New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he will take control of apartment buildings from the city’s worst landlords in order to improve life for tenants.
Now, according to Gothamist, the City Council may give him a legal pathway to do it.
The new measure has the support of some in the real estate industry, it has not yet earned support from the Council speaker, who will decide whether it is brought forward for a vote.
Gothamist reported that the Council held a hearing on Monday on legislation that would allow the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to seize buildings from landlords who have been given housing code violations and accumulated debt from unpaid taxes and fines, and turn them over to owners the city deems more responsible.
Lawmakers spiked a previous version of the program called “third-party transfer” in 2019 after finding that it disproportionately stripped homes from smaller, low-income owners of color without compensation, the Gothamist noted.
Tenant Conditions Worsened
Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx Democrat and chair of the housing committee, said the failure to replace the program has let problems to get worse for tenants, with no accountability in sight.
Sanchez sponsored legislation to bring back a version of the program that she said will be “hyperfocused on the worst of the worst” landlords, without hurting smaller owners with little debt.
“If you are a chronically negligent actor who has your tenants living in dangerous conditions, you do not deserve to be in ownership and you, after a fair process, will have your property taken from you,” Sanchez told Gothamist before Monday’s Council hearing.
Sanchez’s legislation specifically would apply to buildings with unpaid taxes equal to a quarter of the property’s value, or 15% if the property also has an average of five or more housing code violations per unit or at least $1,000 in emergency repairs paid by the city, Gothamist reported.
The city’s housing agency would create a ranking of the most distressed properties.
According to The Gothamist, Sanchez cited the owner of two dilapidated Washington Heights apartment buildings who was arrested twice in 2024 for failing to complete court-ordered repairs.
The owner, Daniel Ohebshalom, faces criminal charges for harassing tenants and endangering the welfare of a child after Manhattan prosecutors said a ceiling collapsed on a young child, Gothamist reported. Ohebshalom has pleaded not guilty and maintains ownership of the buildings.
If passed, The Gothamist noted the Safer Homes Act could allow the mayor to fulfill his campaign pledge to take buildings from landlords who expose their tenants to dangerous living conditions.
Department Officials Praised Program
Mamdani’s spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach declined to comment on the measure and referred to testimony from top officials at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development who praised the bill at the hearing.
“ HPD views the program as a key part of our broader enforcement and preservation toolkit to ensure that housing remains safe and livable for New Yorkers,” said Rosa Kelly, Chief of Staff to the housing commissioner. “We’re very pleased that the council has reintroduced legislation to modernize [the third-party transfer program].”
Gothamist reported that during the hearing, Kelly narrated a slideshow presentation showing that about 3,000 apartment buildings could be eligible for foreclosure and transfer under the new legislation because of housing code violations and unpaid taxes and fines.
Kelly focused on a subset of 200 buildings that have accumulated more than $250 million in unpaid debts and around 14,000 severe housing code violations.
Supporters of the new bill say it will eliminate problems that plagued the third-party transfer program since it was first created in 1996 under then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Gothamist noted. The city enacted that program to pass distressed buildings on to new owners after foreclosing on them, rather than keeping the city in control.
According to The Gothamist, the city had long struggled to maintain thousands of properties abandoned by their owners and acquired through foreclosure starting in the 1960s.
The City Council suspended the program in 2019 and specifically condemned a provision called “block pick-up” that exposed homeowners with tax or water liens to municipal foreclosure simply because they were located near another home already designated for foreclosure.
Program Only Used Once
The city used the program just once in the last eight years on a building that qualified prior to the Council’s suspension. The building’s owner owed the city nearly $28 million in taxes and penalties.
The new measure already counts 34 sponsors, a clear majority of the 51-member Council. But it lacks one key backer: Speaker Julie Menin, The Gothamist said.
Council speakers rarely cosponsor legislation and Menin’s spokesperson, Rendy Desamours, said the speaker “has not taken a position on the bill.”
That measure, known as the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, would have given tenant groups, nonprofits, and some private developers a head start in buying some distressed apartment buildings, but the bill faced opposition from landlord and real estate groups, including the influential Real Estate Board of New York, or REBNY.
Ann Korchak, Board President of the landlord group Small Property Owners of New York, likened the new third-party transfer bill to COPA and said her group opposes the measure.
“It’s still the same wolf in sheep’s clothing that would illegally take private property and life investments of struggling small generational, immigrant owners,” Korchak told Gothamist in a written statement.
But in written testimony Monday, REBNY’s Director of Urban Planning, Maddie DeCerbo, said the group backs the new third-party transfer legislation because it “outlines a clear definition of distressed properties” to cover only the most extreme cases, and because it gets ride of the “block pick-up” provision that swept up properties near a building targeted for foreclosure and transfer.
