Richard Caroll Jr. thought his Harlem apartment was a great deal when he moved in in 2004.
The artist said the natural light that spilled in through the living room windows made for a perfect painting studio. The rent was technically $2,000 a month, but the landlord let him pay $1,200, according to court records.
Carroll said there were no glaring issues at first. Then the stove stopped working, the windowsills decayed, the ceiling lights broke, the bedroom door fell off its hinges, and rats chewed through the wall under the kitchen sink.
In 2022, a landlord who bought the building after Carroll moved in tried to evict him, saying his lease had expired, even though he wasn’t behind in rent. It was only while fighting the eviction case that he learned his apartment had been rent-stabilized until he moved in. Court records show the prior tenant had been paying less than $500 a month, while Carroll’s rent climbed to $1,425.
“I was robbed for $1,000 a month for 20-something years. That’s how I felt,” Carroll said following the judge’s decision. “My apartment was in total decay. So, I paid an extra $1,000 a month for 20 years, and I didn’t even have a livable space.”
An owner listed on property records for Carroll’s building did not respond to a voicemail. A lawyer representing the landlord did not respond to emailed questions.
Carroll is not the first New Yorker to unknowingly live in a rent-stabilized apartment, according to court records and housing attorneys. The ruling in Carroll’s case, which his landlord appealed last week, highlights the challenges renters can face as they try to find and hold onto affordable housing in a tight and increasingly expensive market. It also comes amid a fiery debate in the mayoral race about who has the right to a rent-stabilized apartment and how to balance the needs of tenants and landlords.
“This lack of knowledge is really beneficial to landlords, of course, who want to continue to raise the rent and get their units out of the stabilization regime,” said City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, a Brooklyn Democrat.
She sponsored a bill that passed earlier this year, which requires owners of properties with rent-stabilized units to post signs alerting residents that there are regulated apartments in the building and offering them information about how to find out whether their apartment is one of them. The measure was approved without a signature from Mayor Eric Adams, and a spokesperson for his office said he has not taken a position on it.
Nurse said she found out her own apartment was rent-stabilized several years ago, after another tenant knocked on her door and suggested she check her rent history.
“It’s certainly allowed me to protect myself and my rights,” she said. “And it also has allowed me to support other people in the building to make sure that they understand each time they do a lease renewal that they need to push back when they’re being proposed an illegal rent increase.”
‘I would never have known’
After Carroll’s landlord filed an eviction petition, Carroll's attorney August Leinbach recommended that his client request the rent history for his unit from the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal to see if the apartment was rent-stabilized, which would grant him special protections from his landlord’s eviction attempt. To Carroll's surprise, he learned it was.
“I would never have known,” he said. “They could have done anything to me, and I would’ve had to leave and never have known my rights.”
The rent history shows the apartment was registered as a rent-stabilized unit in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. In 2002, the legal regulated rent was listed at $489.50, according to a record submitted to the court.
But the next year, the rent history shows, the property owner at the time claimed the unit was no longer rent stabilized because of a “high rent vacancy” deregulation, a now-defunct rule that allowed landlords to remove an apartment from the rent stabilization system after raising the rent past a certain threshold when a tenant moved out. Lawmakers outlawed that practice through a sweeping tenant protection package in 2019.
Owners of rent-stabilized units are allowed to raise the rent if they make significant upgrades — not just routine maintenance — to an apartment. Carroll’s landlord argued during eviction proceedings that improvements made before Carroll moved in allowed the prior owner to charge a high enough rent to ditch the apartment’s rent-stabilized status under the old rules.
But housing court Judge Jack Stoller ruled that the property owner failed to provide sufficient evidence that enough improvements had been made to Carroll’s apartment to hike up the rent as much as it was. According to the law at the time, Stoller wrote, the prior landlord would have had to spend more than $56,000 on renovations. But the judge said records from the time suggested only about $22,000 in upgrades to the unit.
“The preponderance of the evidence, therefore, shows that Respondent is a Rent-Stabilized tenant of the subject premises and an eviction proceeding without cause does not lie,” Stoller wrote.
Carroll said he’s not expecting to get paid back for rent he has already paid over the years. For now, he’s waiting for his landlord to set a new rent, which he hopes will be lower.
Barriers to information for tenants and landlords
Attorneys for landlords and tenants said it’s common for disputes to come up about whether a unit is rent-regulated. Sherwin Belkin, a lawyer who regularly represents property owners, said he advises his clients to track down as many records as possible to ensure buildings with units that used to be rent-stabilized were properly converted to market rate.
“I say to the seller, ‘I need the canceled check for the new washing machine that you put into the apartment in 1998 to get this apartment over the deregulation threshold,’” Belkin said. “And the seller will sometimes say, ‘Are you kidding me? You think I saved the check from 25 years ago for a washing machine?’”
Belkin said he’s seen clients walk away from a deal if the seller couldn’t provide every canceled check and paid invoice. Those who don’t can face cases like Carroll’s, he said.
“Unfortunately, every owner doesn’t go through that sort of diligence before acquiring a property, and they can be left in this vulnerable position where a tenant alleges ‘I’m rent stabilized,’ and the owner cannot disprove it,” he said.
But Carroll’s attorney said he didn’t think this was just a case of missing paperwork. Leinbach said the conditions in his client’s apartment suggested no major renovations had been made before Carroll moved in. He recommended that all tenants request rent histories for their apartments to find out if they’re protected under rent stabilization laws.
“ You can start to look into your rent apartment's rent history, see if the landlord is charging you a higher rent, if there've been suspicious increases in the past, if it just totally stopped being deregulated for some reason,” Leinbach said. “That could be a really good first step in trying to figure out what's going on.”
