 10, 15, 20 years old in apartments that have been gut-renovated,” said Joseph. “You might say, ‘Well, how come the landlord didn’t remove them?’ Typically, you have to file for a building-wide removal where they’ll inspect every single violation in the building. Landlords don’t want to risk it.”

For voucher holders desperate for a lease, even the most minor violations can keep them in homeless shelters. Landlords willing to house them are rewarded with an extended vacancy. “The inspector shows up, he dings you for a few things, and you can’t get another inspection for six weeks,” David said. (HPD says re-inspections typically take a few days.)

It’s not just the bureaucracy and the expense of housing enforcement that drives owners mad; it’s that tenants weaponize violations — aided and abetted by inspectors, agencies and judges.

Joseph discovered that one of his Inwood tenants who repeatedly called HPD to stave off eviction had an illegal dryer connected to the gas line by a plastic pipe. Inspectors repeatedly ignored the obvious safety hazard while flagging him for minor issues.

“They were in that apartment many, many times. They would write up peeling paint if they’d find one crack, or a loose floorboard or cracked tile,” said the landlord, adding that he takes pride in keeping his buildings “immaculate.”

“The notion that a violation count on a building is somehow a reflection of the reality of the conditions in a building is a hallucination,” he said.

22-year rent freeze

Slatkin argued in an op-ed that jacking up penalties would be salt in the wound of financially stressed buildings. But he does not believe that HPD should back off from issuing violations to buildings that can’t afford to fix them.

“I’m saying that ‘hammering buildings with violations’ is largely ineffective in these circumstances, but not that the city should stop issuing violations,” he emailed me. “We need to focus on the underlying resource issue rather than looking to financial penalties as a solution.”

However, his point that housing violations drive repairs and generally don’t carry fines, while true, ignores all the other costs — financial and psychological — that they impose. The city and state certainly seem oblivious to that.

Kevin, who owns two buildings and described himself as “a long-suffering landlord,” said a tenant of his in the pricey Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens got the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal to continue freezing her two-bedroom’s rent at $471 a month because a 2.5-inch hole in a tin ceiling was “not repaired in a workmanlike manner.”

By repeatedly filing complaints, she has staved off rent increases for 22 years, despite the landlord twice winning what he called “total BS” HPD lawsuits.

Fed up, Kevin moved out of the city. “I could not take the stress,” he said.

HPD, for the record, has various programs and services for landlords. The agency sees itself as a fair regulator doing its best to protect tenants and preserve affordable housing. But most landlords call it arbitrary, anal and one-sided, a view reinforced by the administration’s series of “rental ripoff” hearings.

“From my point of view and the point of view of many experienced landlords and management companies,” Joseph said, “HPD is really an arm of the local tenant groups and Legal Aid.”