NYC Landmarked Neighborhoods: Are They Harming Rent Stabilization

Preservationists have long lobbied for landmarks protections not only to preserve the city’s culture and architecture, but also its affordable housing. They argue that without landmarks, many rent-stabilized buildings would be torn down for market rate developments.

But the Real Estate Board of New York — a real estate industry trade association — released a report on Monday that says landmarked neighborhoods in the city lost rent-regulated apartments at four times the rate of non-landmarked neighborhoods. REBNY argues that landmarking an area makes it the opposite of affordable.

Already taking sides? Check out the details for yourself.

What REBNY Wants
To build. REBNY is made of developers. It’s no secret that limiting the number of landmarked buildings and districts gives them more freedom for new construction and serves their economic interest.

What Preservationists Want
To preserve. Landmarking protects existing structures from being demolished, preserving the urban and architectural feeling of neighborhoods and buildings. It also helps perpetuate the status quo.

“This is a classic case of pretending that correlation equals causation, when the No. 1 rule of statistics is that it does not,” said Andrew Berman of preservation group Greenwich Village Society of Historic Preservation of the REBNY report. “The real question, which this bogus ‘study’ does nothing to address, is how many units would have been lost in those areas if they were not landmarked?”

Five Facts

  • The REBNY report found the number of rent-stabilized units in Brooklyn’s landmarked areas decreased by 27.1 percent over the studied period — from 8,675 in 2007 to 6,332 in 2014.
  • In non-landmarked Brooklyn neighborhoods, the number of rent-stabilized units fell from 233,066 to 225,126, a decrease of 3.41 percent.
  • Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope had the city’s highest rates of loss of rent-stabilized units. Brooklyn Heights’ units went from 2,192 in 2007 to 1,411 in 2014, a loss of 35.6 percent. Park Slope’s stabilized units went from 1,518 to 889, a loss of 40.8 percent.
  • In the Bronx, landmarked districts actually increased the borough’s number of rent-stabilized units at a greater rate than non-landmarked areas. Queens’ landmarked districts also saw less of a decrease in rent-stabilized units than non-landmarked districts.
  • In 2014, REBNY released a study finding that only five units of affordable housing were built in Manhattan landmark districts between 2003 and 2012, and only 100 affordable units were built in landmark districts in the entire city over that time.

What do you think? Does landmarking hurt housing affordability? Or would rent deregulation be even worse without it?

[Source: REBNY | Curbed]

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What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. It costs at least twice the price to replace the windows (Entrance doors, facade restoration etc) in a Landmark District as it does in a non landmark district. The Capital Improvement increases on the rents from those needed maintenance/capital improvements, are what raises the buildings out of being rent stabilized, not knocking them down because they are not Land-marked.
    You cannot so easily knock down a rent stabilized building that is occupied. If that was the case, half of Crown Heights and Bed Stuy would have been knocked down by now.
    Even developers like original solid architecture around to keep solid roots and social structure in a neighborhood.

  2. “In 2014, REBNY released a study finding that only five units of affordable housing were built in Manhattan landmark districts between 2003 and 2012.”
    .
    The question is how many units total were built in landmark districts during that time? 6?

  3. It’s a fair point, but you still have the problem that landmarked areas are by their nature the most prime real estate.

    The simple fact is that rent-stabilized apartments disappear in (no-doubt) direct proportion to how much the owners of those apartments can sell or rent them for at market. We’re talking about large scale economic and social factors at play here. Landmarking are the deck chairs on the Titanic. The only people who benefit from the reversal of landmarking are large developers.

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