Bx. Beep urges rent protections

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. released a report Thursday urging the state to protect the more than 250,000 tenants who are getting a “preferential rent” discount — arguing that more than half of them could become homeless if they see rent hikes.

Diaz unveiled the report, which goes beyond his typical Bronx domain, on the steps of City Hall Thursday — making him the second likely mayoral candidate for the 2021 race to release a citywide housing proposal in as many weeks. Controller Scott Stringer rolled out a plan to finance affordable housing with changes to mortgage taxes late last month.

Preferential rent means that a rent-stabilized tenant is paying less per month than the landlord could legally charge, which is known as the maximum legal rent. In 2017, 260,378 units in the city had preferential rent — that’s about 7% of the city’s housing stock, and 29% of rent-stabilized units, according to the report.

But those low rents don’t always last: Landlords can raise the price all the way up to the legal maximum rent when it is time to renew a lease.

“It’s a canard. It’s counterintuitive. If I am a tenant who is believing that I am signing a lease in a rent-stabilized unit, how is it a rent-stabilized unit if in the next lease signing the landlord can just arbitrarily increase up to the legal rent?” Diaz asked.

The report argued that if landlords were to raise them “en masse, it could put hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of eviction.”

Diaz’s report is a bit thinner than the one fellow 2021 contender Stringer put out last month — it contains no data on how frequently landlords actually raise the rent all the way from the preferential rent to the maximum legal rent, or whether doing so has become more common. It does note that market rents are rising in many parts of the city, which could spur rent-regulated landlords to increase the rent in preferential rent units.