Pol, allies take aim at loophole ‘Kushner’ uses

It’s not just Kushner Cos.

A housing watchdog group that revealed 80 falsified building permit applications by the company once run by Jared Kushner released a new report Monday — showing scores of landlords had lied about the presence of rent-regulated units in their buildings on some 10,000 permit applications over the last two-and-a-half years.

“If the landlord checks, you know, the ‘no’ box on one or two permits applications fine, maybe it’s an accident,” Housing Rights Initiative executive director Aaron Carr said. “But when does an accident turn into a systematic business model? And I would argue when that accident keeps happening over and over and over again.”

Carr was joined outside the Kushner Cos. building at 666 Fifth Ave. by City Councilman Ritchie Torres — who announced legislation to close what he called the “Kushner Loophole.”

At issue are applications for permits to do construction inside residential buildings. As part of that application, owners are asked whether they have any rent-regulated units at the property. Housing Rights Initiative and The Associated Press found this year that the Kushner Cos. had checked “no” on dozens of permit applications, but that a crosscheck of Finance Department data showed those buildings did indeed have rent-regulated units.

Following the AP investigation, the city Buildings Department fined Kushner Cos. $210,000 in August for 42 false permit applications.

But Monday’s report indicates the behavior is widespread — the group found 10,000 examples of landlords declaring to Buildings that there were no rent-regulated units in their buildings, despite records in another city agency, the Finance Department, that indicated there were such units.

“I am introducing legislation aimed at closing the Kushner loophole, in an effort to prevent what I call the weaponization of construction, the use of illegal construction to harass tenants and displace them from their homes and their neighborhoods,” Torres said.