how many apts. is someone entitled to?

[midtowngirl]

hello, this is my first time posting. i live in a 12 unit building and the building manager has taken over four apartments. 3 are rent stabilized and 1 had been rent controlled before he took it over. he lives in two apartments, has an office with 2 employees in third apartment and the fourth, he is using as storage and will turn it into a conference room. seems like a gross appropriation of space by a person that can afford a market value apartment. he does drive a bentley after all. i just wonder if he legally allowed to do this. the tenants in my building have been suffering from a lot of loss of services (no hot water for the last two weeks. fire dpt. has been here twice in the last month because of a flood and fire caused by wiring). we are now banding together to get a lawyer to help us. also, we just found out that the building is going to be making a lot of capitol improvements to the outside and hallways. i'd like to get complaints registered before he starts raising rent building improvements - not apartment improvements. i'd rather have a new bathroom since it hasn't been renovated since 1974 and it's falling apart. thanks for any help you can provide!!

[TenantNet]

This isn't really a rent regulation issue. Rather it's a zoning issue. By building manager, you probably mean owner by the way you describe him. Owners are allowed to live on premises - and he can probably combine two units together (although some parts of the city have zoning restrictions on reducing the number of units in the building - depends on where the building is). But the other two units it seems clear he's using for commercial purposes, i.e., offices and this may violate the zoning resolution - again depending on what zoning district the building is in. That's why you don't see doctor or dentist offices in some buildings above the second floor. The actualy regs are too complicated to relate here, but they would be administered by the Dept. of Buildings. For improvements, well that's a Major Capital Improvement (MCI) issue. Generally the only way to beat them is if there is a building-wide rent reduction in effect and the owner does not restore the reduced services within a reasonable time, but these days with DHCR it's a hard one to do. Still a unified tenant association is your best bet.

[midtowngirl]

thank you. i will look into the zoning. no, the owner does not live here, he's the building manager and he's running his management company from the office. an estate owns the land and then someone else owns the building. he told me the estate is giving money to fix up the building. we all have pretty low rents so i'm sure they are trying to up the rents.

[MikeW]

My guess is he's simply warehousing the apartments, probably with the owners consent. They'll wait till they have enough units, then do a major renovation, and get the whole building deregulated.

I seem to remember there being some sort of anti-warehousing statues, but I can't remember the last time I heard of someone trying to enforce it.

[azimuth]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by MikeW:
[QB]....he's simply warehousing the apartments... tThey'll wait till they have enough units, then do a major renovation, and get the whole building deregulated."

Can anyone speak towards what MikeW says? Are there conditions by which a LL can get a whole apartmentr building de-regulated... including, I assume, rent-stabilized tenants?

TIA,
Frumpy