Apartment rentals New York with Rent Stabilization

In the long standing battle between landlords and tenants in New York City, the latter group of New Yorkers seem to have now found an unlikely new set of allies—the city’s mayoral candidates! In a recent public hearing conducted by the Rent Guidelines Board in Manhattan, three of the Democratic candidates for mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and City Comptroller John Liu, said that they were against a proposed increase in the rents for rent-stabilized apartments in the city.

The meticulous renovation of the pre-war luxury rental building at 37 Wall Street in the Financial District speaks to the care with which architect Costas Kondylis turned famed architect Francis Kimball's original Beaux-Arts structure into one of the more desirable rental listings in the Financial District. It's a luxury rental through-and-through, but 37 Wall Street is also something else -- a test-case in a lawsuit that's looking to extend rent-stabilization to all buildings, luxury rental buildings in the Financial District notwithstanding, that were constructed with the benefit of New York's 421g tax breaks. The renovation of 37 Wall Street benefitted from those tax breaks in funding its overhaul into luxury rental apartments, and the New York Times reports that a December housing court decision could pass those benefits on to the residents at 37 Wall Street through eviction protections and, maybe, rent reductions. Suffice to say that the developers behind 37 Wall Street are not pleased.