Every city renter’s dream came true for Carla Badami when she found out this winter she had a legal right to a much lower rent than she had been paying on her regulated apartment and was entitled to thousands of dollars from her landlord .
Encouraged by her aunt in Queens who had once dealt with a tough landlord, Badami got her hands on a key document from the state’s housing agency: her apartment’s rent history.
It showed her Lower East Side landlord reported her rent as $1,295, but was charging her $1,850. As the social media strategist said in a now-viral video, “the math is not mathing.”
“Once I had the paperwork and was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’ That’s when I contacted him,” she told THE CITY.
In a short time, her Lower East Side landlord paid her back about $6,000 in owed rent overcharges, she said, and offered a new two-year lease at a lower, stabilized rate of $1,468 per month.
But she didn’t want to stop there, she told THE CITY. She took to TikTok to share her story, urging other tenants in rent stabilized apartments to request their rent histories, too.
“Even if one person realizes like, ‘Oh my God, I’m rent stabilized’…and ‘I’m getting overcharged’ — if that’s able to change their life in some way, then I feel really, really good about that, especially in this economic climate,” she said.
Her post, published four weeks ago, has since racked up at least four million views.
And it’s just one of many that built on an earlier post by a real estate review company, which spurred a wave of tenant advice on the social media platform the TikToks dig into questions THE CITY answered in 2022: how to request your rent history, why you may be overcharged by your landlord and how to deal with it if you are.
‘A System That Needs a Lot More Support’
The office in charge of fulfilling those rent history requests — an obscure and understaffed state agency, the Division of Housing and Community Renewal — has seen a major shift in the past month.
Typically, the office receives about 750 rent history requests every week, according to DHCR spokesperson Brian Butry. But recently, staff has received 2,000 requests each week, nearly doubling the inflow. That translates to a current processing time of about 10 days, up from the typical one to three days.
“DHCR is committed to fulfilling these requests as quickly as possible so tenants have the information they are legally entitled to,” Butry said.
Tenant attorney Jenny Akchin with the group Take Root Justice frequently helps clients file rent history requests, and was surprised when one got an automatic reply from DHCR this week warning about a backlog due to “social media activity.”
Dated Feb. 1, the email read: “Due to increased volume as a result of social media activity, the response time to your inquiry has increased to approximately 20 business days.”
When she learned about the flood of TikTok posts about rent history and overcharges, it cheered her, despite the wait her clients may have.
“The reality is, the more people who are getting information about the rent histories of their rent stabilized apartments, the better. If social media is the medium that’s communicating that message to a wider audience of tenants, I think that’s unequivocally a good thing,” she said.
She stressed, however, that DHCR needs more funding from the state budget to be able to handle rent history requests and many other responsibilities.
“Everyone’s doing the best they can and this is just a system that needs a lot more support,” Akchin said.
Rent stabilized apartments are not as rare as New Yorkers may think. According to the Rent Guidelines Board’s annual report, just over one million apartments in the city are stabilized, which make up 44% of all rental apartments in the city.
But stabilization should not be confused with rent controlled apartments, which hail from now-defunct, decades-old law and are vanishingly rare: Only 16,400 of them remain in the five boroughs, the RGB’s data shows, which equals about 1% of the rental housing stock.
Akchin warned that tenants should know that just because they find overcharges in their rent history documents, that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll see cash in their pocket, or a new lease with a lower rent price. Often, unlike in Badami’s case, landlords are obstinate about giving tenants what they are legally owed.
Akchin points out that overcharge investigations by DHCR are chronically backlogged and can take multiple years. Previous reporting by THE CITY showed it took two years for an examiner to be assigned to an overcharge case.
Still, she’s glad tenants are finding out about the first step in that process. Badami, too, felt good that she could use her modest platform to get the word out, especially in a historically tough rental market. New York’s apartment vacancy rate of just 1.4% is lower than it has been since the advent of rent stabilization in the late 1960s, a recent survey by the Census and city housing department found.
“I had to figure all of this out by myself, more or less,” Badami said. “So it was like, I have this information and it should be shared with everybody, especially with the housing prices in New York City right now. The price gouging when it comes to rent is bananas and it’s becoming increasingly harder to live here.”